Bewitched: Pauwels and Wigman

Mary Wigman’s Witch Dance (1914/1926) is perhaps the most famous dance solo no one has seen—at least not in its entirety. A short clip of the beginning of the artist’s second version of the piece, made in 1926 and featuring the addition of a Noh mask and highly percussive music (Wigman first danced the solo in silence), exists on YouTube. One certainly gets a sense in watching the excerpt of the bewitching aura and gestural expressiveness that made Wigman, and this signature dance, such a captivating solo artist and a leading practitioner of Weimer-era Ausdruckstanz, or “expressive dance.” However, what the piece looked like in its entirety per force remains incomplete.

Not that this has prevented generations of dancers, using contemporary newspaper accounts and the archival research of scores of dance scholars, from attempting to reconstruct and/or reimagine the work. Belgium’s Pedro Pauwels is the latest. Working with fellow choreographers Carlotta Ikeda, Josef Nadj, Robyn Orlin, and Jérôme Thomas, Pauwels asked his collaborators to use Wigman’s Witch Dance as a basis for delving “into the roles of rhythm, energy and movement when dedicated to bewitching, spells and passion” and, in the process, “to build their choreographic vision of today’s sorcerer or sorceress.” The result is Sors, which opened The Dance Centre’s 2013-14 Global Dance Connections series last night.

As interpreted by Pauwels, the piece is divided into five parts, beginning with a fairly faithful recreation of the clip of Wigman posted to YouTube. Masked and seated on the floor, Pauwels claws at the air with his arms and pushes his bent legs to the ground, just as Wigman does. But, not least because of the absence of the familiar percussive music, this opening feels less like an orienting homage than a decidedly disorienting ghosting, with Pauwels here (and throughout the piece as a whole) conjuring a version of the uncanny that is as much about emphasizing unlikeness as likeness. This perhaps helps to explain the next section, in which Pauwels rolls about the floor with his head partly inside a brass bell, a prop I took as less a mimetic reference to a witch’s pointy hat than a Labanesque eukinetic allusion to the body’s internal resonances (more on Laban below). In the third movement Pauwels is mostly vertical, darting diagonally across the stage with outstretched arms in a long grey wrap that he wears back to front, and reminding us why, at least in her first tour of America, Wigman was both hailed as the next and panned as a derivative Isadora Duncan.

The fourth section of the work is the longest and, from my point of view, most interesting. It begins with Pauwels, now stripped to his underwear and outfitted with a body mic, back seated on the floor à la Wigman, as at the outset of the piece. However, he is also now in possession of an electric toothbrush, which he proceeds to use, and which we hear amplified via his mic. Soon he is brushing not just his teeth, but other parts of his body: the inside of his nose, his legs and feet, his armpits, his crotch. This purification ritual precedes—and then proceeds along with—a spoken-word bit in which Pauwels first channels Wigman’s voice by quoting from her letters and then her very bodily being by calling for assistance from the audience and a stagehand named Hans to aid him in his cross-gendered transformation, donning lipstick, pantyhose, and high heels and shimmying briefly to some hip-hop coming from an audience member’s iPod. Lithe and sexy, the feminine Pauwels is certainly bewitching. However, the references to Laban, the Nazis, and the 1936 Olympics in his recitation of Wigman’s correspondence are an important reminder that the poetics of Wigman’s dance sorcery are necessarily shadowed by politics, with her pioneering explorations of individual bodily expression always needing to be historicized in terms of the social movements out of which they emerged, and towards which they were conscripted.

And, so, because I have been doing some research of my own into this particular period of dance history, permit me to open a long contextual parenthesis:

As avant-garde origin myths go, one cannot get much better than Wigman, in the summer of 1913, climbing up Monte Verità in Ascona, Switzerland in search of a visionary artist whom she had heard held similarly radical ideas about movement. What Wigman and Rudolf von Laban shared was an antipathy toward the traditional dance vocabulary inherited from ballet, folk dance, and pantomime, and that as an expressive form was always subservient to music. Rather, they were both interested in the body as the primary instrument of movement and in developing dance that emerged directly and organically from the body’s everyday dynamic and rhythmic relationships with space. However, beyond this common core principle, Laban’s and Wigman’s theories were quite different, not least in terms of how each characterized the relationship between motion and emotion. For Laban, movement was emotion, and in his theories of space harmony (choreutics) and effort (eukinetics) he would attach the names of different affects (sadness, joy, anger) to simple bodily movements and positionings. This informed his idea of movement choirs, mass groupings of people, most without professional dance training, who could be taught basic combinations of everyday movement that they would then repeat in unison, transmitting rhythmically and kinesthetically the set of affects attached to that movement.

