The architecture office
Taipei Music Center
5,000-seat concert hall, outdoor plaza, production facilities, and cultural hall in Taiwan
T I M E L I N E
— Sometime in 2015, Lain York introduces Banning to Greg Pond.
— Greg Pond then introduces Banning to Atlas of Novel Tectonics, a book written by Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto, the married duo who run REISER + UMEMOTO.
— After reading the book Banning begins incorporating some of the book’s principles in her practice as a choreographer.
— One project in particular, Guncotton, is the direct result of Greg Pond and Banning responding to Atlas of Novel Tectonics and its discussion of novel approaches to invention.
— Banning then uses the principles to lead an ensemble of New Dialect dancers in their creation of Atlas Kid.
— Five years later, Reiser and Umemoto find a video of the performance online and are surprised to learn a choreographer has adopted their thoughts into her choreographic practice.
— In April of 2021 they send Banning an email asking if she would be interested in taking a meeting.
— She takes the meeting and she begins working with Jesse, Nanako, Standford Kwinter & others to produce an event in Toyko Bay.
Nanako Umemoto & Jesse Reiser
RUR featured
New Dialect’s Atlas Kid & Guncotton
as a Selected Projects
on their website.
The title of the page: Liquid Architecture
Inspired by the architectural ideas of Reiser+Umemoto’s Atlas of Novel Tectonics and Sanford Kwinter’s introduction, “The Judo of Cold Combustion,” contemporary dance practice New Dialect presents “Atlas Kid” and “Guncotton.”
Goethe theorized that music is “liquid architecture,” and choreographer Banning Bouldin has proven the point.
By adapting architectural ideas from Jesse Reiser’s and Nanako Umemoto’s Atlas of Novel Tectonics and Sanford Kwinter’s introduction “The Judo of Cold Combustion," Bouldin, founder of Nashville-based New Dialect, has developed new means for generating contemporary dances. The result is a multiyear, collaborative effort coalescing in two cross-disciplinary productions, Atlas Kid and Guncotton.
Atlas Kid premiered at OZ Arts Nashville in 2016, with an original score by Ljova and Mikael Karlsson. According to Bouldin, the work wields concepts like variation and scale to “build on [Kwinter’s] principle of unfolding geometry and novelty, to conjure up a dreamlike world sculpted from the temperatures, textures, shapes, and feelings of our childhood memories. Using the playful habits of shadow making, mimicry, and exaggeration, the dancers re-imagine traumatic and triumphant experiences that formed their perceptions of the adult world around them—a place where they are, in their re-imagining, both natives and foreigners.”
stills from Guncotton’s motion capture process
Created with visual artist Greg Pond, Guncotton spans dance, sculpture, drawing, and sound to explore form-making through movement and motion capture technology. As Bouldin describes, “To begin, I devised a series of rule games based on concepts addressed in Atlas of Novel Tectonics. Dancers used these rules as a roadmap to project geometric limits to their bodies, generate imagined intensive changes to their own matter, inscribe negative space around each other to create reactionary new forms, and deconstruct movement patterns in an exploration of coherence and incoherence. Through this process we built a lexicon of physicality rooted in architectural ideas. These movements were recorded and—by means of computer code—interpolated into an object, sound, or image. By repeating this program over and over again, our team was able to co-create continuously unfolding sets of dances, scores, and sculptures.” These collected works were installed and performed in galleries throughout the United States in 2018.
Bouldin continues to use Atlas-based concepts to inform her choreographic research. She created her most recent theatrical work The Triangle as a surrealistic self-portrait of her experiences as a movement artist living with periods of paralysis. Bouldin’s practice of drawing on Reiser and Umemoto’s architectural ideas to inform her own compositional language has empowered her to continue generating complex and nuanced movements with large groups of artists, when she herself cannot move.
