R o b L i s t (f r o m A m s t e r d a m)
f i r s t s o l o p e r f o r m a n c e i n B o s t o n
N a t u r a M o r t a F o l l y
W e d n e s d a y A p r i l 2 9 8 : 3 0 p m
s u g g e s t e d d o n a t i on $10
Studio Soto at Thompson Design Group
35 Channel Center Street, corner
Boston
Studio Soto is honored to host the first solo performances in Boston of renowned American/Dutch choreographer, Rob List. List has developed his own personal style of movement related to ideas of minimalism, abstraction, and architecture. He performs with less of an intent to show his face in order to reduce the viewer's reading of emotion, while instead suggesting anonymity and an everyman sense of the figure in space, in the moment with the audience.
The performance is in conjunction with his recently completed exhibition at Studio Soto the past month, Rob List: Drawings About Movement, part of a series featuring multidisciplinary artists working across media. For more information about Rob List, visit http://www.studiosoto.org/artists/rob-list and Rob List's website at www.ozu.nl
Natura Morta [1996]
This solo performance is the first in a series of movement pieces exploring underlying themes in the genre of painting known as 'still-life', in which objects such as flowers, food, instruments or ornaments are displayed on a table. These objects, while unmoving, can be filled with vitality, a living presence with a quality of immanence. The paradoxes in 'still life' are inherent in the term itself, as well as in its equivalent Latinate term 'natura morta'. 'Life/death, still/moving, natural/unnatural' are the themes of this movement performance - in which an anonymous figure stands behind a table with a vase of flowers and begins a journey which crosses all of these paradoxical boundaries. Performed in Amsterdam, Marseille, New York, Zurich, Tilburg, and Prague. Winner of the 1997 Netherlands VSCD Mime Prize.
Folly [2000]
This solo performance is the first in a series of "follies". Folly is an English word meaning "foolish action, undertaking or belief". It also refers to a form of landscape architecture, Follies were structures made by 18th century English and French gentry to enliven and demarcate their gardens - towers, obelisks, grottos, rustic monuments or other buildings - reflecting not only the obsessions of their creators but also their fascination with nature as something picturesque, frightening, or sublime.
This movement performance explores the double meaning of folly: an absurd and vain act as well as a structure erected in a world of "howling wilderness".
In September a select few had a rare treat as the American expatriate Rob List performed one of his "Follies" at the Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in conjunction with the American Abstract Artists exhibition "Material Matter." With his tall, thin frame clad in a black suit, Mr. List sang a song, then had a haunting choreographic conversation with time, narrative and the gallery's smooth white walls. It passed too quickly. Like all these dances, it's a conversation that needs to resume, and soon.
- Claudia La Rocco, dance critic New York Times, December 23, 2007
