Dance Scene and Trends in Germany

His pieces tell of dreams and of the social reality on which dreams can be shattered. In Raimund Hoghe, an extraordinary artist has been honoured as “Dancer of the Year”.

He would probably never have dreamed of it himself, although his dance pieces invariably tell of dreams. And of the social reality that threatens to shatter people’s dreams. The critics’ poll of the dance journal ballettanz has chosen the dancer and choreographer Raimund Hoghe as Dancer of the Year for 2008, and this in spite of the fact that the dancer with the hunchback doesn’t quite fit into our picture of a dancer. Using his body, which does not conform to traditional ideas of beauty, Hoghe shows himself on stage and challenges the way we look at the norm. Cringing has never been his thing. For the question about who is permitted to show himself on stage is closely bound up with the question about the social representation of other bodies and other lives. This question has not only a grim history in Germany. In view of biomedical developments and the ubiquitous ideal body presented in advertising, the question has become more urgent today than ever before.

A German story

Through his work as a journalist, Raimund Hoghe met Pina Bausch, whose way of looking at and curiosity about people he shared, at the end of the 1970s. He became her dramaturge, and remained it until the native Wuppertaler left Bauch’s dance theatre in 1989. In the following years he choreographed pieces for various dancers and actors before realising his own first solo in 1994, Meinwärts, which he based on the life of the tenor Joseph Schmidt, who was murdered by the Nazis. In Chambre séparée (1997), Hoghe’s subject was his childhood in the Germany of the “economic miracle”, which had long to wait before stepping out from the brown shadows of its past. Another Dream (2000) revolves round the new beginnings in the 1960s. The German past has still not released its grip on him in his most recent productions. Thus in the second act of his Boléro Variations (2007), we hear the voice of Anita Lasker-Walfisch, a survivor of Auschwitz, who tells of her sufferings and privileges as a member of the concentration camp orchestra. Stripped to the waist, the kneeling dancers bend to the ground, their arms stretched far before them.

Spaces of longing

Hoghe’s theme is time itself, passing time, and remembrance of the suppressed, the excluded, and of other forms of co-existence and sexuality that return to the stage and express themselves. His dancers appear as delicate ghosts, as in Swan Lake, 4 Acts (2005), which have sprung from the imagination of the dreaming choreographer. With their ritual-like actions and their exact movements from past Swan Lake choreographies (in which the dancers, including Ornella Balestra, have themselves once performed), they leave a deep mark in the memory of the spectator. Hoghe’s stages, which he repeatedly subdivides geometrically with objects such as cloths, tealights, sand or bowls, are spaces of longing, essentially borne by the carefully and knowledgeably chosen music that is always precisely related to the theme of the piece.

Another life

The season 2007/2008 was a productive year for Hoghe in which he presented three new pieces. In Seoul, Korea, he developed 36, Avenue Georges Mandel, a piece about the opera diva Maria Callas, whose final address gave it its name. Shortly thereafter followed Boléro Variations, with which Hoghe was invited to the February 2008 Tanzplattform Deutschland in Hanover. Inspired by Maurice Béjart’s famous interpretation of Boléro, he seizes upon the instant of turning in dance and develops movements for individual parts of the body that are as clear as they are playful. Finally, L’Après-midi is oriented on Waslav Nijinsky’s first choreography from 1912 for Claude Debussy’s music and takes up its relief-like, two-dimensional movements, which the dancer Emmanuel Eggermont, as the faun figure, presents trenchantly with angled wrists and feet. It is the poses of a seducer that Hoghe seizes upon so as to analyse and consider them anew. The theme of sexuality, which created a scandal at the original premier, is here more than just reminiscence. What was already clearly apparent in Hoghe’s furious duet with the dancer Lorenzo De Brabandere, Sacre – The Rite of Spring (2004), is continued in L’Après-midi. The spectator can read the relation between the two men on stage as a gay relationship, but need not do so. Beyond lewdness or drastic stage effects, it opens possibilities for the spectator to see the world a little differently and so to shape it more richly, more variously and more humanely.