Tanzkongress 2009

Congresses (and conferences) are always two-sided affairs: in the first place, they promote themselves as committed to creative, theoretical and curatorial innovation; at the same time, though, they are hot-houses of networking, and class-action efforts to gain access to funding streams. So it was at the second edition of TanzKongress, held two weeks ago in Kampagne in Hamburg.

The inaugural TanzKongress took place three years earlier, to celebrate the procurement of an 11 million-Euro national ‘Tanzplan’, or budget allocation, for Germany. Repeating the achievement was on the agenda this time around. Towards this end, the opening night featured no less an eminence than Dr. Norbert Lammert, the President of the German Bundestag (who appeared on stage in the role of the statesman from central casting, and the emissary of power). Lammert’s performance consisted of a crowd-pleasing speech, low on specifics, in which he vocalized his personal happiness that the state’s neglect of dance had been addressed. It would be possible to interpret this sentiment as ominous: the current Tanzplan expires next year, and it still isn’t clear if a new scheme will replace it.

The President is presumably a busy man, so it’s unclear if he stayed for the opening night’s performance. Either way, it would have been a more intelligent bet to schedule a something a little bit more composed, just in case. The actual performance was the world premiere of a work-in-progress entitled Out of Context (due to be completed next year) by the esteemed choreographer Alain Platel, which featured a dozen crack dancers (from the Platel-associated collective les ballet C de la B) working an accomplished routine. The bodies were great – firm and ductile – but the piece was uneven. The piece opened with a man, wearing a kind of cowl, singing unintelligible noises and falling over repeatedly. The first time this happened was shocking, with the sound of the microphone clanging, but doing the same thing ten times seemed dumb. Worse would follow. As Out of Context went on, each of the dancers took turns singing bars of pop songs – Michael Jackson, Madonna – out of tune, into the now standing microphone. What started out as irritating became infuriating. At the end the hooded man asked the audience to hold up their hands, before strangely enquiring – with a baffling sneer – whether anyone wanted to dance with him. No one did.

The next day Platel would be interviewed in the same space, under the intriguing title of ‘The Social Body’ and say a series of things too banal to repeat. The Belgian has done some great things in the past; indeed, he was one of the principle inspirations behind the thriving Brussels dance scene which centred around the school PARTS. But judging by his Tanzkongress showing, the choreographer needs some fresh ideas. The Hamburg work combined a peculiar lack of faith in its own language with an opportunistic attempt to raid some semantic significance from trash culture, like some kind of Zombie dance redux of 1990s British ‘high-art lite’. This does not seem like a fruitful path to follow.

What is really at stake here is the problem of movement-codes and the search for a new one. It’s a question, as Agamben says in The Man Without Content, of particular economies of gestures, opening up new possibilities, while closing down certain others, which have turned into clichés. Without doubt, the dance-world choreographer most aware of these issues is the French enfant terrible (now aging) Jérôme Bel. In his famous 2005 work Pichet Klunchun and myself, Bel negotiated the main clichés with the eponymous Thai classical dancer, effectively putting his research on stage. ‘Now we reveal the genitals,’ Bel tells a resistant Klunchun at point. ‘It’s the final step.’ The joke is a good one. The naked piece seems to be something that every contemporary dance choreographer, even the best ones, have to go through at some point: to wit, Tino Sehgal‘s suspiciously under-documented Dance History at the HAU in 2001, which featured the artist-in-becoming making a rare personal appearance in his work, walking around naked for an hour, and occasionally tugging at his penis.

Along with the similarly structured Veronique Doisneau (2004), which was centred on the eponymous ballet dancer, Pichet Klunchun and myself now seems like the opening gambit of a more epic project: an large-scale attempt to compile, effectively, a biographical history of contemporary dance, told through the lives of its dancers. The latest iteration in this series is Lutz Förster (2009), in my view the best single work of the Tanzkongress.

