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Ballet dancers tell a story through a series of movements that follow a structured choreography sequence. By constructing the dance, their bodies convey the structure and feel of the music to the audience through the dynamics of relaxation and contraction of movement.
Replacing the site reconstructs the target site as a medium in which the systematic performance of ballet is in harmony with the impromptu performance in the city. In an organized grid system, concrete actions are triggered in a specific place (ie, people act programmatically) by being defined and manipulated through prototypes of street furniture, ballet barres and landscapes on the surface. By reflecting these movements and illuminating them again, the position of the actor and the observer changes. The viewer and the person seen, the objects and places, the earth and the sky, the foreground and the background change in the same way. As the general public uses the urban furniture placed at the intersection of the grid, they also dance, and the ballet dancers perform site-specific and improvised performances with the public.
Repositioning frames the various hierarchies of public performance and at the same time reveals them on the stage.
This multi-stage performance maximizes the cross-sectional area by filtering the human body up and down in the space of the dug up large intestine. As the slope of the site slopes inward, the four types that are repeated induce differentiated behavior and are identical, but each have their own identity. On the other hand, the visually and perceptually dynamic reflective mirror planes maintain their position, where people dance or walk around the land while the mirrors stand guarding the road level. Thus, a gradual transition between the foreground and the background unfolds between the road and the stage.
Ballet dancers tell stories through performative gestures in a choreographed sequence of movement. Through an architecture of dance, their bodies negotiate both the structure and feeling of music-reconstructing them in space through a kinetic tension/compression dynamic between themselves and their audience.
[TRANS]positions choreographs the site as a mediating field in which the systematic performance of ballet intertwines with the improvisational performance of urbanity. Operating within and regulated by an organizational grid, furniture prototypes, ballet barres, and groundscape trigger specific actions in specific places [themselves performing programmatically, while mirrored planes reflect these actions back onto themselves—transposing performer and spectator; viewer and viewed; object and field; ground and sky; foreground and background. As the public engages the urban furniture at grid intersections (as they dance with them], ballet dancers engage the public through site specific, improvisational performance in between them.
[TRANS]positions simultaneously frames and stages a gradient of public performance.
This performative gradient is amplified sectionally as the excavated site filters the body up and down through space. As the site slopes inward, the repetitive prototypes [4 types) trigger differentiated actions; while identical, they gain their own identity. Meanwhile, the perceptually dynamic mirrored planes maintain positional stasis; as the body moves through the site [through dance and/or leisure), the mirrored planes remain at street level. A gradual transposition of foreground and background unfolds in between street and stage.
Location: 52 West 200 South, Salt Lake City, Utah
Site area: 1,72.09m2
Structure: wooden
Exterior finish: log, stainless steel, round gravel, birch plywood
Use: Pavilion
Design : MMKM associates Seohong Min + Gabriel Fuentes + Dongcheol Yang + Junho Jo
Client : AIA Utah's Young Architects Forum