From Performance Art to Figure Skating

Ron showed the seminar some clips of Raimund Hoghe's work over the weekend.  I've been lucky enough to see him perform twice at a dance festival - most recently, I saw his company perform a meditation on Bolero (in which they performed to the song over and over again).
The performance explicitly revisits Torvill & Dean's performance at the 1984 Olympics (and uses the television broadcast as its soundtrack).  It's pretty amazing - and strange to see that Olympic spectacle absorbed into performance art. I also saw him perform "Meinwärts" couple years ago, and watched the audience turn on him.  That performance was so slow, so serious, so painfully sincere and labored that I fell asleep.  I figured that was OK, and he probably wouldn't mind.  He didn't seem to care what people in the audience felt - even when some queen a couple seats away from me started heckling.  It was incredible - the hostility provoked by what I think the audience experienced as a kind of aggressive sincerity.