Luminous structures

A Sun Dance borrows its name from a phrase Rochelle Haley discovered in the architect Colin Madigan’s archive, where the term is used to describe the effect of harnessing the distribution of natural light within the interiors of the National Gallery. Extrapolated out as a choreographic artwork, A Sun Dance articulates Haley’s own observations of sunlight as it travels across and through built interiors, and how it is given material form by the physical and temporal dynamics specific to its host setting. In this, its first iteration, the original brutalist building of the National Gallery provides the architectural mis èn scene upon which the work unfolds.

To develop an intimate understanding of the interplay between the architecture and light of the Gallery, Haley visited the site over an 18-month period. This cultivated her ability to predict where concentrations of sunlight would appear at different times of day, and at different times throughout the year. Applying this knowledge, she mapped an ambitious and itinerant stage for a durational performance. Throughout the development of A Sun Dance, Haley continued to return to another of Madigan’s visions for the institution: that the sun should be considered an active agent within the museum – a ‘visitor’s guide’¹; or even a ‘blood circuit’². This key precept will continue to inform and contour future activations of the work. Viewers are encouraged to enter A Sun Dance alongside the sun’s passage, and to become alive to a physical and sensorial appreciation of place.

The expanded stage it occupies fractures and reforms in real time, and makes use of the many textures and structures of the building as a ‘moving graphic backdrop’³ for experiencing dance. Operating across the full complement of spatial vagaries contained by the Gallery, the performance encourages audiences to appreciate the architecture’s distinctive topographical configuration, described by architect and academic Philip Goad as ‘an interior landscape’⁴. Light and shadow work in concert with their multistorey and interstitial environments, such as when the performance finds its way onto the switchback ramps, and parts of the ensemble may be observed dancing at differing heights from a single vantage point.

On these ramps, the afternoon sun is channelled through angled grills and lands on concrete walls in striated bands. Here dancers can engage in shadow play, dipping their hands and arms into the light to cast distortions of their bodies onto the fabric of the building. In these moments, we are aware of the continual movement between two- and three-dimensional properties of the body. We witness a manifestation of performance artist Lygia Pape’s idea of an ‘energised’ space that ‘conveys equal values to positive-negative’, and where the ‘stage … is transformed into two dimensional planes that interpenetrate’.⁵ Both now and in the future, A Sun Dance will be released from the proscenium arch of the traditional theatre, untethered and discoverable by both its performers and audiences.

If Madigan’s design challenge for the National Gallery was to ‘sneak the light in’,⁶ Haley extends this provocation by using dance to travel even more sunlight into the building with a range of somatic gestures and processes. A Sun Dance positions its dancers as recipients for and vectors of sunlight, their bodies refocused as additional surfaces on which light can materialise and be manipulated. In a key moment of the performance at the Gallery, the ensemble explores the effect of sunlight entering through the soaring, narrow window on the first floor by enacting a practice Haley has named ‘stretching the sun’. Facing out, performers meet and commune with the light, feeling and suspending it on their hands and forearms before tracing its narrow beam across the tiles. In languid procession they externalise what it feels like to absorb sunlight through skin, setting in motion bodily descriptions of invisible sensations.

In Haley’s artistic schema, the act of casting light through the building is both poetic and literal. The work’s haptic engagement with sunlight evokes biological phenomena such as photosynthesis and heliotropism, the way that plants, such as sunflowers, rotate to face the sun as they grow. As the dancers move through areas without natural light sources, they are physically metabolising the sunlight they have ingested, releasing it into their immediate environment in a process of heat transfer. At times the choreography may reflect this unconscious act through ‘remembering’ with the body the felt sensation of sunlight. Or it may involve the discipline of seeking out areas of sun and shade in succession to complete cycles of energy absorption and dissipation.

With a practice situated at the boundaries between painterly abstraction, installation and bodily activations of public space, Haley’s aesthetic and intellectual inclinations have found a natural resonance with the foundational motifs contained within the National Gallery’s architecture. These were explored by the artist in detail via the Madigan archive, where diagrammatic drawings, construction documentation and a vast array of reference material spanning from the Labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral to the 1969 moon landing comingle with passionate axioms penned by the architect himself. Imagery of equilateral triangles, hexagons and descriptions of the design function of the coffered ‘triagrid’ system that proliferates across many of the Gallery’s ceilings, as well as Haley’s embodied experience of moving through these geometries in the building itself, emerged as universal and generative nuclei from which to build a choreographic framework.

