Minotaur (2009)

Synopsis

Minotaur was the center of in a solo exhibition at the New Museum, New York. Octogenarian choreographer Anna Halprin, pioneer of postmodern dance, recently created an erotic performance based on Auguste Rodin's rendering of the Greek legend. Minotaur traces labyrinthine transformations, in which photographs, sculpture and dance succeed and replace one another, and in which bodies and objects appear part of a continuous tissue. Fluctuations between disparate media are accompanied by shifts in gender dynamics; in Rodin's original the half-man / half-bull grips an ambivalent nymph, while in Halprin's iteration the female 'victim' turns the story on its head, wresting a melancholic triumph over her captor. A score by Matmos, which includes the sounds of Rodin sculptures being struck like instruments, echoes the sculpture's muscularity.