“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.
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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
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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
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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
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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 postpostdramatic 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
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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 sitespecific 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
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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)
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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
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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.]
The most special about the collective process of dramaturgy of the
company is, that the work on each piece is combined and essentially
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determined by learning: learning new things like singing and playing an
instrument, another time drumming, Jodeln or other cultural techniques.
And as well, the artistic work just goes on every day in the atelier, no
matter if its published or not.
WILLIAM FORSYTHE:
Finally out of the huge artistic work of William Forsythe I will just pick out
a choreography, that was the most intense moment of theatre for me in
the last years. In terms of dramaturgy, you could probably do another
workshop just to find out more about his method. He himself is hungry for
philosophy and developed in the same time a lot of tools to be able to
transform text into three-dimensional-bodies in space and vice versa to
put the thinking and searching with the body into words or with
“improvisation technologies” into a new media tool for communicating and
notating his methods.
I will just point out one tool that was used in “Three atmospheric studies”:
Andreas Breitscheid with Forum Neues Musiktheater of the Staatsoper
Stuttgart developed live electronic tools for body-produced sounds. That
means that the dancers would focus very much on the production of all
kind of sound landscapes by dancing. It’s a very delicate operation on
stage, making visible by the really weird dissimilation and fusion of what
you hear and what you see. For the first time I had the impression, that
new media really became a technique serving the dancer. Forsythe
described in a lecture the long process to arrive there. And the effort to
get out of the repeating of wrong hierarchies: earlier music to dance and
now very often media to dance.
So with means of body, spoken text, the space, the use of different
composition tools in “Three atmospheric studies” Forsythe creates the
complex narration, not at all linear, of a battle – one of the battles
surrounding us, be it 9.11 or other wars.
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Below I will try to describe some of the juxtapositions dramaturgs are
surrounded by in their everyday work:
1.
THE SEARCHER
There are as many different ways of artistic research, too unique to be
compared, as there are ways to start the work on a performance. Still
there is probably always some kind of starting point – maybe just the fact
that a work has been commissioned, maybe an interest in something that
finds a form many years later, there is a text, pictures, a
misunderstanding, a sensation of not being able to handle reality at a
certain point.
The dramaturg can be the one who feeds into this very beginning of the
creative process. Bringing material, pictures, music, texts, all kinds of
little found fragments to build up a rising complexity in the preparation of
the work. Whereas in opera you may ask how and why, in which
landscape you want to perform a baroque masque in 2007, in dance –
understood as contemporary dance - this process is much more open and
for this much more complex and demanding. At least in Europe there is no
structure - as in the a traditional form in Asian dance – that you can relate
to. The field is to be defined and there is only the artists that can do this.
So you collect and research, you start to have experiences together, in the
rehearsal space or outside. You watch the news or read magazines, listen
to music, build relationships to other artists you feel could enrich your
practice. This is a process of allowing for a growing complexity. Knowing
that at a certain point you have to make decisions.
2.
THE TRANSLATOR
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Translation of one material into another, of music and text into
movement, of reading, listening, interpreting, misunderstanding,
describing happens during rehearsals, during performances, by the
collective during the work, by the choreographer, by the spectator, by the
ensemble, by the critics. There are different moods, atmospheres,
irritating moments, elements that make you feel uneasy or very alert.
Negotiations, associations. Bringing you in relation with your present
body, the past and the future.
The dramaturg should be the one who risks to describe what he or she
sees, to stumble, to jump in at the deep end, putting into words what you
could hardly perceive, what is not yet named.
Especially in dance you can probably only find a personal way to do this.
But trying hard just to describe, without the fear of breaking the poetic
structure, can help.
Translation is not meant as a practice of re-presentation. Rather, it is a
process of transformation of experience, a deconstruction of images and
certainty, a separation and de-connecting of sound, image, movement and
emotion. Bodies rather stumble, stutter, fail to say what they meant, don’t
fail as they didn’t mean, rather translate than talk, transform than state,
rather follow a strange need to find something nobody has ever talked
about, nobody has ever realized, nobody would have ever have missed.
But now, as it’s there everybody perceives it.
