STEEL // SPIRIT is a short film exploring the interaction of dance and sculpture. Yves Musard, dancer and movement artist, performs with sculptor Richard Serra’s “Inside Out”, 2013 at the Gagosian Gallery in New York City. Serra’s massive weathered steel sculpture fills the entire luminous space at Gagosian’s 21st Street Gallery. Yves Musard’s site specific choreography explores Serra’s environment. Musard moves with focus and curiosity around the ribbons of steel exploring the sculpture both literally and metaphorically with the purpose of making the viewer more aware of the sculpture’s dynamic within the gallery space. Combining motion and stills, filmmaker Keri Pickett creates a short film about time and perspective. Tamara Douglas-Morris writes a reflective score to accompany Musard’s simple chants.
The short premiered in 2015 at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival. It won an award of excellence from the 2016 Indian Cine Festival.
Richard Serra (born November 2, 1939) is an American minimalist sculptor and video artist known for working with large-scale assemblies of sheet metal. Serra was involved in the Process Art Movement. He lives and works in Tribeca, New York, and on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia.
Yves Musard, based in New York City, is a movement artist whose life’s work focuses on site specific performances and spatial investigations, inside and outside museums and galleries, exploring, responding and interacting with pathways, communities or situations. Yves works as a solo artist often includes collaboration with musicians and other artists. His unique approach to movement in the surrounding space generates a sense of place, details and people. His primary interest is on space as the ‘room’ that holds the commonness of all people.
Musard’s working tools includes multi-media documentation of performance of site specific environments interwoven with live performance, His archive material, mapping his international performance trajectory, has been published and included in numerous independent films including ‘The Dia’ commissioned The Man Who Believed He Could Move, (1988) and English Promenade / La Promenade in the Dan Graham Roof Top Urban Park Project, (1991-1992). The French Cinematheque created a film montage of his dance history (1982 onward). Select choreographic awards include the New York Foundation of the Arts, New York State Council of the Arts, and both the French Foreign and Culture Ministries.
