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DANZ QUARTERLY Issue No 12
No 12 – July, August September 2008
Still Life:
the politics of movement
By Michael Parmenter
Contemporary dance identifies itself through a process of continual redefinition. Choreographers challenge existing traditions and venture into uncharted territory. Young dancers, often to the despair and regret of their teachers, neglect the gifts with which they have been bestowed and go in search of the body’s forgotten or unimagined vocabularies. These domains in turn become points of departure for new trajectories.
On a recent trip to Europe, kindly sponsored and generously and comprehensively organised by the Goethe-Institut, I had the opportunity to see how this reactive tendency in contemporary dance can occasionally arrive, as often happens with bold and daring adventures, at a place that demands a moment of reconsideration, a chasm that can’t be crossed, a boundary that can’t be breached, certainly not without risking the integrity of the whole mission.
The focus of the trip was participation in a celebration of German contemporary dance, the biennial forum Tanzplattform. Held this year in Hannover, Tanzplattform is an intense five days of performances of ground-breaking choreographic approaches by dance-makers who, though currently based in a variety of German cities, hail from various regions of Europe and represent European-wide trends.
With the notable exception of a lively hip-hop show, a conscious attempt to reach out to a youth audience, the chosen performances – a wildly diverse and eclectic sampling – were united by a singular characteristic; the total absence of anything resembling dance. Now if this sounds like the hyperbolic characterisation of an old-fashioned reactionary, then I stand guilty as accused, but first let me tell you that, not only was there an absence of what normally goes by the name of dance, but the performances were characterised by a comprehensive and conscious rejection of movement as such.
The result, as witnessed in Tanzplattforum, was a parade of “Still Lives - Hannover”, to use the title of one of the works presented. This particular piece highlights many of the issues concerned. A collaborative ensemble, Good Works Productions, creates a new version of the work for each city. The performers are workshop participants, so predominantly non-dancers and the piece centres on the responses of passers-by to a photograph by Jeff Wall. Accompanying the recorded voice-overs, simultaneously projected in translation on to a back-screen, the performers recreate various tableaux and patterns onstage. As in many of the works presented, there is a strong focus on text, visual image and egalitarian physicality.
Other works offer more complex and engaging challenges. A piece by Eszter Salamon, was based on the choreographer’s research into the lives of a number of other women who shared her name. Projected video interviews comprised a good 75% of the work, the sole live elements being a couple of engaging songs. The advertising image for the work shows the choreographer seated on a couch talking on the phone, in front of a back projection of the choreographer seated on a couch talking on the phone. This piece about the undoubtedly very interesting ‘lives’ of the various Estzer Salamons, was devoid of any sense of embodied life.
Xavier Le Roy’s ‘Le Sacre du Printemps’ was a witty idea, recreating the actions of a conductor leading an orchestra through Stravinsky’s classic score, but unfortunately it had run its course well before the mere 40 minutes of the accompanying recording. ’Neuer Tanz’, despite its name, presented a dry, zany, sound-waste-meets-Abba-vocals music performance. The show was a lot of fun, but the connection to dance… the two female vocalists wore pointe-shoes, ostensibly so they could reach the microphones.
The challenges of Tanzplattform were highlighted by the final performance, choreographed by Raimund Hoghe. Hoghe crosses over from the earlier generation of choreographers – he was for many years, dramaturge for Pina Bausch – but if his latest work, performed by the choreographer and five other performers, is any indication, he shares little with his mentor besides the propensity for works of challenging duration. ‘Bolero Variations’ consisted of two and a half hours of slow walking. Unlike many in the audience, I returned after half-time, fearing that the choreographer might pull off some surprising coup-de-theatre which – I might hear later from those who stayed – made the whole excruciating experience worthwhile. My instincts were good, except that the anticipated revelation – accompanied, after umpteen quixotic variations, by Ravel’s original – consisted of the bare-torsoed dancers, hunched on the spot, circling slowly on their knees. The fact that this particular posture exposed fully the irregular geography of Hoghe’s hunchbacked spine, didn’t offer the requisite epiphany necessary to redeem the previous two hours.