Bodies are in between. They don’t connect the disciplines; they rather
amalgamate them into something that did not exist before. Strange
conglomerates of bodies, texts, light, objects, colours, spaces, music,
images, emotions, what else? You may hear a movement, see a sound,
listen to darkness.
3.
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THE OUTSIDE EYE
Even more than in the other performing arts, the fact that dance and
performance are unrepeatable and fluid calls for somebody on the outside
working on that translation in both and more directions. Keeping in mind
the transformation, right from the very beginning. Having the courage to
make a cut, to give words to something that has no words yet. Standing
outside means to take the position of the first spectator, as always in
dramaturgy. Does he or she experience what they are supposed to
perceive? Being “the outside eye” in dance also means to move, risking to
get too involved, withdrawing again into a polite and a little colder
distance, putting an opinion on the table, asking for other possibilities,
having doubts.
And as I think spectators are intelligent and appreciate the work that is
done, they will realize if during the rehearsal process there was this
struggle between material, the real world and social, political, private
questions we are concerned about, and the way we construct our work of
art on stage.
4.
THE VISIONARY
In all this creative chaos, complexity and doubt as to the right way, the
dramaturg can be the one to remember the very first ideas. And in doing
so remember the desire that stood at the start of the project, of the work
to be created. So he or she is the one to encourage the choreographer to
follow the road to unknown territory. To go on building a structure, a form
still to be discovered. To trust in strange ideas, try them out, throw them
away, but by doing this, move towards something that will be at a certain
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point the performance, often still to be developed every time you perform
it.
5.
THE HOST
No matter if you work as a freelancer or in the “established” and still quite
well-financed theatre systems, if you are involved in an engaged team you
have – at least as a dramaturg in Germany – in the last years been in a
field of strong juxtapositions. You were in charge of the classical parts of
dramaturgy, at the same time production structurer, structure inventor,
inventor of projects, cook, producer, inventor of marketing strategies,
mediator for all kinds of catastrophes, responsible for budgets, for
contracts, inventor of new forms of interaction with the audience.
It’s time to find the way back to a smarter form of theory. We have to
insist on time for research and discovery. The only chance we have is to
insist on long preparation periods . For the research by the choreographer
/ director, the dancers / performers, for the training, the field of
dramaturgy, the space, the music, for new media. For us as subjects
working on an object, a work of art. Most artist that have fascinated me
describe this state of producing a creative atmosphere and allowing
themselves duration in a distinctive space and time. This attitude towards
work, of insistence, is felt. It is nothing that remains, it must always be
newly defined and move in new directions. It produces the experience of a
distinctive, non-interchangeable work of art.
Conclusion
I want to express my huge regret for not being at Tel Aviv. I really
enjoyed the one day of the conference: to stay in the example of the
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opening, it was like somebody taking you to a very high tree in the forest,
and you realize: it’s a forest and it’s the most beautiful forest you could
ever imagine to be in.
Thanks to Carl Hegmann we have a name to what happens, and it might
be an interesting V-Effekt. For the first time Jossi Wieler and me are
twins, him taking over a role quiet strange, me having to put everything
into a text, not being able to speak. But I know that also his work with
Sergio Morabito in opera is very much about the body, the co-presence of
bodies in theatre and the perception. Gilles Deleuze says in “Cinema 2”,
my favourite dramaturg-philosophy:
“Wir nehmen also normalerweise nur Klischees wahr. Wenn unsere
sensomotorischen Schemata blockiert sind oder zerbrechen, kann jedoch
ein anderer Bildtypus auftauchen: das rein optisch-akustische Bild, das
nur Bild ist, ohne Metapher zu sein, das die Sache als solche, gleichsam
buchstäblich [littéralement] in ihrem Übermaß an Grausamkeit oder
Schönheit, in ihrer radikalen und nicht zu rechtfertigenden Eigenart
hervortreten lässt – denn sie bedarf keiner ‚Rechtfertigung’ mehr, im
guten oder im bösen Sinne...“i
Gilles Deleuze
Thank you.
Bettina Milz
i
Gilles Deleuze, Das Zeit-Bild. Kino 2, Übersetzt von Klaus Englert, Frankfurt am Main 1991, S. 35
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