We think of architecture as static: structures that shelter the living. But to Quebec Province-born Brooklyn choreographer Noémie Lafrance architecture moves, its curves and angles animated by those who pass through its spaces. Descent, a 2001-02-03 work, celebrated the glorious spiral staircase that ascends the clock tower of the former New York Life Insurance building on Manhattan’s lower Broadway. An empty Williamsburg McCarran Park Pool became a vast, concrete canvas for the imaginary world of 2005-06’s Agora I/II. So it was inevitable that Lafrance would find the undulating surfaces of architect Frank Gehry’s buildings, a sort-of man-made landscape of hills and valleys, “urgently� tempting.

“Architecture is so present in our everyday life,� Lafrance says. “It serves a function,� it’s how humans “impose order on natural space. So we don’t notice how much architecture affects us, how spatial life is. I’m drawn to dance because I’m interested in movement in relationship to everyday life (and) something happens to spaces when people exist in them; just by occupying a space people’s energy patterns change it.�

“Architecture is the man-made side of space.� Fields, oceans, those are natural spaces. “When you think of those spaces you think of emotions. The ocean is open, infinite.� It is, she implies, soothing but humans also sense its danger. Architecture protects us. “In a small, little room you feel quaint, cozy, safe. In a big space you may feel scared or under someone’s eyes.� In turn, the space we’re in affects how we interact with people, “it plays on our psyche. I’m interested in people’s unconscious, physical reactions to a space.“

In Rapture, set on Gehry’s new Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, Lafrance is interested in “the body against the architecture,� in physically confronting the audience with the architecture. “Buildings are huge in comparison with our bodies.� That’s part of our emotional response to architecture, “how they dwarf us. I like the idea of putting bodies on a big building and seeing how small we are,� but also “how big we are, how big our energy� makes us.

The roof of a Gehry building, like nature itself, is never truly flat. A Gehry building’s curves and angles “challenge our perception of what is straight, what is vertical. You wonder how a building that appears to be made of floating fabric, that implies movement, can stand; we’re shocked by that.�

The movement for Rapture results from this quasi-natural landscape. “I want to capture the movement (of the building) and the physical body’s experience of it. The parts of the roof are slanted in all sorts of different ways so every dancer is actually on a different slant. There are areas where you can stand, and ones you can’t because it’s too steep.� The difference between a 25-degree and a 70-degree slant dictates alternative approaches to the phrases of the dance. “For me it’s interesting to be working so intimately with gravity� Lafrance notes. “It’s like the gradual path you take on a hill and it gets steeper and steeper and there’s a point where gravity won’t let you go anymore. We’re playing with that moment. At that moment,� when the human body can no longer stand unaided, a “rope picks up (and changes) the body’s gravity.�

In order to perform Rapture a specialized rope system allows riggers, who “have their own synchronicity with the dance,� to pull the dancers uphill. This dual performance fascinates Lafrance. In order to keep the ropes out of the way they have to be choreographed into the dance. Supporting the dancers in this way allows them to leave the realm of normal gravity; at times they “stand� parallel to the earth, perpendicular to a wall. “We don’t have much experience knowing our bodies in these (suspended) places. Your body can do things you don’t expect,� but you only discover what that is through practice. “It’s very difficult, you’re in a strange position, almost like being in a [Martha] Graham contraction the whole time. It’s like running at full speed, lifting something heavy, and doing sit-ups at the same time. The dancers are really exhausted.� Depending on the slant, what “one dancer can do, another can’t do at all. If you’re hanging sideways you can’t do a full turn like you can standing on your feet, you can’t wrap upward on a rope.� But when “your weight is not on your feet, when gravity is in your pelvis, you can jump like you’re on the moon.�

Walking around the sort-of-star-shaped building, its contours change. That’s why the piece — audience and performer — travels, “so people can see the body in many relationships to the building.�

Audiences “have to navigate to experience the whole show� and even then “you don’t get to see it all. Depending on what you see, each person sees their own variation, a different dance, but they’re all beautiful.�

“Sometimes life is like that,� says Lafrance who hopes eventually to perform unique versions of Rapture on Gehry buildings worldwide. “There is more there than you can see and you have to make choices, you’re editing. That’s my idea about how movement happens in the context of life—you can’t always see everywhere, someone may run (past you) to a corner (and disappear), but that creates a story, it’s mysterious.�

Rapture can be seen from the lawn of Bard College’s Fisher Center for the Performing Arts in Annandale-on-Hudson, through Sept. 28 and October 2-5. For tickets and bus service to Bard from lower Manhattan call the Fisher Center Box Office 845-758-7900 or go to the Fischer Center website http://www.bard.edu/fishercenter.

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