By contrast, Wigman insisted that movement expressed emotion, and her early solo practice explored movement patterns and gestures that evoked individual felt experiences and interior states of being, and on attuning those “inmost feelings to the mood of our time” (The Mary Wigman Book, 107). This also explains why Wigman, unlike Laban, remained wary of conscripting movement to other interpretive ends, as in the theatre. Writing in 1927, she distinguished the pure movement of her “absolute dance” from the larger “’scenic’ event” and “total” synthesis of expressive forms that characterized what Laban first called “stage dance [Tanzbühne]” and then Kurt Jooss (who had replaced Wigman as Laban’s disciple) termed dance-theatre (Tanztheater). “The absolute dance … does not represent, it is,” Wigman claimed, before positing her own version of kinesthetic empathy: “its effect on the spectator who is invited to experience the dancer’s experience is on a mental-motoric level, exciting and moving” (The Mary Wigman Book, 108-109).

Nevertheless, Laban’s and Wigman’s aesthetic philosophies were sufficiently allied as to attract mutual notice by the Nazis, whose theories of Aryan racial superiority were buttressed by the gymnastics and body culture movements then proliferating in Germany, and who were of course equally adept at employing mass choreographed movement and stylized gestures to solicit collective emotional identification with their cause. Even before the Nazis officially came to power Jooss had made his own political position clear, creating his most famous piece, The Green Table (1932); this exemplary early work of dance-theatre is an explicitly anti-war ballet, anticipating Brecht’s Mother Courage in using bold costumes, masks, original music, and a libretto by Jooss, alongside expressionistic choreography developed over seven episodic scenes, to allegorize the horrors of armed combat. Hounded to fire the Jewish members of his company, including his composer, Frederik Cohen, Jooss decided to decamp Germany for Holland soon after returning from The Green Table’s premiere in Paris, eventually setting up a new school in England.

However, Laban and Wigman equivocated (whether naively or opportunistically, depends on one’s perspective). Both accepted the patronage of the Nazi Party, and both bowed to pressure to dismiss Jewish company members or students, before separately running afoul of Josef Goebbels over their participation in the 1936 Olympic opening ceremonies, ironically a stage ideally suited (as it continues to be) to the transmission of affect through mass movement. Yet what was to have been Laban’s grandest movement choir, Vom Tauwind und der neuen Freude (featuring 1000 amateur dancers from across Germany), was scuttled after Goebbels deemed the dress rehearsal insufficiently adulatory of Nazi ideology. This made inevitable Laban’s eventual departure from Germany, first to Paris and then, with Jooss’s aid, to England. As for Wigman, she displeased party officials by demurring on a commission celebrating the leadership of Hitler, though she was allowed to contribute another group piece, Totenklage, instead, and she continued to teach, first at her school in Dresden, then in Leipzig, until the end of the war.

Wigman’s career extended past the war, with her notably creating a version of Le sacre de printemps in 1957 that the dance scholar Susan Manning sees as having an influence on Pina Bausch’s own take on the Stravinsky libretto 18 years later (see Susan Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon: Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman, 245). However, Ausdruckstanz’s transformation into Tanztheater in post-war Germany necessarily involved a careful negotiation on the part of choreographers like Bausch and Reinhild Hoffmann (who both studied with Jooss) with expressionist forebears like Wigman, emphasizing the universality of German dance-theatre’s bodily affects at the expense of its local political history.

This, finally, brings me back to Pauwels’ Sors, and its final section. It begins with Pauwels, now once again fully clothed and entering upstage right with his back to us, magically unfurling a seemingly endless length of sheer plastic from what at first appears to be his mouth but was no doubt the top of his shirt. Lifting and twirling and running with and rising and falling underneath the sheet, Pauwels weaves a gorgeous final visual spell that is certainly vivid and memorable in its emotional expressivity. However, I couldn’t help thinking it also worked to contain and bracket off the politics of the preceding section.

P.

VIFF

Went to a fabulous Saturday morning screening at this year's Vancouver International Film Festival. The film was First Position, a documentary by Bess Kargman about six young ballet dancers ranging in ages from 9-17 preparing for the finals of the Youth America Grand Prix, an elite competition that awards prizes in various age categories, but also, for the older dancers, scholarships at some of the finest schools around the world, and/or contracts at professional companies.