What on earth is going on here? Why would choreographers abandon the very medium that defines their art? Or why do composers, video-artists, performance artists, insist on calling themselves choreographers and demand that their work be programmed in dance festivals?
One answer is that European dance has, for about a decade now, been going through a certain crisis of identity. Where to now? After Tanztheater, and after the post-modern virtuosity of the contact/release/improv dancer-for-hire, what does the new dance and the new dancer look like? Choreographers who consider it important to ask questions about the very nature of their art form are putting dance through a cross-examination. When trying to ascertain whether the accused is guilty or innocent, tough questions need to be asked.
One of the things that European dance has questioned is the immediate identification of dance with the relentless drive of movement. As Andre Lepecki asks in his aptly named survey of the current scene, Exhausting Dance, “Why then this obsessive concern with the display of moving bodies, this demand that dance be in a state of agitation?” (Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. Routledge, New York 2006. p.3.).
If not all choreographers buy into Lepecki characterisation of movement as merely a modernist obsession that we need to ‘move’ beyond, then there does seem to be a general agreement amongst many theory-enhanced choreographers that the ardent, agile and, lets face it, aggressive physicality of the trained dancer, is implicated in – and guilty by association with – the sexualised consumerism of the market economy, the relentless kinetic drive of global capitalism and the passionate and determined strength of the industrial/military complex. Dance = movement, is an equation that many European contemporary choreographers would like, at the very least, to put in brackets for a while. Let’s see what dance might mean, they ask, if we resist the imperative to always be on the move.
Well, who can argue with the acuity of this critique and the rigour of the response? A wholesale rejection of movement might just be the right form of detox that dance needs. One might ask why language and video, which are present in abundance in many of these performances, are any less contaminated by association with the global market, any less guilty of the seductive power attributed to the moving body, but the possibility of radically critiquing the medium at the heart of dance seems insightful, important and exciting and frightening at the same time. What if we can’t justify many of the disciplining and exclusive practices that we associate with elite virtuosic performance? What would the art of movement look like, how would we sell it, if we refrained from many of the sexualised, youth-focused images? How is the moving body complicit with regimes of power and violence?
Surely these questions need to be asked, and I believe that many valuable and important dance works will emerge from of the asking. They cannot be answered however, by negating movement, by handing the territory, so to speak, over to the enemy. Yes movement is a grubby medium, but what isn’t? Video is used to promote everything from pornography to political parties. Concentration camp commanders listened to Bach in the evening and executed thousands the next day. We live in a terribly imperfect world in which all forms of communication are compromised, all institutions tainted, all knowledge partial and provisional.
Some of the choreographers offering work at Tanzplattform were endeavouring to make historical and political points – the Neuertanz concert was staged as though it might be a radio broadcast to troops in Iraq – but having surrendered what one might consider their most eloquent medium, the moving human body, many of these political manoeuvres seemed sterile and tokenistic. Any consideration of the politics of movement must begin with a certain fascination with movement in the first place. The most successful piece at Tanzplattform, ‘Maybe Forever’ by Meg Stuart and Philipp Gehmacher, intrigued because in this collaborative piece between a mover and a non-mover, Meg Stuart – a mover if she is anything at all – was the one who gave most away. Her performance, like a caged animal seeking release, was largely responsible for the muted power the piece conveyed. Through restraint and containment, rather than outright rejection, movement was still the currency of transaction.
We must listen to the important critique that is being levelled at the way the medium of movement and the image of the moving body are being used by forces that promote injustice or jeopardize human freedom, but a significant response seems to me to entail getting in, boots and all, and making a critique of movement, from the perspective of movement, not from the perspective of some realm of imagined purity outside movement.
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