About This Show
A live visual arts presentation, Paso Doble is the meeting of two highly accomplished artists: Miguel Barceló and Josef Nadj. Barceló is a Catalan sculptor and painter whose materials (mud, ash, sand, animal skulls, etc.) and themes (animal fables, bull-fighting, the deep sea, the passing of time, desire and of death) reflect his roots in his native island of Mallorca, as well as the worldliness of his life and career. Nadj is an internationally celebrated French choreographer and dancer of Hungarian origins, whose inventiveness has elicited comparisons to Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker and Bill T. Jones.
After a long residency in Barceló’s studio — with hours upon hours spent playing with shadows by candlelight and studying the contours of objects on canvases — Nadj decided he wanted to enter a painting. The notion immediately appealed to Barceló. The two artists imagined a wall made out of red clay. In the performance, they not only use a number of tools to manipulate the
clay and make “live sculptures,” but more strikingly work their bodies in and out of the clay, such that they become not only the sculptors, but the key elements on the canvas. Underscored with a soundscape by Alain Mahé, the two bodies gradually disappear, as if absorbed into the clay, leaving the canvas free for a different work every evening.
Over the course of Paso Doble, Barceló and Nadj illuminate a compelling way that dance, visual art, mime, performance art and theater can converge to make a thrilling, new kind of artistic work.