Today we are going to step into a dialogue between dance, chandeliers and design, where the muses meet the Hebrew ruach , the French élan, the ballerina’s arabesque through a leading hotel of the world design, that of hotel Peninsula.
Shall we begin?
Installation
The Dancing leaves installation is in the lobby of the Peninsula hotel in Paris created by Lasvit, a Czech glass and design company known for sculptural light installations.
The chandelier is made of 800 hand made crystal leaves. The leaves are designed to evoke plane trees that line in the grand Parisian boulevards.. The chandelier is an image of caught mid air as though Parisian air has moved through them ~~
If we were to examine them in relation to the Greek , French and Hebrew languages we would base our analysis on:
- The dancing leaves embodying suspension;
- The constellation being much more than an imitation of the trees , it is about essence;
- The leaves being translucent and animated by the wind, a breeze in the hotel–
Suspension and essence
Starting from suspension and the French language per se, it is associated with the notion of hovering beauty that characterizes the culture and language overall. Stephane Mallarme poetry is a brilliant example of this tendency To begin with, he loved images that are floating, hard to grasp. In this respect he talked about the leaves in the wind, swans on a lake ,the nymphs~~
To site an example, in his poem L’APRÈS-MIDI D’VN FAVNE he states:
these nymphs, I would make them eternal
so bright
their delicate flesh , it flutters in the air
asleep in thick dreams
The nymphs in Mallarme’s poetry are never solid presences. They belong to the imagination. The faun wants to embrace them but they slip away , they are always out of reach suspended between approach and retreat ~~
From another stand point, he never named things directly, he was aiming for pure essence. He would not describe a rose directly he would suggest fragrance shadow as he believed the essence of the rose was not on the flower itself but on the aura it created. It was the emotional and spiritual resonance that it left on the reader as he believed that the direct, conventional use of words obscured the deeper, spiritual significance of an object.
Turning to music and talking about the Greek language and culture, the suspension is very much related to the concept of Greek chorus tableau. In ancient Greek tragedy the chorus was a collective voice commenting dancing singing. Their songs would often culminate in moments of stillness called chorus tableau., silent yet full of dramatic potential.
If we were to talk about the Hebrew language now the words are built on roots (usually 3 consonants) out of which spread several words which are linked thematically through the essence of the root. At the same time it doesn’t have vowels- they appear as marks added later (niqqud) or left implied. This means that Hebrew words are always in a state of potentiality~~
To make associations between the 3 all of them share share a logic of incompletion refusal to define closure
Fullness in this respect is not in fixing but in holding things open like wind through leaves.
At this point I will zoon in to the French language which is a characteristic example of this fullness.
The chandelier like the French carries ornamentation but it is airy not heavy there is politesse in its form. Having mentioned this I turn to the another glue that holds everything together, this is no other than the word wind.
Wind
The word wind has one vowel , vowel i which is the 9th letter of the English alphabet Nikola Tesla the famous physicist once claimed that 3 6 and 9 make up the essence of the whole universe. This very much resonates with what wind stands for in the Greek, Hebrew, French language in line with the wind dancing across the wonderful hotel leaves.
Stating from the Hebrew alphabet the letters carry mystical meaning animated by the so called notion of ruach ( pronounced roo-akh) which is the Hebrew word for the Holy Spirit . We will talk about this in more detail in other posts, for the time being let’s just say that letters stand alone but the truth essence as animated by ruach blooms when they are studied in correlation with the other letters resembling the leaves installation itself whose beauty arises from the interplay between the individual leaves.
Τurning to to world of Greek the leaves are translucent, they catch light. This resembles the radiance of the Greek Logos , characterizing the highest form of Greek speech. The language itself has mousiki ( music), something which Plato considered to sculpt the soul. Though the Greek language has musicality the original conception of the word Mousiki comes from the 9 Muses. The Muses were the daughters of Zeus (The rules of the skies) and Mnemosyne (Memory) According to the Greek philosophers, they were allegories of the sources of Logos. The Muses like the Hebrew Ruach animate language and make the leaves vibrate at the mote just frequency, not rigidity not wild disorder, but the spirit of the French élan.
Like a ballerina held in arabesque penchee1 the Penisnula chandelier lies poised between gravity and grace.
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Fragnance card
World: Hidden essence shimmering beneath appearance
Accord: Greek clarity of form proportion, lyric poetry
Undertones: :French elegance is suspension, Hebrew depth essence
Sillage: Leaves caught mid drift – a ballerina arabesque -perfume notes overlapping in unfolding grace~~
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[1] The dancer looks like stretching between the earth and sky It is both stable ( rooted on one leg) and weightless