For a second you think you are looking at a Beyoncé video: black and brown people gaze intently at you, while lounging on the branches of a tree in white, marigold and red flounced skirts. Looking closer, your eye discerns some distinctly uncomfortable, back-breaking poses.
Something else is at work here.
Shot on the grounds of the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens, L.A.-based Carolina Caycedo’s 12-minute video work, Apariciones / Apparitions (2018), deals with ghosts. A cast of seven dancers roll languidly down the Huntington Art Gallery’s grand staircase, rest in piles under reading lamps in a darkened library and move en masse beneath Thomas Gainsborough’s famous painting, “The Blue Boy.” We know the Huntington Library was built with railroad magnate Henry Huntington’s money, but Caycedo’s video makes you ask whose bones the paradisiacal garden was built on.
There is jerking, shaking and surrendering: choreographer Marina Magalhães has the dancers engage with movement suggesting spiritual practices and rituals, especially Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Against the background of the Huntington’s lush gardens, the dance makes for stunning, sensuous images. The images are not slick, however, nor do they let you off the hook. Caycedo’s work has strength and poise. The quiescent force of the dancers looking back at you looking at them makes you wonder how much Caycedo’s work is making the Huntington reflect on itself as an institution.
Carolina Caycedo: Apariciones / Apparitions on view at the Huntington Art Gallery through February 10, 2020.