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Alonso, Natalia (2013) Dance and modernist architecture: the case of Lina Bo Bardi's SESC Pompeía. Masters thesis, London Metropolitan University.
In 2008-09 I witnessed various performing arts events concerning 'dance and architecture', which made me feel uneasy and became the trigger for me to look deeper into this subject. Conversely, I heard of the SESC (Serviço Social do Comércio, Social Service for Commerce) project in my Diploma education in architecture (2003) (through tutors who presented me to the project) and since then I developed a fascination and affection for Bo Bardi's approach to architecture. Achilina Bo Bardi (Lina Bo Bardi) was born in Rome in 1914, during the outbreak of World War I; she studied art and graduated from the Architecture Faculty of Rome University in 1940 at the beginning of World War II. Soon after this she moved to Milan, where she worked for Gio Ponti a renowned architect and edited the magazine Domus. After World War II, she emigrated to Brazil in 1946 with her husband Pietro Maria Bardi, an art historian and critic. She remained in Brazil until her death in 1992.
My research contributes, firstly, to a deeper understanding of the SESC Pompeia building. On the basis of this, it will be possible to clarify a persistent conflict in modernist architecture regarding the nature of 'movement' and 'space' - between its potential for individual emancipation and for collective solidarity - particularly since the SESC building offers an unusually successful example of a more profound understanding of the nature of social and political life. A central theme in Lina Bo Bardi's SESC (Serviço Social do Comércio) Pompeia Community Centre, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1976-86, is the motif of dance and its relation to Architecture. In her presentation for the SESC project, she referred to, Laban and Duncan. There is a tension in dance between its embodiment of communal values (tribal, cultural) and dance as a vehicle of individual self-ex-pression (freedom), a tension characteristic of modernist architecture generally. My research seeks to clarify this phenomenon. Plenty of research has been done in relation to architecture, urban planning with dance and the performing Arts, but we are missing an understanding of dance as more profoundly understood, as meaningful life. I intend to bring out new insights on the ethos of dancing and its relation to modern architecture that are beyond our current views using Bo Bardi's embodied aesthetical approach; the SESC offers a good example of an architecture that communicates and integrates the essence of dance within everyday living, if we open ourselves to it.
'Dance' is meant here as a metaphor for a heightened awareness of existence, particularly in relation to movement in space. The motif recurs in the history of modernist architecture, and it was prominent in Lina Bo Bardi's transformation of the SESC Pompeia brief from a sports facility into one of the most significant recent interpretations of civic life. The result is a dialogue between the permanent and the ephemeral that uses the literal movements of everyday situations to incite a multiplicity of transformations and readings, endowing the whole with the anticipatory quality of a constant performance. The building creates a species of theatre for its several activities (what Bo Bardi termed 'creative leisure'), invoking Brazilian traditions through the visual arts, gardens, material metaphoricity, and all unified by her conception of 'dance'. Public life for Bo Bardi has forgotten its primary order; "After the 2nd World War the west is declining" she declares and speaks of creative 'renewal'.
Bo Bardi spoke of time as perception and movement of people in space in a lecture delivered in Salvador in 1958. Architecture, "not as works, but as possible ways of being, and taking hold, [she declared], only exists when learnt, possessed, captured". She shared the aspiration for recovery of a lost harmony with artist Isadora Duncan, for whom dance was a collective phenomenon, and a vehicle for attunement to nature: listening, not transforming; "It is essential that Man 'consciously' seek what he has 'unconsciously' lost". Similarly, the study of rhythm and movement was the basis of all modern teaching of dance. Albert Jeanneret (brother of Le Corbusier) wrote an article in the magazine L'Esprit Nouveau recalling Dalcroze's teachings about rhythm. These themes developed along with an increasing interest in the more austere settings of modernism, as for example in Schlemmer's work at the Bauhaus. The innovations were deemed able to recall, or to revivify, primitive festival and celebration as an ethos of modernism, what Bo Bardi termed "an attempt to return to the theatre its attribute of 'detaching and involving'".
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