The lead-up to the finals and, before them, each dancer's individual regional semi-final, is--in the best tradition of similar performance documentaries--edge-of-the-seat gripping. However, what sets Kargman's film apart is not just her obvious empathy for each of the young personalities at the heart of this work, but her commitment to documenting the tremendous sacrifices they and their families are prepared to make in order to achieve their goals. And, mercifully in that respect, this is a rare example where all of the storylines have a happy ending.

Not so for the residents of the famous artist studios above Carnegie Hall, who are the subject of Josef "Birdman" Astor's Lost Bohemia, and whose unsuccessful battle to stave off eviction by corporate managers of the performance space below in search of extra office space ends up being a searing indictment of New York's larger willful neglect of its cultural past: in this case, both Andrew Carnegie's original vision for the building he endowed, and the collective artistic legacy of all the famous residents who have lived and worked and studied in its spaces.

One of those residents was Bill Cunningham, the New York Times photographer who was the subject of last year's wonderful documentary Bill Cunningham's New York. Seeing Astor's film this past Monday at VIFF was a perfect bookend to the earlier film, because it fleshes out the Carnegie relocation drama in greater depth, as well as letting some of the personalities we meet in the Cunningham film (including the incomparable Duchess) take centre stage in their own right.

Together with Pina this past Wednesday, that brings the grand total of attended screenings at this 30th anniversary edition of VIFF to three--a far cry from my original ambitions to buy a matinee pass this year and see as much as possible. I do hope to get to Alan Bennett and the Habit of Art tomorrow, a behind-the-scenes look at the staging of Bennett's play about a fictional encounter between W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten, which I saw at the National Theatre in London in May 2010, and which I briefly blogged about here.

But I might not get to blog about the film, as we're off early next week for another trip to London (and Frankfurt and Paris and NYC). Lots of performance and culture are on the agenda (as well as a couple of research archives), and I will have my new iPad with me. However, given all the connectivity issues I've had to deal with in the past when traveling in Europe (where it's hard to find free WiFi), and the general pressure of finding time in the day to blog, I may take a bit of a hiatus from posting, saving a global summary of the performance highlights for when I return to Vancouver in mid-November.

Fair warning to the two or three people who might actually follow this blog with any regularity.

P.

Re-Membering Pina

Yesterday afternoon Richard and I attended a sold-out screening of Pina, Wim Wenders' 3D homage to the dance-theatre legacy of Pina Bausch. The film was playing just up the street at the Park as part of a special presentation by this year's Vancouver International Film Festival.

Before her untimely death in 2009, Bausch--from her nowheresville outpost at the state theatre in Wuppertal, an industrial town in northwestern Germany--revolutionized contemporary dance: in part by jettisoning completely the core principles of dance composition; by forging a company that was as much a family as it was a working collective; and by making an emotional connection with her audiences (whether positive or negative) central to her aesthetic. Let me explain a little better what I mean by these three prongs by reproducing here the first three paragraphs of an essay I recently completed on Bausch and her contributions to contemporary dance-theatre:

When, soon after taking over the directorship of Tanztheater Wuppertal in 1973, Pina Bausch famously commented that she was less interested in how people moved than in what moved them, she was first and foremost announcing her own choreographic break with conventional dance composition as the virtuosic arrangement and execution of steps. Yet she was also reciprocally hailing audience members whose engagements with dance are deeply felt, but who may not be able to articulate precisely what about the movement they have watched has so transported (or alienated) them. In both instances the different limits placed upon access to or deployment of a technical dance vocabulary to say all there is to say in or of a given work is offset by a shared emotional vocabulary, one that is still profoundly, viscerally, corporeal, but that refuses to abstract, divide between, or pit against the other, performers’ and audience members’ subjective experiences of the work. Thus, starting in the late 1970s, with works like Blaubart (1977) and Kontakthof (1978), Bausch developed a new rehearsal process, one roughly akin to the emotional memory exercises of a Stanislavski or a Strasberg. That is, she threw away her dancers’ safety net of having movement patterns set directly upon their bodies, and asked them instead to first respond as an ensemble to a series of questions or prompts that could cover everything from personal relationships, memories, and moods to social situations, customs, and behaviors. The dancers’ responses might involve or incorporate movement, but just as frequently they took the form of stories told, or of images seized upon, or of objects proffered. These elements, some jettisoned, others refined and expanded, would then function as the basic building blocks for the piece, its emotional architecture. Indeed, the affective force of Bausch’s dance-theatre comes as much from its reveling in theatrical expressiveness—scenography and design, costumes, music and sound, spoken text—as it does from its eschewing of some of the more repressive canons of dance.