Lutz Förster. Photograph courtesy: Anna van Kooij

The work starts straightforwardly, with the eponymous subject introducing himself to the audience. Lutz Förster is a 56-year-old dancer. He began studying dance at the age of 21, before working for Pina Bausch, who spotted his talent from a film of students, picking him out as ‘the tall one with the big nose.’ He went to America and danced in José Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane (1949), a modern dance adaptation of Othello set to music by Henry Purcell. Förster played Iago; at Tanzkongress he reproduced the routines, now physically unsteady. Later, he worked for Robert Wilson – ‘a very intelligent and attractive man’ – and, most famously, choreographed a sign-language dance version of Sophie Tucker’s 1928 song ‘The Man I Love’, in commemoration of his deceased best friend. The work ends with the final piece that Förster danced for Bausch, and then with Förster stating how he came to be here: he received an e-mail from Jérôme Bel, asking him if he would like to participate in a dance piece about his life. The audience, some of them with tears in their eyes, delivered a five-minute standing ovation.

Lutz Förster is a testament to the power of simplicity, not to mention humility. All revolutions in art are perhaps returns to simplicity: encrusted mannerisms are stripped-away; the language is purified. At least, this idea seemed strongly evident in the reconstruction (including costumes and stretching to chandelier lighting) of nine short pieces by the modern dancer Mary Wigman. Wigman’s strong, lucid gestures recalled silent movies – in particular D.W. Griffith’s similarly Eastern-facing Intolerance (1916) – while at the same time, in their clarity, conveying a striking emotional resonance. The execution was also striking: from start to finish, the male dancer Fabian Barba, who also conceived the project, didn’t just re-enact Wigman, but was Wigman.

The reigning order of rank between art and theory is for the former to learn from the latter. A Mary Wigman Dance Evening and Lutz Förster both suggest this could be profitably overturned. And, from the opposite direction, aspects of the theoretical component of Tanzkongress also suggested this. On Friday, the Slovenian theorist Bojana Kunst began her lecture promisingly, noting that the first ever film was a film of workers leaving the factory. Cinema starts where the assembly-line ends – it’s a provocative thesis, that unfortunately swiftly degenerated into post-Marxist position statements. For all its facility, I’m no longer sure that this rhetoric isn’t exhausted.

A more fertile line of enquiry was pursued by Kunst’s Swiss colleague Geza Ziemer, a one-time contributor to Florian Schneider‘s ongoing Dictionary of War project, and a professor at the Zurich-based Institute of Theory, outlining some thoughts on complicity. The approach belongs to the same series of underworld art poetics as Irit Rogoff’s influential idea of curation as smuggling, and Hannah Hurzig‘s travelling project the Black Market. (Hurzig was in personal attendance at Kampagne, a space she in fact founded, equipped with her mobile archive.)

‘Basically, I am interested in staging theory,’ Hurzig reflected on her project at one point, attempting to access the internet. Staging theory and accessing the internet were also the basis for the ‘open-source performance project’ Générique (2007), one of a number of games created by the artists collective Everybody which in theory anyone can use. What was staged in this case was a great idea marred by an indifferent execution. The set-up was a post-performance artist’s talk, convened to discuss a performance that didn’t take place. The audience was invited to pose questions, and did so, but the four performers seemed strangely unwilling to take their own enterprise seriously. ‘Were there not certain fascistic elements at work in this piece?’ ran one query. ‘I don’t think this is something we have to respond to,’ came the answer. Uh, okay, but then why are we here? At several points things became simply ridiculous: ‘How do you feel about you performance?’ someone asked towards the quartet towards end. ‘How do you feel?’ one of the panellists responded. The sense was one of enigmatic contempt, as if the mere fact of an audience was itself somehow contemptible. While I’m willing to tolerate being held in contempt, I would like at least to know why.

