“The Accent of Bodies”(Provisional name)
‘The Accent of Bodies’ is conceived as an artist-led project developed through film and photography. Its first iteration is proposed in collaboration with Ballet de Barcelona, whose diversity makes the company an ideal setting in which to explore the relationship between body, displacement and identity.
A micro-society of bodies in motion
Ballet de Barcelona brings together people from different countries, cultures and life experiences within a single company. Each dancer arrives carrying a geography, a language, a form of training and a history inscribed in the body. When these bodies meet, they must learn to coexist, coordinate and create together through a shared grammar: movement.
The Accent of Bodies proposes looking at the company as a micro-society: a temporary community in which different identities negotiate with one another to produce a collective image, while still retaining what distinguishes them.
The project begins with the double meaning of the word movement. On the one hand, the physical movement of the body within choreographic space. On the other, the geographical and personal displacement of those who have left one territory in an attempt to inhabit another.
In both cases, there is a point of departure, a trajectory, a transformation and a new place to occupy. A dancer moves across the stage just as they once moved across the world. The difference is that choreography determines where movement leads, while life rarely offers that certainty.
The aim is not to create a promotional piece about the beauty of ballet, but a work that observes what each person preserves, transforms or conceals when becoming part of a collective body. The project is conceived as an open-ended work capable of unfolding through film, photography, publication and exhibition.
ACT I — ACCENTS
The first act introduces the members of the company through their individuality. Each person appears as the bearer of a history, a voice and a particular relationship with movement. There is not yet a shared choreography: there are separate bodies, fragments of memory and different ways of naming the place they come from.
Personal objects, family archives and physical traces construct an indirect portrait of each performer. The intention is not to illustrate their place of origin, but to observe what displacement has left on their body and among the things they have kept.
ACT II — GRAMMAR
The second act observes ballet as both a system and a process. Repetition, counting, authority, correction, exhaustion, comparison, cooperation and frustration all come into view. Technique begins to construct a common language, but the process of learning it reveals the distance between the body that exists and the body it is trying to become.
The camera remains close to the attempts: a sequence that never quite comes together, a correction, a loss of balance, a body waiting its turn, laughter after a mistake, a bandage, a breath, a gesture of support between fellow dancers. Failure is not shown to humiliate, but to restore humanity to an artistic image that normally conceals the process behind it.
Film
Photography
ACT III — CHORUS
In the final act, the aesthetic dimension fully occupies the space. Costume, lighting, music, composition and choreographic precision come into play. Yet, after hearing the voices and witnessing the process, the viewer no longer sees an abstract group of dancers: they recognise many biographies sustaining a single form.
The choreography can begin with individual movements that are passed on, repeated and transformed as they travel through other bodies. Gradually, the company constructs a collective architecture. Moving in synchrony does not erase difference; it allows differences to coexist within a shared temporal order.
The project is conceived as an open-ended investigation capable of taking different forms: a film, a photographic series, a publication and a potential exhibition installation. These formats are not understood as independent products, but as complementary manifestations of the same universe.
The proposed first step is an exploratory phase involving observational access to rehearsals, preliminary conversations with members of the company, and a collaborative investigation of their personal archives, objects and stories. This process would inform the selection of participants, the final treatment, the schedule and the production requirements.
studiodanielsimon@gmail.com
T. (+34 633 663 523)
Barcelona, Spain.
*All images are used solely as visual references. Copyright remains with their respective owners.*