Gessnerallee
Zürich

A space in between a no man’s land, a film set, and a white cube. Within it are six dancers, a piano quartet, and a billboard. Warming up on their instruments, stretching their bodies, they encounter each other, get lost, disappear. As the flickering light of a video projection pervades the space, slowly a beat, a pulse begins to develop.

Making films means watching people die at twenty-four frames per second, according to the famous observation of French director Jean Cocteau. This allegation is appropriate for the new piece by Boris Nikitin, a dissolve of musical theater, dance, and video, which focuses on the state of our bodies being entangled with time. What happens when our bodies are subjected to organic processes? When do our bodies become a moving, i.e., emotion-provoking and in movement, image, evolving into this fragile condition we call identity?

And what happens when this image is shattered?

Relating to two previous pieces Versuch über das Sterben [Attempt about Dying] and Hamlet, with 24 Bilder pro Sekunde [Twenty-Four Images per Second] Nikitin creates a musical painting about the vulnerability of the body realized through a form in between documentary realism, appropriation art, and Surrealism. Last but not least, the work looks at what is happening in between the images, in between the movements – at the gaps in space, at the passing of time.

24 Bilder pro Sekunde is a collaboration with the piano quartet Kukuruz, choreographer Lee Méir, and video artist Georg Lendorff.