A Frieze of Life and Death in Eleven Paintings

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Dance Now! We Shall Be the Last is an installation of eleven black-and-white paintings conceived as a continuous frieze, to be viewed “like a film.”

Inspired by the tradition of the Dance of Death and by dancing manias — those strange epidemics of dancing that swept across Europe from the Middle Ages to the early modern period — the work brings dancers, musicians and masked figures into a procession that gradually descends into darkness.

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Yet this dance of death is also a dance of life: in the face of fear, catastrophe and death, bodies dance to feel that they are still alive.

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From one painting to the next, the frieze draws us into a continuous movement, culminating in a final figure that seems to reach out a hand to us: is it inviting us to enter into death… or to join the dance?

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