This dialectic demands as much of an emotional investment from Bausch’s audience as it does from her performers. One cannot sit in passive anticipation of pretty steps at a Bausch premiere. Rather, in often simultaneous scenes of serial repetition one can expect to be assaulted by an equally serial (and often simultaneous) set of affects—shame, joy, anger, disgust, hate, love, fear, pity, tenderness—as they replay, in particular, a social history of the gendered body. That body, Bausch makes clear, is always at the (physical) mercy of the other; but the vulnerability, she also suggests, is shared. And so in her work Bausch is relentless in soliciting our attention and awareness not just of the bodies and bodily behavior on stage, but of our own. Again, this happens mostly on an emotive rather than a cognitive plane. Even when we cannot make sense of Bausch’s work, Norbert Servos claims, we still maintain a “’sense connection’” to it. Even when we cannot explain our response to a given piece or sequence, we are still responding. In this way, as Servos also suggests, the boundary between rehearsal and performance dissolves, and just as the performers lay bare their creative process on stage, so must we in the audience give up something of ourselves (energy, autonomy, objectivity, distance) in our reception of it. It is an intensely co-dependent relationship, to say the least. In the world of contemporary dance, one tends either to love Bausch’s work or to hate it. One rarely remains indifferent. And just as the fierce loyalty Bausch inspired in her dancers has left them understandably bereft in the wake of her sudden death in 2009, so have many of her fans been plunged into a prolonged period of mourning.

How is it that I have come to share in this grief? I, who have only ever experienced Bausch’s work via video or grainy YouTube clips or the thick description of print reviews and criticism—why have I been so affected by her death? And in ways that, at least to me, far exceed the more temporary and vicarious forms of mourning one is wont to perform upon the passing of a great artist? These questions are what initially motivated the writing of my essay on Bausch and dance-theatre as a form, and they are also ones I took with me into yesterday’s film.

I am unquestionably biased, but I do honestly think that Wenders has crafted an exemplary tribute to Bausch, one that manages simultaneously to capture and document some of her most iconic works and, as crucially, to allow the performers who danced them to express (in words and in movement) the range and intensity of their feelings for their lost mentor. Those performers span virtually the entirety of Bausch’s 35 years in Wuppertal, with veterans like Meryl Tankard, Josephine Anne Endicott, and Dominique Mercy offering up their testimonials and dancing some of their signature roles (including Mercy in his tutu from Nelken) alongside the younger, newer members of the company, a polyglot rainbow united in their love for Bausch and their total immersion in her movement vocabulary. It’s worth noting, in this regard, that Bausch’s death actually came in the middle of filming, and so the tone of the work obviously changed. Wenders’ unifying conceit between dance excerpts is to shoot a close-up head shot of each of the featured dancers, with their words about Bausch (spoken in their native language) heard in voice-over and subtitled accordingly.

But it is the dance that takes centre stage, made fleshly and impossibly intimate thanks to the 3D technology. Wenders' use of 3D never feels gimmicky or intrusive. Rather he uses it in the same way that he uses various exterior spaces in and around Wuppertal as backdrops: to make Bausch’s choreography pop, to leap off the screen and grab hold of us kinaesthetically—in other words, to move us (physically and emotionally), as the best live dance is meant to do. In this regard, the filmie in me was surprised at just how restrained some of Wenders’ shot-making was. In pieces like Vollmond, where the dancers famously frolic in ankle-deep water and leap from a giant rock stage left, there are lots of pans and quick edits, and the drops of water from when the dancers kick it or throw it seem to land in our laps. Yet in the classic chamber work Café Müller, Wenders is quite content for his camera to remain static for long periods, letting us take in that work’s famous chair-cluttered mise-en-scène. And in the opening “chorus line” from Kontakthof (which I was pleased to see featured not only in its professional Wuppertal company version, but also those that Bausch set on senior citizens and teenagers from the community), Wenders shoots in long shot, so that we actually see the seats from the intradiagetic auditorium, an uncanny visual experience in 3D, as those seats necessarily start to merge with the those in the Park theatre, to the point where I couldn’t tell at times whether movement in the rows was happening onscreen or off.

