Dancers wearing Princess Diana-esque jumpers and fake pearls are to feature at Tate Britain for the next six months in an artwork that combines 1980s power dressing with 17th-century baroque.
Pablo Bronstein’s Historical Dances in An Antique Setting is this year’s Tate Britain commission, which since 2000 has invited artists to fill the building’s large, neo-classical Duveen galleries.
At any given time between 11am-5pm three classically trained dancers will weave through the spaces with movements drawn from the 17th-century Italian concept of sprezzatura, which laid down how gentlemen were supposed to behave – what we might now see as a kind of camp, wrist-flicking nonchalance.
Equally, Bronstein said, we might see them as gestures from contemporary voguing – the urban dance movement formed in New York in the 1980s and which became famous globally with Madonna’s hit Vogue.
Bronstein said he was fusing baroque gestures with everyday walking. “It is showing how mannered walking can be and how normalised baroque gestures can become if seen often enough.”
He is further playing with time by dressing dancers in classical ballet leggings and jumpers with rolled up sleeves, and pearls that hark back to the 1980s.
Bronstein has long been interested in pre-modern European design and architecture and like his other work, the piece explores “how falsified history is … how it is constantly remade in the present”.
Previous Tate Britain commissions in the Duveen galleries include Mark Wallinger (2007), who recreated Brian Haw’s Parliament Square protest, Martin Creed (2008), who simply had runners sprinting as fast as they could, and Phyllida Barlow (2014) and her vast ramshackle sculpture dock made from throwaway materials such as cardboard, polystyrene and wooden pallets.
It is Bronstein’s most ambitious work to date, and filling a space which was a real challenge, said the artist. “It is very difficult, it’s huge, it’s cold, it’s gloomy, it’s grim and hard and not great for dancers because of the stone floor. But it is also beautifully designed and manageably sized … it is monumental but not as big as you think.”
Getting the right dancers was also tricky as Bronstein was after a certain type of person. “It is not a question of technical expertise,” he said. “You can have the best ballet technique in the world but if you can’t flick your wrist the way I want you to flick it then you’re no good to me. As cruel as it sounds I have to see how people move and then decide whether to work with them.”
Pablo Bronstein: Historical Dances in an Antique Setting is at Tate Britain from 26 April to 9 October
