BY TRACY ZOLLINGER TURNER
Part of the stated mission of the FAR Center for Contemporary Arts is to “nurture community within the arts by means of collaboration between diverse art forms and other disciplines.” On May 31 and June 1, “Black + White,” to be held at FAR’s 505 Theater, is an event that puts that aspiration into action.
The event is a theatrical performance that tells “visual stories with tango and photography,” says Mia Dalglish, co-curator of Pictura Gallery which is part of the FAR Center. Dalglish is also an instructor at the Artango Dance School in Boston, Massachusetts, and part of the production.
Photographs by Andres Mario de Varona, a bachelor’s in fine arts student at Indiana University, will be projected over and above the dancers, with movement choreographed in response to his work.
“Photographers take a moving world and distill it into one still image,” Dalglish says. “With this dance, we’re doing the opposite. We’re taking one still and putting that into motion.”
“Black + White” is choreographed and directed by Fernanda Ghi—an Argentine dancer Dalglish describes as “one of the best-known tango dancers in the world.” Ghi is in the process of creating a new company that will “fuse tango with other dances as well as other forms of art,” Dalglish says.
The Bloomington performance will feature the world premiere of three pieces that will be part of a larger show blending tango and photography, which Ghi hopes to tour internationally. The photographs come from a series de Varona is producing “about the loss of his mother and going through rituals to connect with his mother after she died,” Dalglish explains. De Varona’s photographs will be exhibited at the FAR Center in 2020.
“It’s an interesting time in a fine art gallery—asking people to slow down and take a lot of time with one image or a group of images has gotten harder and harder,” Dalglish says. “One of David Moore’s [co-owner of the FAR Center] goals is to link photography with other forms of art—to find different portals that people can enter into photography.”
