Readers of the British newspaper the Sunday Times found an unusual image on the front page on April 11, 1971: amid news of arms sales to Libya and conflicts in Pakistan, there was a photograph of three dancers hanging from cranes under the sky of London’s Kentish Town (fig. 1). The “crane ballet,” as described by the caption, was a production by Argentine artist Leopoldo Maler, commissioned by the Swiss Cottage Library as one of the many artistic activities that were part of the Camden Arts Festival taking place that Easter weekend. From the little information that could be gleaned from the newspaper photograph, readers could not anticipate how the spectacular image of the dancers enabled a dialogue between that wasteland in London and the avant-garde experiences of a distant metropolis: Buenos Aires. 1  As I will show in this text, Crane Ballet linked those worlds through an experimental dance piece where bodies and machines, languages and latitudes, were combined. 

After settling in London in 1961 to work for the BBC, Maler spent the 1960s and 1970s living alternately in England and Argentina. 2  In Buenos Aires, he was part of the experimental scene of the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella (ITDT), where he made the film recording of La Menesunda (Mayhem, 1965), the renowned work by Marta Minujín and Rubén Santantonín, and produced his first theater piece, Caperucita Rota (Broken Red Riding Hood, 1966), which he presented at the ITDT’s Centro de Experimentación Audiovisual. By the time he staged the ballet in Camden in 1971, Maler had already studied with the Royal Shakespeare Company, directed a stage adaptation of Palabras ajenas (Argentine artist León Ferrari’s literary collage, whose title translates to “The Words of Others”) and developed a multidisciplinary work that included films, installations and stage works. 3  Crane Ballet was not only a work where many of Maler’s explorations of the previous decade converged but also the piece that would initiate his productions for the public space. 4 

The documentation preserved at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) allows us to reconstruct the ballet and its production. ISLAA’s archive holds the expense records and purchase invoices for the harnesses and other materials needed for the dancers’ costumes (fig. 2). There, we can see the prices and other details of the crane rental for April 9, 10, and 12, 1971 (fig. 3). The first day was devoted to rehearsals, while the two festival performances took place on Saturday April 10. On the last day, Monday April 12, they shot a 16mm film, preserved in the collection in DVD format. 5 This film does not record the performances made for the festival but, rather, a production carried out by the BBC for television broadcasting. 6 

The other idea that guided Crane Ballet was to expand human possibilities of occupying space and propose a creative use of utilitarian technologies. In this sense, the performance engaged in a direct dialogue with the ideas of the Artist Placement Group, created by British artists Barbara Steveni and John Latham with the aim of rethinking the role of the artist in society and in production processes. 11  About a year before Crane Ballet, in December 1969, Maler proposed to Latham himself to observe activity in a factory and create a choreography from them that could be performed in that same factory space. 12  The movements of the workers and the way they used the machinery could be creatively harnessed and redeployed, freeing them from their utilitarian aims. The role of the artist, in that sense, was to be a catalyst for these possibilities. 

Dance offered infinite possibilities for that purpose, which Maler had already begun exploring in his works X-IT (1969) and X-IT2 (1970) (figs. 16–17). Presented at London’s recently opened venue The Place, these performance pieces were commissioned and performed by the London Contemporary Dance Theatre. 13  X-IT and X-IT2 consisted of a series of scenes and featured two motorized elevators that choreographed their movements with the dancers on stage. 14  Alongside these works, Maler also published a manifesto in which he declared that all movement could become dance, and that, through it, it was possible to transform our own perception:

The idea of drawing connections between factory work and the field of art had also been explored in the Argentine scene. In 1968, Argentine artist Óscar Bony showed La familia obrera (The Working-Class Family), where a real family, consisting of a factory worker, a housewife, and their son, were presented in the context of an art exhibition at the ITDT. Both Maler and Bony compensated their workers with double their usual pay. But their works differed in their treatment of the worker's knowledge. In Bony’s piece, the focus was on family ties (although compensated as labor). For Maler, on the other hand, it was the workers’ skills, in particular their ability to operate the crane, that played a central role in the creation of the work. 17 That knowledge, used in a completely different way, could be freed from its utilitarian functions.

Finally, Crane Ballet also offers the possibility of a comparative analysis from the perspective of contemporary artistic practices—from the relationship between the human and the non-human to different explorations of the body. 18  The circulation of documentation on Leopoldo Maler will undoubtedly play a central role in generating new readings that connect his work with recent productions. In the case of documents related to Crane Ballet, in recent years the film produced by the BBC has been the almost exclusive protagonist in the circulation of the work in galleries and museums (fig. 18). However, this audiovisual material lends itself to a very specific reading, according to which the work is shown almost as if it were a simulacrum of a classical ballet performance. 19  The film sets the movements of the cranes to a fragment of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. At the request of the producers, the film also shows Maler dressed in tails and waving his baton, as if he were an orchestra conductor. 20  Over a span of less than four minutes, the film shows images of the audience, the performers, the cranes, and the artist, including a short interview with him at the end of the tape. 21