Floor
Floor
Floor
By Charles Atlas
Floor
Floor
Floor
In the seventies, the filmmaker and video artist Charles Atlas was amongst the first generation of artists to explore the artistic possibilities that the new medium of video provided. Atlas comes from the world of dance and experiments with techniques to record dance and performance on film. Floor shows Douglas Dunn, a dancer with whom Atlas often collaborated. The camera is focused on the floor of a dance studio where Dunn improvises everyday movements. Due to the black-and-white image and the pattern of the floor, the dancer’s body is often cropped by the camera’s frame. You see Dunn’s body as an abstract element – thus it becomes part of a scenario that, despite the ordinariness of its elements, we cannot grasp immediately.