Ligna, The New Human (2009). Photograph courtesy: Stefan Malzkorn

Générique was one of two audience participation works on display; the other being the Hamburg group Ligna’s The New Human. Taking as its point of departure Bertolt Brecht’s line that ‘doing is better than feeling’, the work employed radios to deliver movement instructions to a participating audience, interspersing the orders with contextual lectures on history. The performance was divided into four components, each focusing on one of the major theorists – Brecht, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Charlie Chaplin and Rudolf Laban, apparently – of the avant-garde wager that art was a method for elaborating new subjectivities. The work generated the spectacle of a chaotic stage, as different groups of people, hearing different sections, did their best to respond to the voices in their earpieces. But the most enlightening part of the piece was its media aspect, which underscored the importance of radio in this avowedly Communist enterprise. ‘The Russian revolution owes its success to Marconi,’ noted Ezra Pound in the August 1928 issue of his magazine The Exile. The sharpest compare-and-contrast was with Richard Siegel‘s new piece Homo Ludens (2009), a muscular duet by two men dressed in skullcaps, performed in front of a screen showing digital graphics. The work featured scenes of disjointed, almost autistic conversations, sat in front of a desk, in a manner which recalled Skype, or Omegle. Welcome to the work of dance, in the age of digital reproduction.

Richard Siegel, Homo Ludens (2009)

Siegel wasn’t among the three bleary-eyed panellists called to discuss this question at 10am on Sunday morning. This was left to the two leaders of Public Movement, in town to deliver a lecture on their recent works, Ole Frahm of Ligna, and the moderator, Hamburg artist and barman Christoph Schaefer. Schaefer began proceedings by talking about Henri Lefebvre, and then played a few items from his collection of YouTube videos. The governing theme was crazy new dances taking place in public space: in particular, Tecktonic and Jumpstyle. Frahm, lacking coffee, swiftly introduced the example of the notorious jumpstyle Lambrini ad, and declared there was no emancipatory potential to this practice. Other views were more ambivalent. Jumpstyle, admittedly, probably won’t bring down capitalism, but its emergence is nonetheless indicative of a changing urban space.

Later that day, Frahm became somewhat sunnier, leading a group of the curious on a short tour of Gängeviertel, in effect, Hamburg’s new ‘squat’ district. A couple weeks earlier, 200 artists occupied 15 houses right around the corner from the offices of the main Springer newspaper, who, unexpectedly, were supporting the occupation. ‘It’s the first new squat to have survived more than 24 hours in Hamburg for decades. We can’t understand it,’ admitted Schaefer. Was this a resurgence of an anarchist subculture, in the notorious black-green Hanse city of Hamburg, in which a biopolitical peace is preserved at all costs? Or merely the latest phase of creative city gentrification?

Interested parties may consult the group’s website. Meanwhile, there is the case of Kampagne itself. The space today is a shiny, clean contemporary performing arts centre, equipped with a large, well-designed hall with sharp lighting. When it first started, says Hurzig, it was ‘like a little old grandmother with two or three teeth.’ The access-points were mysterious, and each evening would start with various baffled visitors wandering around, wondering how to enter. ‘We rented out space to different parties,’ says Hurzig, ‘an opera, a computer firm, just to pay the bills. One night I remember, there was a girl reading on stage the last three chapters of Ulysses [1922]. It started pouring with rain and the roof started leaking, and so she began reading in silence as the rainwater dripped into buckets. The whole space was silent, everybody was waiting expectantly for the rain to stop. It was a beautiful moment. Because at the same time, on the other side of the complex, the water rose through the floor and the opera had to be abandoned.

‘On another occasion, we hired a band, and about 20 guys showed up, all claiming that they were performers. Basically, they all wanted to be paid, but I said that I wouldn’t pay anyone who wasn’t on stage. So they all went away, and they choreographed some stupid dance, because they wanted the money. The same night the computer company were having a party, with this huge buffet. This buffet had everything, chicken, meat, everything. So the night wore on, and we were getting more and more drunk, and then finally everyone converged on the buffet. There was this moment of absolute stillness, where our two tribes confronted each other. And then one of these guys from the band grabbed a piece of chicken, like some kind of barbarian chief, and just began tearing into the meat with his teeth. God, it was a beautiful moment.’