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September 22, 2008
Dancers on a hot Gehry roof
The Times of London
by Tony Allen-Mills
Noémie Lafrance, a Canadian choreographer, is staging dance performances on the roofs of titanium-clad buildings designed by you know who.
One of the world’s best-known modern architects has found a new use for the shimmering steel buildings that he has turned into landmarks in cities around the world. Frank Gehry, renowned for sculptural masterpieces such as the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, wants his undulating silver roofs to become aerial dance floors.
This week, at one of Gehry’s most dramatic constructions, dancers will mix ballet with bungee-jumping as they leap across the scalloped domes of an auditorium at Bard college in Annandale-on-Hudson, 90 miles north of New York.
The performance is the first in a series of rooftop spectaculars that may ultimately be performed at nine different Gehry buildings in America and Europe, among them the Bilbao museum and the Walt Disney concert hall in Los Angeles.
As with most every Gehry project, however, there have been unforeseen problems.
The dancers wear wrestling shoes, which were found to have the best grip, but rehearsals still proved impossible at midday because of the force of the sun glinting off Gehry’s reflective steel panels.
NoLandGrab: Gehry's buildings might best be put to use by the Food Channel, with Rachael Ray frying eggs or Bobby Flay grilling a steak on the sizzling metal siding.
Posted by eric at September 22, 2008 9:07 AM