Rodin and dance

Name: Rodin and dance
Start: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
End: 2024-03-10 00:00:00
Location: MUDEC - Museum of Cultures

MUDEC - Museum of Cultures

Milan, Lombardy, Italy

The show

The French capital hosted the Universal Exposition from 15 April to 12 November of that magical year, exceeding 50 million visitors (only Osaka in 1970 and Shanghai in 2010 did the same). These were months in which Paris transformed into a beating heart that was no longer just European but 'global', where economic expansion, fun and faith in progress and change were the grand fil rouge of the event. For the occasion, the most recent discoveries of science and technology are put on display, such as electricity and the cinema, developed in those years by the Lumière brothers: a true triumph that completely changed the perception of memory, of knowledge, of the collective imagination and who invented a new universal language unifying emotions, perceptions of space and time and of movement in general. Also at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1900, delegations of performing artists arrived from all over the world with their practices admired, studied and then portrayed by the most famous artists of the time: from regional folk dances such as the Cambodian delegation to cabaret shows or individual exceptionally trained and innovative dancers and acrobats.

A unique and unrepeatable, surprising atmosphere, also fully experienced by the Parisian Auguste Rodin, who at that time was 60 years old and at the peak of his artistic career. Rodin - who throughout his life tried to translate life into his works of the body, its movements, its energy and its expressions - he is literally fascinated by these new dance expressions in their dynamism, an inexhaustible source of interest and insight for the Parisian master.

Rodin dedicates a series of works to this passion which are still today testimony to an unprecedented work, where the 'liberation of movement' is the concept on which an entire rethinking of the artist's plastic vision of the human body revolves. The set of experimental sculptures and drawings known as Mouvements de danse was born, created in 1911, which represents the extreme synthesis and culmination of the Maestro's research on dance.

The exhibition that the Mudec presents to the public from 25 October 2023 "Rodin and dance", produced by 24 ORE Cultura - Gruppo 24 ORE, promoted by the Municipality of Milan-Cultura and which sees the Deloitte Foundation as Institutional Partner, is made possible thanks to the collaboration with the Rodin Museum in Paris from which 53 works come; Through an unprecedented and original exhibition project, it tells the story of the fascination and very strong creative imprinting that dance had on the artistic genius of Auguste Rodin. A virtuous circle in which, on the one hand, dance was the muse of inspiration for the artist in the early twentieth century, on the other, contemporary dance still finds inspiration from the artist today through his 'dancing' works, unique and so current.