Sunday 29 August 2010, 15.00

Charles Atlas, Parafango, 1983–4, 27 min

Magnetic performances by Karole Armitage, Michael Clark and Philippe Découflé are the focus of this French production, an intricate and quintessential Charles Atlas pastiche of provocative dance, new music, pop design and costuming, narrative, documentary and media references. Armitage’s eclectic, often frenetic choreography is performed with a postured insouciance. The kinetically shot and edited dance segments are intercut with an ambiguous narrative involving the performers, TV news footage and other appropriated images, colour bars and other formal video devices. Atlas punctuates the physicality of the dance with an artificial media reality. By rupturing the performance illusion with deconstructive devices, Atlas subjects this radically postmodern dance to an inquiry into the tension between the fictive and the real.

Charles Atlas, Ex-Romance, 1987, 48 min

Atlas’s fascination with ‘narrative, psychology, dance and flights of fantasy,’ is manifested in this dynamic video-dance musical. Here the post-modern choreography of Karole Armitage is performed by Armitage, Michael Clark and others to American pop and Latin music. Framed and interrupted by the ironic observations of two parodic ‘public television’ commentators, the dancers play fictionalised versions of themselves in a wry tale of contemporary romance, in which the dance literally and metaphorically advances the narrative. Atlas deftly stages elaborate dance sequences in unlikely settings – an airport lounge, a gas station, a baggage conveyor belt – that are presented alternately as fact and fantasy. Atlas manipulates the representation of truth and artifice, reality and fiction in this meta-narrative.

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£5 (£4 concessions), booking recommended