Introduction

The concept of the structure is based on the notion of a house as a form of choreography.

From the outside dancers sleeping inside a building recalls an upended opened box: a single rectangular volume with three “flaps” extending horizontally on ground level. While the façade is white (punctuated by four bright blue awnings that do not necessarily indicate openings) the interior walls are painted dark blue. The dark blue interior recalls nighttime, in effect creating night.

Inside the house is partitioned into two spaces, a ground floor and a mezzanine level. Inhabitants are encouraged to move about during the night.

The presence of dancers during periods in which they are not performing addresses the philosophical debate about essential being: is a dancer always a dancer: off stage, while eating, taking a shower or sleeping?

While the presence of dancers is essential to the house, their actions are not themselves necessarily visible or observable. The inhabitants are both real and implied. Visitors may imagine the life of a dancer inside the house, but the performers are not a spectacle, rather shielding their existence from sight—an effect the placement of the blue awnings reinforces. Instead the architectural layout and the openings, and the placement of furnishings can be read as a proposition for a choreography of possible movements.

With its title’s reference to Trisha Brown’s Man Walking Down The Side of a Building, first performed in New York City in 1970, Dancers sleeping inside a building alludes to Brown’s practice of integrating her dancers’ habitus into the performances and of reducing them to individual gestures.