Noemie LaFrance's site-specific installation, Descent, performed in the City Court Building in New York City (August 2001 and September 2002), transforms a work of architecture and its audience, as well as the notions of static/dynamic and engineered/organic structures. But the work is itself in a process of perpetual transformation through its own documentation in various forms, and Claire Le Pichon's photographs of the piece—the first generation of Descent's evolution out of LaFrance's hands—raise intriguing questions about the nature of dance once it is recorded in other media.

Descent, through movement and a sense of physicality, breathes life into a fixed environment—twelve flights of curving marble stairwell. LaFrance forces the audience to contemplate the vertigo-inducing verticality of the space, placing the dancers in covert, liminal spaces: snaking down the banister, sneaking out of a corner, lying on the stairs, and so on. LaFrance describes the effect as "created for the audience, where they are and what they see. From above, below, beside, it is all about that—a question of angle. How this angle has an effect on what you see, how the different levels, the optical illusion, the repetition, how all these things apply to your point of view, from where you see the piece."

By focusing on these angles and requiring the audience to descend the stairs, the choreographer transforms the conventionally static, perhaps voyeuristic audience into dancers themselves, embodying the "collapsing boundaries" that are so crucial to her work. In one section of the piece, dancers placed above and below the audience force the members of the audience to make choices, moving their heads "like snakes," according to LaFrance, a movement that becomes part of the piece itself. The transmogrification put in motion by Descent extends to the space itself: "People will come to me and say, 'I've never seen the stairs so beautiful,' says LaFrance. "That is also why I do what I do—to give people a chance to see architecture that's used in an imaginative context, or in a context that gives it a new value, [so that] you can imagine it inhabited."

In addition to giving life to a space and audience, LaFrance works to transform the interior lives of the people who experience it. Her choreography seeks to reverse the alienating effects of mechanical reproduction and technology in society. "We're going to come to a turning point," she says, "where we are going to be so remote from people and space, by doing and seeing so much stuff on a screen, in images so immediate, that's we're going to have a craving for human contact." LaFrance hopes that her art and that of other artists with similar aims can help us "understand more about all the mysterious things we don't understand, that maybe a lot of things, like religion, are trying to [explain]; what mystery is, what is between people that [is] so magical."

LaFrance's work, with its emphasis on the human experience—both physical and metaphysical—resists documentation. Its emphasis on the performance environment and commitment to place complicates matters as well, nearly eliminating the possibility of meaningful documentation. Neverthe-less, Claire Le Pichon's photographs of LaFrance's first experiment with the work takes up this challenge and transforms Descent into a series of nominally static images. Her photographs range widely in their aims—from demonstrating the scope of the space itself to capturing the intimate details that constitute the flesh of the work: a dancer's tossed leg, a draped arm, a shadow created by her body.

Photo by Claire Le Pichon

Photo by Claire Le Pichon.

They also attempt to convey a sense of the space: instead of conventionally framing the dancers, Le Pichon opts instead to let the dancers frame the space, giving the architecture center stage, so to speak. In Le Pichon's work, the vertical plunge of the space is the overt subject of only a few photographs; by choosing to document more subtle details, she communicates instead the nuances that make the space compelling on a different scale. The photos' focus on the details—the graffiti on the walls and the streaks on the windows—reduce the space to a series of human-scale gestures, much like Descent itself.

Le Pichon engages with the live elements of the piece, attempting to capture "something of the feeling" of being present. "Photography can freeze and bring to your conscious attention moments in the live performance that are experienced more unconsciously," she says, "[moments] that are felt, more than observed." Photography has the potential to contribute to the overall sense of a live work by highlighting the subtle aspects that might be missed in performance, in part "because of the speed at which they happen." In the process, Le Pichon eloquently affirms the importance of dance photography, pointing out the subtle ways in which the live experience is itself limited. Her dance photographs are best viewed in a series, where they convey a sense of the piece as a whole; the collection creates a narrative, even a sense of movement, through the sequence of subtle frozen moments.

In Le Pichon's experience, the dance photographer becomes a kind of dancer herself; by attending rehearsals, she develops her own movements in order to complement those of the dancers and to cultivate an intuitive sense of the piece. While assisting Chris Nash in his installation, Assemblage at the London Opera House in 2000, she had the opportunity to experience photography as a kind of choreography; Nash conceived of his piece as a dialogue between the different languages and vocabularies of photography and dance.

Le Pichon considers staged dance photos—however compelling—to miss the intensity, personality, and serendipity that defines live performance, and attributes successful dance photography to intuition, emotion, and psychology. "You have to have an appreciation for dance, for the human body, in order to achieve this [effective transmission]," she says. In admitting the limitations of the still image, Le Pichon's photos effectively communicate intimacy, immediacy, and physicality—much of the magic inherent to live performance.

In search of further transformations of Descent, Noemie LaFrance has plans to use her piece as a starting point for another distinct artistic venture, a film. "It depends on another media and another artist," says LaFrance of the project, still in its conceptual stages. "It transforms the work—it's another thing, like the cartoon of the piece that appeared in the New Yorker. It's another art piece about this piece. It's not trying to be [Descent]. That's why we will call it another name. It's not a descent anymore, it's about something else—maybe it's going to be about a bathtub in the end, about the shape of the architecture. Maybe it's like a well or a snail, or whatever—but it's another thing."

LaFrance's insistence on the film work, like Le Pichon's photographs, serving a purpose beyond mere documentation requires that it take up issues other than perspective and immediacy, translating the thrill and power or dance into its own language; assisted by —rather than limited by—the dance she has created. "I think that a lot of people are very curious about how you can document dance," she says, "and how you can create a dance without the constraint of having to get a whole crew and do a production each time—dance has not been commercialized like that."