This aspect of A Sun Dance is evident through a series of practices that, as Haley has previously described, ‘highlight[s] the geometric nature of the collective space of several dancers’.⁷ At times, interlocking patterns are translated into the dancers’ bodies through formations that expand and contract across space. Elsewhere, architectural boundaries, volumes and shadows find speculative and corporal extension through linear arrangements of limbs. Shapes are shared amongst and ‘completed’ by the ensemble. Those generated by individual performers are amplified and pluridimensional with group work. Opportunities for both solo and collective image making are continuously available to the dancers as the choreography refracts through a prism of defined and intuitive phrases.

Haley’s incorporation of painting practices into the choreographic process further underscores the potential of image making to occur through live performance. Reimagining geometric diagrams and architectural sketches from the Madigan archive as watercolours was central to A Sun Dance’s development, with Haley establishing her intentions for the work’s overall aesthetic through simultaneously lyric and instructive pictures. To embed these compositions and their palettes within the performance, Haley worked with costume designer Leah Giblin to impart a painterly and abstract quality to the congress and dispersal of bodies in space. The geometries and gestural nature of light explored through Haley’s watercolours finds further expression in Giblin’s garment patterns and dyes, with painting acting as the connective tissue between discrete elements of architecture, architect, artist and costume design.

For Haley, painting and choreography are alike in the way that the body generates expressiveness in either medium.⁸ Her approach to making performances is unique in the way she considers painting through choreography, and vice versa. This is led by an architectural, structural way of thinking that prioritises dimensional and temporal understandings of both disciplines. She likens this to the way that constituent parts of an abstract painting can be revealed over time and in different contexts. With this in mind, watercolour can be understood as an ideal medium to express how these aleatory effects of circumstance and the passing of time are experienced in choreography. Haley cites the technique’s unpredictability—caused by the ‘buoyancy’ of pigments as they travel through water, and their eventual stasis as the liquid dries— as a type of mercurial compositional effect she envisages for A Sun Dance.⁹

Like the components of a non-objective painting unfurling before our eyes, a semaphoric language is launched now and again between the ensemble, generating a sense of spontaneity from within a tacit set of rules. Dancers move in relay, their circuit around the building hinging on a connection made at first between two bodies. Two choreographic phrases – one angular, the other orbital – are exchanged, the duo performing these oppositional movements in unison until a third dancer enters the connection. This point of inflection can be sustained for as long as the dancers choose. Then, a release: rectilinear and planar forms transition seamlessly into organic, sweeping gestures. Physical repartees are found anew, elsewhere. A game is afoot.

A Sun Dance assumes part of its character from the National Gallery’s architecture and setting, yet its complexion will continue to shift in relation to subsequent performance contexts. The work itself is open to an ongoing congruence of site, the vacillations of sunlight and the established practices of its performers. As an artwork it is adaptable and flexible, receptive to the specific physical, environmental and creative conditions that arise during its presentation. The term Haley, along with choreographer collaborators Goh and Wawn, have developed over time to describe this property is ‘site harmonising’. This reinforces the idea that both the artist and her ensemble bring established techniques and practices to a site that maintains their own logics as the work unfolds. In some ways, harmonising connotes a coming together in time of autonomous yet connected elements, activating what curator Catherine Wood has described as ‘working with what is already there’.¹⁰

Among a host of other working methods, this principle manifests in the way that Haley and her ensemble have established their own vernacular in order to embed spatial, temporal and situational understandings within the choreography, and how the music is arranged by composer Megan Alice Clune around the existing aural landscape of the building. A complex series of triangulations that echo the formality of the work arise between its sentient and inanimate components, with architecture generating a choreographic response that is reciprocal and multi-directional. Performer and poet Claudia La Rocco has also observed this tripartite of relations between artist, work and audience that characterises the conditions under which dance is undertaken, adding: ‘there’s no reason to stop at that geometric shape (one could add time for example). But triangles for me evoke a certain generative motion, energy travelling through those three circuits’.¹¹

Actualised through this set of imagined, social and artistic relationships, Haley’s vision for A Sun Dance is underscored by a desire to draw down ‘gigantic relationships at a celestial scale and forever timescale’ into the present moment.¹² It siphons the enormity of Earth’s orbit around the sun and the relative scale of human life to the extent of the known universe through the enacting and experience of choreography. Haley proposes that a connection to these concepts of vast space and time can be established with the simple, universal act of receiving sunlight on skin. She acknowledges the immediacy of this sensation is made possible by the temporal distensions implicit in the journey the sun’s rays take from the core of its ancient star to alight in our atmosphere. This expansive way of thinking is taken into the bodies of her performers, and by extension, A Sun Dance’s audiences, with tempered and structured light providing pathways into the performance as it cycles through its own circadian rhythm.

A Sun Dance is a new performance commission by artist Rochelle Haley to be performed at the National Gallery 24 February 2024.

A Sun Dance is a free, ticketed performance.

Drop in anytime between 9.30am – 4.30pm to experience the work.