Jiří Kylián about Moving Still

I am a choreographer since many years and obviously movement always fascinated me.

Moving Still is an installation consisting of nine life-size sculptures of dancers who were scanned 3-dimensionally. I have asked these dancers, with whom I worked for many years, if they would participate in this project and whether they would be willing to be scanned nude in 3D, printed life-size and publicly exhibited. The dancers are Lorraine Blouin, Cora Bos Kroese, Valentina Scaglia, Shirley Esseboom, David Krügel, Ken Ossola, Stefan Żeromski and Michael Schumacher.

Since years I am fascinated with movement in general and moving inside or outside of a space in particular. The life-size 3D prints of these dancers should be situated either inside or outside of any windows – or they should be caught just in the midst of their flight through the glass with their bodies cut in half. I started working on this project in October 2021 in the middle of the pandemic. At that time we were not allowed to move anywhere. That is why I gave my work the title Moving Still. It is an installation of motionless sculptures flying through space between life and death. Their bodies are marked with cuts and wounds… But while working on this project, I have realized that neither a living dancer nor his static 3D print ever stands still. Nothing ever stands still....

But movement and stillness in choreography was not the only inspiration for this project. I was equally inspired by the sculptures of the deceased people of Pompeii who died in October 79 AD when mount Vesuvius erupted. This tragedy happened 1945 years ago and still today these motionless sculptures move us deeply.