The young girl stares wide-eyed, introducing herself and questioning the audience, her movements slow and calculated, delicate and almost human.
The presentation catered to the expectations of a pop-music audience; individual movements were offered piecemeal, the exception being the whole of Shostakovich's devastating Eighth String Quartet, played here with endearing intensity.
In contrast, the Shanghai Quartet gave a stellar account of Ravel's String Quartet in F, and its passionate playing — driven, elegant and nuanced — inspired energetic clapping by the audience between movements.
An exposition of about 1,300 works, it introduced the New York art audience to movements like Cubism, Fauvism and Futurism, as well as the work of artists like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp, jolting them out of their romance with realism and toward newer, more experimental interests.
We also know that audience eye movements (Hasson et al., 2008) and brain activation patterns (Hasson et al., 2009) are synchronized with one another and with the content of the movie.
Chaplin charmed audiences through movement, so much so that the humorist W.C. Fields insisted he wasn't an actor at all but a "goddamn ballet dancer".
As a former architect, Kogan uses these "new" body parts as her building blocks, borrowing audience's movements, weight, and images in her works.
And Elinor Renfield makes a few puzzling directorial choices that don't help: actors with their backs too often to the audience, continual movement seemingly for its own sake.
I was really impressed: in the same way that Australian literature for young adults seems to have an interesting tone and approach, so Girl Asleep pushes its audience with movement and narrative.
If the ensemble sections of the first half bombard the audience with movement and structures that are rigid and repetitive, the transformation that follows gives the entire piece its meaning.
