Marcel Dzama: Behind Every Curtain

In recent years, Marcel Dzama (born 1974) has expanded his widely acclaimed drawing practice to incorporate theatrical realizations of his magical, myth-laden cosmology in three-dimensional dioramas and films. Behind Every Curtain provides a kind of sketchbook companion or dossier on the making of his latest film, A Game of Chess. This work draws on the importance of chess for the early twentieth-century avant-garde (Man Ray, Duchamp, Picabia) and the game's curious overlap with dance, in films and ballets by Ren Clair and--of especial significance for Dzama--Oskar Schlemmer, whose 1922 Triadic Balletincluded puppet-like masked figures performing on a checkered surface. In Dzama's film, characters based on chess pieces, clad in costumes made from papier-m ch , plaster and fiberglass and wearing elaborate masks, dance across a checkered board to engage their opponents in fatal skirmishes. Distinctions between reality and fiction collapse as both costumed and "real-life" characters in t