Dance

Book cover

Susanne Linke is one of the most illustrious exponents of the German dance theatre scene since the 1970s. She carries on the German tradition of expressionist dance more tenaciously than anyone else, though without ever seeming old-fashioned. Her style is about precision: paring it down to the bare essentials. A new book rehearses her childhood, stage career and works.

Someone’s walking. Someone else goes after her. Or someone goes after herself. Schritte verfolgen, or “following steps”. Watching someone dance: that, too, is “following steps”. Planning, the path to creation: thinking and working steps. The look at a life also observes its composite movements.

Learning to speak

Susanne Linke

The book about Susanne Linke takes its title from her 1985 solo dance piece Schritte verfolgen, in which she goes over her own life – just as in the book: the world-famous dancer/choreographer tells of her childhood, studies, professional career. A childhood without verbal communication. We get to know a girl, born shortly before the end of the war in Lüneburg, who was bright, wild, but unable to speak and understand due to an early case of meningitis and whose contact with her surroundings was confined to close observation and bodily gestures. At the age of six she was placed in a psychiatric hospital for a fortnight and subsequently learned German like a foreigner: sound by sound, word by word.

Learning to dance

Susanne Linke recalls her enthusiasm at the age of 19 for something that wasn’t at all in vogue in German postwar stage dance: Dore Hoyer’s Ausdruckstanz (known in English as interpretive, expressional or expressionist dance), which had had its heyday in the 1920s. Though already 20 years old, Susanne Linke began dance training in 1964 and was among the last students of Mary Wigman, who had been the foremost interpretive dancer of her day. Afterwards Linke attended the Folkwang School in Essen, the artistic point of departure for her great peers Pina Bausch and Reinhild Hoffmann as well, to learn the techniques of classical ballet, too. She remembers a period of grave doubts and strenuous exertions. That was the only way for her: slowly and thoroughly, step by step.

'Heiße Luft'

Linke later remained attached to the Folkwang School, whose dance ensemble (Folkwang Tanzstudio FTS) she directed for ten years. Her most recent appearance there was in the spring of 2006: with advanced students she worked out the choreography for a piece based on a series of photographs of Dore Hoyer.

Dance theatre

Susanne Linke has choreographed several works for ensembles, including Frauenballett in 1981 and Ruhr-Ort in 1991 for six men, which deals with what was for many years the centre of her life: Essen, the Ruhr area, the drudgery in this (erstwhile) coalmining and steelworking region. From the mid-’80s she worked abroad as well: with the José Limon Company in New York, the Paris opera ballet, the Dutch Dans Theater, with dancers in Senegal and dance students in Tel Aviv and Milan. She owes many of her worldwide contacts and tours to the Goethe Institute, which consistently patronized her from early on.

Solo pieces

'Following Steps'

But the special thing about Susanne Linke’s artistic work is her solos, in which she displays consummate mastery of her own movements, her steps. And she’s such a stern taskmaster, so unrelenting, that in the end it all looks light, unconstrained, born of the moment. In a film interview she once referred to it as a matter of “tricking nature”. The art of leaving things out. A clarity emerges in which every little movement hasn’t so much a specific meaning or emotional expression, but is simply there, as if just about to disappear. A tactile moment is often added as though to reaffirm existence through physical contact with something: fabric or solid objects like tables or the famous bathtub. In Im Bade wannen (Bath Tubbing) premiered in 1980 – and performed again and again ever since – she runs a towel over the edge of a bathtub as if inadvertently, later her arms and upper body disappear into the tub, then reemerge. In Schritte verfolgen (Following Steps) she runs into the edge of a table over and over again, darting back and forth with short girlish steps.

The biography presents the long lineup of Susanne Linke’s choreographies under various thematic heads, with comments by renowned dance critics, some of whom followed her work over the course of many years, including Norbert Servos, Waltraud Körver and Jochen Schmidt, and illustrated with large, highly expressive photographs. It’s high time a whole book was devoted to Linke, and this is a worthy homage to one of Germany’s greatest choreographers and dancers. It makes you want to see more and think about dance, which, in wonderful moments, can be a lot like thinking, doubting, apprehending: step by step.