I can’t possibly do justice to all of the works from the Bausch repertoire featured in the film, but I will say that it was wonderful that Wenders begins with a big long excerpt from Bausch’s Rite of Spring. This work, from 1975, was the last one that Bausch created in a “classically balletic” style, but also announced a clear shift in her aesthetic: the peaty soil on the stage over which the dancers move; the explicitly gendered politics of the work; the emotional demands it places on performers and audience members alike. Wenders’ film traffics in those demands as well, not least in those film-within-a-film sequences when he brings both groups together to watch ghostly apparitions of Bausch dancing and creating.

I can think of no greater memorial to the woman and her work.

P.

Gina and Pina

Maybe it's because I have just been writing about her, but O Vertigo's La chambre blanche, which closed DanceHouse's third season in spectacular fashion last night at the Playhouse, reminded me of Pina Bausch: both aesthetically in terms of its mixing of dance and theatre; and thematically in its exploration of various states of confinement, not least those that subtend oppressive and antagonistic gender roles.

Originally created by O Vertigo Artistic Director Ginette Laurin in 1992, La chambre blanche underwent a complete choreographic revisioning in 2008. One thing that remained consistent, however, was the piece's iconic set, which, like Bausch's famously memorable mise-en-scènes, establishes the overall expressive tone and at once enables and constrains the movement patterns that will be explored within it. In the case of Laurin's work, the set is single room of a turn-of-the-century asylum or sanatorium, complete with high concrete walls, black and white tiled floor, ceiling-level windows, floor-level heating grates, and a single doorway upstage centre that opens onto a corridor containing a working faucet and a stack of buckets.

The dancer-inmates (6 women and 3 men) enter, clad only in white underwear and black street shoes. One of the men begins a sequence of movements near one of the women, who remains motionless and unflinching as he proceeds to cut, jab, and thrust at the air immediately around her, a series of potentially violent blows clearly directed toward her vulnerable and exposed body, but also just as clearly failing to find their target. And, indeed, it is the woman who finally initiates contact, blocking one of the man's would-be punches (precisely cued to Nicolas Bernier and Jacques Poulin-Denis' pulsating music) with her hand, which is the signal for the other dancers, until then lying still on the floor, to join in the fray.

And join in they do, walking, running, jumping, spinning, falling, crawling, sliding, and colliding in patterns that physicalize both the compulsive repetition and the resignation that is tied (quite literally) to the spatial and social extremity of their situation: bound within and to this enclosed and confining room and, as a necessary but perhaps unwelcome consequence, to each other. As such, the group contact between the dancers throughout La chambre blanche alternates and escalates (often quite rapidly and dramatically) between the twin poles of tenderness and aggression: one dancer is helped to scale the walls to look out one of the windows, while others are pinned against them; bodies supported and embraced one moment just as quickly get shoved aside or deliberately knocked down.

And in all of this, exhaustion provides no means of escape. The pace of this piece is as relentless as its emotional assault. Pauses are worked in to the choreography to allow dancers to switch into a version of black evening dress, don bunny masks (shades of The Shining?) and, in the case of the women, to slip on pointe shoes; but otherwise quiet, private moments, where the dancers can retreat from the intensity of the group, are few and far between. One exception occurs when different dancers break off from the physical hurly-burly to lean against and whisper into either of the miked heating grates, their amplified voices seeking to express fragments of their personal narratives that have otherwise been subsumed by the dizzying group movement. But even these snatches of individual lucidity and attempted self-differentiation eventually give way to the primal sounds of the group: screams, moans, groans, pants, giggles, laughs, and screeches replace intelligible--and individuated--speech as the evening wears on.

La chambre blanche ends with an image both gorgeous and haunting: one of the women dancers, clad in a white bodice-cum-straight jacket, flits on pointe centre-stage, the long sleeves of the jacket tucked into chinks in the asylum walls on either side of her. Laurin has stated that she first created the piece as a reaction to Marc Lépine's 1989 murder of 14 women at Montreal's École Polytechnique. In its reimagining for contemporary audiences the work has necessarily taken on additional cultural meanings and references (not least, as Carolyn suggested to me afterward, Abu Ghraib); however, this closing presentation of a defenseless, vulnerable, objectified, and institutionally immobilized woman still retains its Bauschian power.

P.