Dance in Germany – Background

They push the boundaries of dance to include so-called “laugh concerts” and explorations of nothingness – and never without a healthy dose of humour.
They sit around and chat. They open up laptops and switch off the spotlights so the mental movie can run whilst a couple of dancers are intertwining their limbs into human knots. They laugh in rhythm, even Superman gets to flutter across the stage once in a while in a yellow cape. But take one look and you’ll notice that the one thing they don’t do here anymore is dance. Over the past 20 years, the dance aesthetic, the display of virtuosic dancing and the role of the stage name as a veritable brand name has been systematically challenged by practitioners of contemporary dance – first and foremost by the most illustrious exponents of so-called conceptual dance, Xavier Le Roy and Jerome Bel.

Ever since, choreography in Germany, as elsewhere, has ceased to be synonymous with the arrangement over time of intelligible movements in space. Nowadays choreographers are parsing the parameters of dance, stretching and redrawing its boundaries. Instead of re-enacting the rules and figures of dance and thereby establishing a present-day presence for the same, they put those very rules and figures up for grabs, challenging the underlying notions and the very physicality of the human body. That is done by verbalizing the cultural context of dance, on the one hand, and, on the other, by quite physically letting the body break out of conventional codes of movement and by experimenting with other modes of articulation.

Monika Gintersdorfer and Knut Klassen: “Logobi”

In their widely-discussed five-part series Logobi (2009/10), for instance, director Monika Gintersdorfer and visual artist Knut Klassen stage dialogues between the Ivorian dancers Gotta Depri and Franck Edmond Yao and European dancers.

In Logobi #01 Gotta Depri and the German dancer Gudrun Lange present to each other – and so to the audience as well – their own socialization and learning processes as dancers. Their dialogue treats of the body as a cultural construct and of its vocabulary of movement. The European dancer in each Logobi piece translates the Ivorian dancer’s texts, so the intercultural exchange becomes a translation process – replete with minor potshots and sideswipes.

Physical and cultural influences are articulated and critically questioned in these pieces, setting in motion a transformation process of the dancers’ very stage presence. With the image of his body, the dancer puts himself up for re-examination, showing spectators the fissures in his artistic identity rather than alluring opportunities for identification. He becomes a transitional figure of ambivalent presence that represents neither an original self nor an intelligible stage figure.

Antonia Baehr and her laughing chorus

Meanwhile, dance notation systems are also undergoing a transformation in the process: choreographer/performing artist Antonia Baehr, for example, probes various forms of facial and bodily expression by stripping them of causal motivation. The score serves here as a means of systematization, but also as a perceptible source of friction between the performer and her material.

For her self-portrait entitled Lachen (“Laughing”, 2008), she had friends and relations give her “laugh scores” for her birthday. On stage she runs through the whole register of giggling, chuckling, snorting, cooing and rippling laughter in rhythm – accompanied by those in the audience who are infected with her laughter, which makes for an unpredictable chorus and a contrasting foil, as it were, to the austere and highly artificial mise-en-scène.

In For Faces (2010), four performers showcase their own faces, as their composed movements create moving landscapes of twitching eyelids, lips and noses, inviting spectators to explore these individual microcosms.

Dissolution and entanglement: deufert + plischke

Deufert + plischke, who call themselves “artistic twins”, seek to dissolve the autonomous subject in an artistic elective affinity. Drama theorist/performer Kattrin Deufert and choreographer Thomas Plischke have developed a production method in which the material is generated jointly according to the principle of the Surrealist game of “exquisite corpse”. In the rehearsal process, fragments, texts and choreographies are translated, overwritten and reworked by the other performers so that personal memories and material lose any clear-cut attribution.

The individual stories are turned into discrete movements and sequences, which then form an archive of their own: the three-part piece entitled The Anarchive Project (2009–11) makes use of inscribed partitions referring to the associative context and the situation portrayed on stage, rendering quotations of movements recognizable. Deufert and Plischke collaborate with other dancers and performers, but also with the philosopher Marcus Steinweg.

Probing nothingness: Fabrice Mazliah, Ioannis Mandafounis and May Zarhy

Fabrice Mazliah, Ioannis Mandafounis and May Zarhy also take a collaborative approach. The trio deconstruct cause and effect in joint projects like Zero (2009), at once an exploration of nothingness and a production of non-sense, which involves paring dance down to a probing of the body and of space, along much the same lines as Mandafounis and Mazliah’s duet P.A.D. (2007). In a tableau vivant, the threesome flesh out a simple vocabulary of movement that does not capitalize on the dancers’ virtuosity so much as on relationships between their bodies that weave transitory moments of tension. Actions and noises are stripped of their context and interpretive framework: the upshot is a captivating and whimsical open forum for dancers and spectators alike.

But these empty spaces are never devoid of wit, of comic effects of one sort or another. It may be said that, generally speaking, these young choreographers are not engaged in a humourless study of their art, of the body and its social moorings. On the contrary, in their probings of the untranslatable, in their efforts at cultural deconstruction and unshackling from teleology, they always discover levity.