“Classical” as a treasure of the past and as a lost opportunity, has its roots in the mythology and in the fairy tale. The model of the ballerina and the quite younger Barbie combined with the eternal youth and the pure beauty, compete for the label “classic”. The non common body position and its deformation, as features of this beauty, constitute a diachronic issue and form the idealized road towards “completion”. Architectural design and design in general, ever since modernism, have elements of this idealized approach although they are rarely obvious at first glance.
In philosophy of the classic dance, the dancer’s objective is the completion of the human being along with the excess of every human characteristic. The process of the human’s transformation is achieved through the attainment of the five basic positions.
The world-centred conscience and the understanding of human’s body constitute the main attributes of the first position. The complete body control is accomplished with the “turnout” and viewing of unknown features of the human body parts. The creation of a neuter being by combining the male and female properties is expressed through non-concurrent examples of sartorial design, social revolutions and toy production, making the deformation of the body’s nature a cross-cultural phenomenon of beauty. The world-centred conscience and completion of the dancer coincides with that of global idealized human models in ancient Greece, Renaissance and modernism.
The second position constitutes the place where the human body is, for the first time, in a condition of redefining its axis of balance. The understanding of the human body as a mechanism is of major importance in the attainment of this new balance. In the industrialized environment of modernism, the “Modulor” of Le Corbusier gives a modern view of the classic dancer by homogenizing the model of human body. The body remains enrolled in a Euclidean space, conventionalized, while the whole of its motion is unstable, approaching more organic curves. The space produced by the classic dancer in the modern environment is expressed through the use of concrete, the process of moulding but also through drawings of Hadid and Liebeskind.
The heretical use and operation of human body constitute the objective of this attitude. The third position combines the revelation of internal mechanisms of support with the charm of body as a structure that tries to maintain a marginal balance. The heretical use of industrial materials, the abstract of the static manufacture and the sense of transparency, constitute the transport of this body in the architectural planning.
The objective of the fourth position is the search of a new axis of balance with the inversion of mechanism of support of the body. The mechanism of support of body becomes perceptible only with multiple viewing, while the axis of balance is transported between the two legs, which become fully autonomous. The art of prospect to create twisted spaces, where the third dimension is represented by illusion, constitutes the conjunctive ring between the body in this position and the projection and representation of space in the period of renaissance and in the contemporary designing environments.
The fifth position constitutes of the final phase of deformity of body, characterised by minimisation of the body base support, heretical use of physiology of the joints and finally with his transformation in a two dimensional machine. Exceeding the picture of this body as a formalistic platform of production of beauty, the deformity of proportions and his incorporeal nature approach a model alien and transcendental in the architectural planning, through the examples of the surreal architecture of Gaudi and the abstractive metaphysical modernism of Hadid and Koolhaas.
The motion of dancer, fully defined, constitutes of a simultaneous and internal process of metamorphosis not only of the person, but also of the audience watching him. The modern theory of Bart, about the art of photography, concentrates the substance of the dancer’s glance and his interaction with the audience. This internal process constitutes of a composition of fragmentation, formalistic and abstractive space, which is described in the theory of Marey, and continuity, combinedwith the speed and the “floating”, in the futurism and in the modern, not territorial, new city “Tilepoli”.
The metamorphosis of the person through the classical dance, leads to the creation of a superman, of a hero. The new man balances between a mechanic and transcendental reality, between life and death, drama and comedy, his ennoblement and contestation. The example of Rey’s film “Les Mystères du Château de Dé” incarnates the ideal geometric space of classical dancer in the modernism, the uncertainty of transcendental space, that today has been changed in a situation of contestation of nature, which finally produces an empty space, with continuous possibility of recording of new motion, a productive process, with the hero conquering the eternal youth.