Under Discussion

Contemporary choreographers are all fired up about the avant-garde – both yesterday’s and yesteryear’s. With their fingers on the pulse of the time, choreographers are archaeologists who excavate within the seldom tangible sphere of a fleeting art form. In doing so, they raise new questions about their own artistic function. German modern expressionist dance is surfacing. Reconstructions and recreations sit well with modern dance’s notion of hybridity.












The future evolves against the veil of the past. At the intersection of both, a type of dance emerges that we refer to as “contemporary”. No other art form slips away from its original manifestation as radically as dance. Photos, texts, films, even the most meticulous of notations of movements cannot capture the character of living, breathing works of art. Apparitions of spatial movements, their imaginary essence, accelerate the process of forgetting. In contrast to ballet, with its techniques that are handed down from generation to generation, personal creations die out with their creators – the memories of the process of creation are encoded in the body’s cells.

Must works of dance really fade away? Our perception of history has sharpened, fuelled by the growing presence of the science of dance, by the appetite of concept artists for analysis and reflection, by the networks of dance archives and the bundling of knowledge through dance congresses. Documentations are more easily accessible now than ever before. The veil that separates us from yesteryear has grown increasingly transparent and questions of creatorship more pressing and precise.

Separating the wheat from the chaff

Mary Wigman describes dance as a “living language […] soaring above the ground of reality”. Wigman was a revolutionary force in the early twentieth century and a seminal figure in the United States as well. Her Witch Dance from 1926 can be found on the World Wide Web as an exemplary work of art of its time. Who owns the copyright? Can anyone take it and dance its movements? No, say Wigman’s heirs. They only approve and offer stylistic tuition if they feel that an artist embodies Wigman’s message. Contemporary witnesses are still around, yet there is no school or technique dedicated to Wigman’s art. This is why her language sounds so foreign today. The third dimension, the realm of the sensual and the spiritual, is lost in film; the “how”, the Flow – that subtle matter which, according to Wigman, is “exuded”, “exhaled” and projected into space in the dance performance. While many have tried to seize this grail, few have adhered to the strict work ethics of the archaeologist, whose task is to clear away the layers of dust and debris to reveal the objet d’art.

The most prominent of these “investigators” is ballerina Sylvie Guillem. Approaching Wigman’s Witch Dance and Summer Dance in 1998 at the outset of her “post-pointe” dancing career, she was astounded by the modernity of these two works. She omitted and added what she thought was necessary because “to be able to dance like her I had to be her, live her life, her visual fantasy, her tempo”. As Guillem explains, preservation is not simply replication; it demands the personal involvement of the artist.

Creating idiosyncratic variations of affects

Ecuadorian choreographer Fabián Barba is one of the youngest “historians”. He crowned his training at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels with three Wigman dances from the Schwingende Landschaft (“Reverberating Landscape”) cycle, which he is currently working on as part of his artist-in-residence programme at the K3 Zentrum für Choreographie/Tanzplan Hamburg. With a remarkable degree of curiosity and dedication, Barba explores echoes within these works which resonate with his home country, and draws on contemporaries of Wigman’s for guidance. The nature and extent of his fascination with Wigman will be revealed at the Dance Congress in November 2009 when Barba will debut his work and present a reading.

Like Barba, Martin Nachbar is also an alumnus of Brussels’ talent factory. With the support of Waltraud Luley, who keeps a close watch over the legacy of the last standard bearer of modern expressionist dance, Nachbar has been taking aim at Dore Hoyer’s Affectos Humanos 1962 dance cycle since the year 2000. Nachbar surrendered in the face of Hoyer’s formidable technique, dynamics and the poignancy of form – the release technique that he was trained in has been of little use in this undertaking. But in his work Urheben Aufheben, Nachbar focuses on failure in itself. His work explores themes of identity and authorship, and shows how a new body of ideas can be created through the act of preservation – as an activity that defines, constitutes and supports culture.

In their Hoyer-reconstructions, Susanne Linke and Arila Siegert – one a student of Wigman, the other of Palucca – collide directly, albeit with a specific form of physical anticipation, with the pace of the original. Linke, who actually saw Hoyer dance, offers an impressive rendition of Hoyer’s typically reluctant traction of the torso; while Siegert is fascinated by Hoyer’s tall and slender silhouette. Siegert and Linke both have direct references to expressionism. Both dancers decided – at different times – to work on their own solo choreographies on human emotion, and to channel the emotions which had emerged during their work on Hoyer’s Affectos Humanos cycle into acts of creation.

Berlin’s Academy of Arts is another body devoted to this culture of recollection. In its series of events titled “Politische Körper” (Political Bodies), the Academy seeks to keep the memories of ancestors and heirs alive, ensuring that the knowledge of the body is not lost and that the cultural history of dance as an art form is provided with a proper foundation.

The contemporary breath of dance history

The Catalonian dancer Cesc Gelabert struggles to preserve the memory and legacy of dancer and choreographer Gerhard Bohner, who died in 1992. Since 1996 Gelabert has toured the globe with Bohner’s 1989 solo Im (Goldenen) Schnitt – and has grown alongside the piece. Gelabert has become the keeper of a life’s work that was stimulated by the Bauhaus school and has learned that “mechanics are found in precision”. Mareike Franz is similarly compelled by this dedication to precision when she traces the physical structure and formation of ideas between the pores. Meanwhile Susanne Linke has already chosen to pass her work Wandlung on to the next generation. These various acts of preservation ensure the vitality of the language which pervades and filters the flow of knowledge between creators and their heirs.

Sabine Gehm, Pirkko Husemann, Katharina von Wilcke (ed.): Knowledge in Motion. Perspectives of Artistic and Scientific Research in Dance. Bielefeld: Transcript 2007, 355 pages.