“Conglomerates”
DANCE DRAMTATURGY & DRAMATURGY OF THE BODY
Dramaturgy - a toolbox for [condensed] impossibilities
Bettina Milz
1.
During the last few years the field of dance dramaturgy has gained more and more significance in dance practice, but the number of choreographers who concede themselves the continuous work with experts of theory is still much too low. The most exciting choreographers and their companies have worked with dramaturges, such as Pina Bausch, William Forsythe, Meg Stuart or Xavier le Roy – speaking of the European, even German context. But for most independent companies - and this is still basically the frame for exciting and experimental contemporary dance today – it is a luxury to have a partner in theory. Finally in the field of modern ballet until recently almost no company in Germany would take into consideration the function and necessity of a dramaturge.
I have to confess that I am a long-term admirer of Israeli artists in theatre and dance, such as Ohad Naharin or Yasmin Godder for the younger generation. But for this lecture I will mainly focus on three artists that I could follow in Germany over the last 10 – 25 years: The Company NEUER TANZ under the former co-direction of Wanda Golonka and VA Wölfl, who is now head of the company as visual artist; on William Forsythe and the Frankfurt Ballet, now TheForsytheCompany, who opened up the world of ballet dance for me and still is the most exciting choreographer, speaking of course from my very personal perspective. And finally Xavier Le Roy who represents the movement of so called “conceptual dance”, a term which is leading audiences, discussions and reception in a pointless and wrong direction. I will come back to this later.
2.
One of the main reasons for the new need for dramaturgy in dance is probably the shift towards complex artworks on stage and even off stage – in museums, landscapes, urban surroundings,- that with a focus on the body can no longer be easily framed by the term “dance”. Often fragmented performance structures on stage, strange conglomerates of bodies and all kinds of rather trans- than interdisciplinary uses of the different parameters of theatre, such as space, text, light, rhythm, projections, emotions, sound, music and silence etc. create a unique field of art.
The performance texts that arise from these artistic strategies are as complex and diverse as the artworks themselves. Still the main difference between contemporary dance and other performing arts like classical ballet, opera, musical theatre or drama is the complete lack of a written score, a text, based on words or notes. So the performance text is not “on top” but rather a not easily captured structure itself. Whereas classical ballet still mainly could refer to a libretto or at least a score, contemporary dance moved into an empty space. The body, questioned as a field of wisdom, as a carrier of a knowledge, as a battlefield or a fragmented entity itself, even as a multiple construction, this body took a central position. And it was not anymore an instrument to be trained and enabled to express an idea. The body rather became a territory of research itself. At the same time dance developed as a critical practice within the performing arts.
3.
After a period of now about 40 years of Tanztheater, modern and post modern dance, modern ballet, Butoh in Japan or recently conceptual dance, after vertiginous structures and deconstructions there is a growing need to form theory out of the no-man’s-land. This might be one of the reasons why choreographers increasingly seek the exchange with theorists – they may be dramaturgs, they may also be architects, sociologists, philosophers or more recently media artists.
And at the same time there is a need for new forms of narration on stage. Too long and too often fragmentation, montage, free association and diffuse clouds of meaning have confronted the audience with repeated questions and with the absence of content. I am not talking of irritation: we want dance to produce unknown images or to question the images of the body we are surrounded by in media, publicity, films, everyday life. We want to be irritated, surprised.
The boom of Tanztheater produced again and again the topics of power between men and women and the relation of private and political forces. More abstract dance works risked to return into virtuosity and quiet superficial use of trendy patterns, just by means of different movements, hopefully reaching a young and dynamique audience.
But what kind of narration can be developed, which stories do we tell? How are personal biography and social, political issues transformed on stage? What tools of composition can be developed?
Contemporary dance has seen the development of highly diverse working methods, aesthetic forms and performance structures. Performances are based on particular concepts and principles of composition which are individually structured by each artist. Even the words “dance”, “performance” have no clear frame any more, maybe never had.
