With a New Dance Series, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye Becomes an Unlikely Stage

IN 1929, on a voyage from South America aboard the Lutetia, two shipmates struck up an unusual intimacy. He was the world-famous Swiss architect Le Corbusier, fresh off a lecture tour in which he’d championed the modernist home as a “machine for living in.” She was Josephine Baker, the 
banana-skirted American who had lit up cabarets across Paris with her magnetic chansons. “Her voice, her countenance, her gestures are an intense, total creation,” Corbu recounted in a letter, marveling that she had “not an atom of vanity or pose.” Inside his notebook, architectural studies mingled with drawings of Baker, including a tender portrait of the kinetic performer asleep.

Poring over Le Corbusier’s archives, the artists Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly found themselves fascinated by the short-lived rendezvous at sea. “It was a jumping-off point to imagine how this encounter could have influenced modernism,” says Gerard, describing the performance that the Los Angeles–based duo will stage outside Paris at Villa Savoye this month, in a coproduction with the city’s Festival d’Automne and the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. The property—not coincidentally the very one Le Corbusier was building when he met Baker—is the fullest expression of the architect’s early radical propositions: open floor plan, wraparound windows, and a foundation elevated on slender columns. (Commissioned by the bourgeois Savoye family, the place was eventually occupied by the German army and later used as a makeshift hay barn; it was designated a historic monument in 1964 and is now open for tours.)

This is the first European venue for Gerard & Kelly’s roving “Modern Living” series, which animates avant-garde homes with site-specific dances. Each chapter obliquely touches on an atypical relationship, beginning with the two-couple commune of Los Angeles’s 1922 Schindler House three years ago. At Villa Savoye, with its open-air decks and whitewashed ramps, the ocean-liner tryst sets the mood for the dance work. Navigating throughout the house and into the surrounding landscape, the eight performers fluidly shift between geometric forms and Baker-style improvisations; they occasionally sing pared-down versions of her songs, along with robotic recitations of lines inspired by Le Corbusier’s manifestos. (“We live mechanical lives. These are mechanical times.”) As in most homes, clothes come off and on. Skin, as it was for the Folies Bergère star, becomes a costume element in its own right.

“We’ve been thinking about how Le Corbusier would be a choreographer and how Josephine Baker would be an architect,” Kelly says, dismissing tropes about the performer as a mere sensationalist. Her collage approach to choreography—South American social dances and Martha Graham homages alongside burlesque and the Charleston—had a sly jump-cut elegance. And Le Corbusier’s work is no place to sit still. The spiral staircase or the roof terrace’s sliding doors lend themselves to an organic, almost sensual flow. “The relation to the body in space is key to understanding his practice of architecture,” says Brigitte Bouvier, director of the Fondation Le Corbusier, who sees Gerard & Kelly as kindred spirits. “Architecture is emotion, and motion is emotion.”