Included as part of LAND’s Frame Rate series 

The Cabin, Los Angeles.

12-channel video installation on VHS tape (1 min 28 sec [looped]), TV sets (Sony TVs between the years 1970 and 1989), VHS players, coaxial cables, coaxial splitters; performative response by Maya Gurantz

Regina Mamou’s multi-channel video installation Looping Swans foregrounds a performance of “Danse des Petits Cygnes” (Dance of the Little Swans) from Tchaikovsky’s storied Swan Lake ballet, here performed by the Soviet Union’s Bolshoi Ballet. In the Soviet Union, Swan Lake was played on state-sponsored television during moments of political unrest. On August 18, 1991, a faction of Communist party hardliners attempted a coup against the then President of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, who was a proponent of greater State-sovereignty, and a warming to the West. As tanks rolled onto Moscow, Swan Lake played on television in lieu of news programming.

The choreography of the dance incorporates difficult movements complicated by the requirement that “the swans” remain in sync at all times with cross-linked hands. In the Dance of the Little Swans, the dancers must let go of individuality to seek unity, while masking the aspects of labor, pain, and suffering required of dancers trained at this level. For Mamou, this dance is symbolic of the invisible labor that had been performed by citizens under the Communist regime. 

In response to Mamou’s video installation, Maya Gurantz’s durational performance score does not hide the toil of physicality. Inspired by descriptions of the “disappeared” labor in Stalin’s gulags and Stalin’s concomitant love of public displays of synchronized action (parades, complex human pyramids, ballet), Gurantz focuses on the tensions of the body at work.

Looping Swans presents a juxtaposition of invisible and visible labor drawing from ideologies of Soviet communism. These belief systems, however, are not so different from our current milieu, where media tactics, wielded like strategic weapons, are used for political gains.

Frame Rate is LAND’s screening series, presenting film, video, and moving image works in site-specific contexts.

Looping Swans is curated, and produced by Irina Gusin.