Mainly when we use the word TANZ / DANCE – at least in Europe – today, it has the meaning of contemporary dance. When I try to define the word “contemporary” for me it means that artists try to reflect in their work personal and social, political and private experience, trying to find a not yet known form for what they are discovering and what is moving them in both senses of the word.
4.
Rather than asking for the dramaturg, the need is to create new forms and processes of dramaturgy in dance.
Dramaturgs today move in a field full of contradictions and diverging needs. In practice they are the first observers of a performance in the making; they are mirror and corrective, presenters, producers and authors of texts for programs or marketing publications, sometimes even mainly texts to apply for funding. They are moderators in a complex process of production between a team of artists and an institution, or rather a network of producers and co-producers. They are translators in many areas, mediators, hosts and curators.
What is the most important function we need dramaturgs to fulfil in dance today, or maybe rather the process of dramaturgy?
How do you implant a critical discourse when devising material and content in collaboration with a collective of artists?
And even going more far: Is the field of dance a chance to establish new forms of dramaturgy, that break with the idea of “the dramaturg” by destroying the idea of connecting this critical discourse every work of art is accompanied by to ONE intellectual? Rather giving this discourse back into the collective of dancers, visual artists and other specialists in form of a daily work of rehearsals, trainings, reflections?
And an important question, which is not at all solved, is what should be the special quality and qualification of dramaturgs in dance? Should they be trained as dancers or choreographers to be able to discuss questions of composition? Should they be specialized in dance or could it be helpful just to have a reflecting position in the process, a philosopher or sociologist, an expert of literature, music or dance, a specialist for urban development?
I will try to describe some of these diverging needs, looking at the diverse fields of the theatre production process; and looking at the work of a few choreographers and companies I really admire.
What are the principles of composition in contemporary dance today?
5.
Dance has not only recently had the unique character of a laboratory for new forms of performing arts. As we all know, at the beginning of the last century, starting around the 1920ies, with artists like Loie Fuller, Rudolf von Laban, Mary Wigman, Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Oskar Schlemmer and the Bauhaus in Germany, ”DANCE” was developing out of diverse facts, such as the capacity of language being doubted and psychoanalysis opening up a new discourse also for the arts. The body as a field of contradictions, paradoxes, as “the other” and as such the catalyst of modern, later post-modern, post-dramatic and postpost-dramatic theatre moved more and more into the centre of discourse. The body in the terms of Jaques Derrida: „Vom Theater ist daher zu sagen, was man vom Körper sagt.“ The body, influencing our thoughts and longings, became a field of research. And very soon became a field of ideological misuse. Quite soon two general trajectories can be discovered. With Laban, Schlemmer, Kurt Joos, with artists like Jaques Dalcroze, Apia or Craig this body was a field of modern research on the relation between subject, space and time. Reflecting what was happening in science, the categories of space and time started to move, they became uncertain and no longer reliable as clear points of orientation. Machines and technical revolutions started to influence art. Perception, one’s own position, the extension of bodies in space and the possibilities to analyse movement became topics of analysis undertaken by artists. Those artists mainly came into conflict with the fascist system, they had to emigrate and it took until about 1960 for this development to be continued in the theatre.
The work of Kurt Jooss for example, building up the Folkwang Schule at Essen as a central place for new experiments between dance and all kind of other arts like music, space, literature was only continued by the work of Pina Bausch starting in the 60 / 70th of the 20th century.
So recently – in the last 10 - 100 years – dance was this laboratory for new interdisciplinary art forms, merging all kind of arts like New Media, Fine Arts, New Music, Live Electronics or architecture. More and more site-specific works, installations and city projects are developed. The work with simultaneous perception and multiple perspectives replaces a linear, sequential narrative. At the same time dance has and always had to fight to be accepted as art. Developments in the fine arts and in the performing arts are quite different, u.a. concerning the material…. (has to be finished)
What are the tools for a contemporary dramaturgy in dance?
