8. October 2012

SoloShow (SoloShow)

»...SoloShow was a startling sixty-minute performance. From
start to finish, Hassabi absorbed a set of given cultural images –all of women
– and deposed them within figurative lines of flight. The result was a granular
interpolation of movement as each image described a passage within the matrix
of a whole. Each posture was held for an impossible period of time, then
transfigured or almost shattered by the frankly muscular strain. This enactment
took place against a black painted monolith -part sculpture, part stage, and
part abstract pictorial ground. You recognized a fragment from Scavullo’s
seventies Vogue, from Maillot’s River or Rodin’s Iris, and bits of Diaghilev’s
Russian ballet. Sometimes the transitions felt lyrical and satiny. At other
times the distortions were almost brutal -Mendieta?, Bacon? Polansky? In the
end, though, Hassabi attained the larger image of a mobility that, whilst
always radiant, remained fastened to both its time frame and itself. This
mobility was not projected by cultural forces from outside. Its plasticity was
transcribed by muscles and bone as well as the mind. So, if this larger image
intensified bodily force before the visible, it might also show why Nietzsche
considered dance a crucial art. The dancer is not a screen but the bodily cause
of image projection. It is almost as if human beings could be affected by
sensuous thought.« (Scott Lyall)