What could be said about the specific needs of dance dramaturgy?
Probably there is no general answer. There is no general answer at all, neither for the methods of dramaturgy in dance, nor for the working methods of one choreographer. Each performance and the preceding process of work, depending on the material it is based on, and on the handling of this material, has its own cosmos of research and cooperation, of experience and movement into a labyrinth of questions.
So I have no answer to this. But I think it would be helpful to have real production-dramaturgs, that jump in as many parts of the process as possible, sometimes even take part in the training, watching rehearsals, moving in and out. Keeping alive the intellectual process of work.
On the base of three examples I will try to point out three issues
Examples:
Xavier le Roy, “Self Unfinished” (1998)
Excerpts Neuer Tanz, “12 / … im linken Rückspiegel auf dem Parkplatz von Woolworth” (2007)
Excepts of William Forsythe “Three atmospheric studies” (2004/5), “Improvisation Technologies” (2003)
Spoken Comments to the videos:
I chose those three examples as outstanding works of art, works that really interest me – and hopefully you – and that are radical research projects.
To explain my position: The company I worked with as a dramaturg, mainly seeking for the definition of dramaturgy in dance, was NEUER TANZ. The work of William Forsythe, I have followed since “Gänge” in 1983. And the incredible phenomenon about him is, that he never stops to surprise with radically new directions of performance and research.
Finally Xavier Le Roy was one of the biggest irritations for me, surprising by the way he threw himself to the edge, the edge of body images, the end of RE-PRESENTATION.
Xavier Le Roy took a unique role in contemporary dance, starting in the 90th, by breaking radically with the idea of virtuosity in dance. While, within the 80th and early 90th, dangerous physical actions - rolling, falling, just running - appeared as new forms, suddenly the body refused to be young and strong. Similar to the work of Meg Stuart, Le Roy puts the body into fragments, recombines the pieces and by this creates – or rather makes appear – the unknown territory of the real for moments. The body is no text, it is surrounded by texts, but refuses to be “only” readable. It’s rather another kind of brain, with memory, ideas, thoughts, desires.
So what the so called “conceptual dance” is mainly radically trying to find is an idea of the body beside the images media, commercials, the market is producing. Le Roys dramaturg, his “TWIN” (Hegemann) here was a photo artist, he himself was a molecular biologist before transferring his research object into dance.
NEUER TANZ
The second radical way to search by means of contemporary dance that I want to know about is the ensemble NEUER TANZ, directed by the visual artist VA Wölfl. I show an expert of the last piece, 2008. The journalist Elisabeth Nehring wrote for Deutschlandradio Kultur on
“2/... in the right rear-view mirror in the car park at Woolworths’ …
“2/... im linken Rückspiegel auf dem Parkplatz von Woolworth:“
“Te most complex, many-sided and intelligent piece … is not so much dance theatre as choreographed concert. The performers on stage, amidst much technical equipment, remain relatively immobile at their keyboards and electric guitars. Rather, they sing schmaltzy pop songs or lambaste the audience’s ears with jingles, slogans from the commercials and radio teasers. Wandering over the fourth wall through the course of the hundred-minute performance, is a curtain of skeletons, a memento-mori element whose meaning unfolds only gradually. This piece is about war, or rather, about the media exploitation of war. An entertainment industry is unmasked that does not stop at generating bad news as part of the entertainment programme; however, instead of wagging a politically correct moral finger, VA Wölfl, turns and switches their method round into its opposite. Where the entertainment industry sets to with speed, dynamism and punch-line turns of phrase, Wölfl places his trust in a precise calculation of slowness, of repetitions and inertia – and in his choreography, these coalesce into a monstrous coldness and brutality that is revealed as the other side of the brutality of the media. [Wölfl’s production is assiduously styled throughout and a piece of precision crafting in the extreme; but this perfectionism of form is, in fact, a mainstay of the content. For, only because the form is so perfect, the outer course of events so scrupulously scripted, can intense statements of subject-matter come about.]