Tanz Im August: Day 3

Day 3: Friday, 24 August 2012

Tanz at the School of Dramatic Arts, Berlin

Friday was a day for more meetings than performances – but each of our three meetings could not have been more different from each other. We began by meeting Professor Ingo Reulecke, Director of the Dance Department at the School of Dramatic Arts. Post lunch we met with Scott deLahunta of The Forsythe Company, and then rounded off the evening with a tour through Radial System V with Jochen Sandig.

The morning’s meeting was held in a medium-sized (for here!) studio in the School of Dramatic Arts building. The school has four departments now – Acting, Directing, Puppetry and Dance. The last of these came into the picture as late as 1988. This came about as Berlin began to be a centre for dance and performance, with many dancers and choreographers from across the world moving here. It began as a Department of Choreography which resulted mainly from two factors: one, that there was no training apart from the classical Ballet training that a dancer could draw from; and two, the fact that a dancer’s career in the west (very unlike India!) closes by 40 years of age. Choreography and teaching then become the next stage of their dance journeys, but there was no institute for training in choreography apart from what was available in the classical mode. Berlin also was home to three State funded ballet and opera companies, which employed close to 200 dancers. That has now dwindled to one. As in India, divisions existed – and continued to exist – between classical, contemporary, experimental and folk dancers. The Department of Choreography and Dance suddenly became a forum where dancers from diverse backgrounds could meet and interact without the baggage of having to ‘defend’ their forms. For – as Professor Reulecke reiterated very clearly – the Department was and is about communicating and transmitting concepts of dance, movement, space and body, not about teaching form of any sort.

Uferstudios, Berlin

Any sort of form teaching – classical or contemporary – informs the body and marks it for life. There was no necessity to teach another form to these dancers, but necessary to provide them with tools to look anew at their own bodies and forms in different and fresh ways. They continue to draw on several methods which both shy away from specific form, but simultaneously can be applied to any form and technique of movement. The Department has grown immensely over the years, and now functions from about 15 fully equipped Studio spaces in the Uferstudios – a set of converted warehouses in Berlin.

The Forsythe Project

In the afternoon we met with Scott deLahunta at the Goethe Institut. He talked to us about Motion Bank – a project that was first started by choreographer William Forsythe as a tool to teach new dancers joining his company the fundamentals of how he constructed his work and the terminology he used to categorise movement. This was as simple as graphic drawing on demonstration videos which outlined visually the shapes and parameters of movements. This moved quickly into doing the same for pieces of complicated choreography and developed into a fantastic tool for the choreographer (and others) to remember and analyse pieces of choreography. This was demonstrated by a section of a very complicated piece of fast choreography involving 17 dancers moving around 20 tables. Suddenly – as we watched the dance – shapes were drawn out all over the screen – circles, arcs, triangles – formed with body postures or limb movements – and patterns which we had never suspected began to emerge in a wonderful tapestry of movement and drawing. Such a simple concept – but something that would immediately draw anyone into the world of dance and help them instantly see how space, time and movement have been conceived and constructed. Rather than talking about – or even demonstrating – choreographic process and structure, this visual depiction on dancers bodies grabs attention like nothing can with all the attraction of video gaming today.

The company decided to start working with other choreographers and other forms – there has also been a project with Bharatnatyam. But they quickly discovered that each encounter necessitated creating a new set of tools (or apps as one can call them now!) responding to the very specific nature of the choreographer’s work (sometimes each piece demanded a separate treatment) or form. I remember being harangued by a Laban Notation researcher who insisted that every dance in the world could be notated in fully detail by this system, regardless of the fact that the system has no room for improvisation and variability – something so intrinsic to Indian dance and music. But here, we were shown examples of Deborah Hay’s work (a piece we say that evening) where variability and changes in space, time and duration in every single performance of the piece was central to the documentation. Each example really showed a true collaboration between the animators and the choreographers / dancers – inventing, discovering ways of working together putting the work in the forefront rather than harping on fitting the work into a pre-existing system.

Jochen Sandig

Our third meeting of the day was with Jochen Sandig of Radial System V – where Sasha Waltz and Guests has their home base. I’ve written about the space in an earlier blog post about this trip to Berlin, so won’t go into those details again. But touring the space with Jochen was a different experience altogether for two reasons. One, he has a completely different and equally passionate relationship with the space as Sasha: his comes out of setting it up, managing and sustaining it. Second, the tour was with the whole delegation and feeling awe-struck by the space in a group, is quite different from feeling it alone. Once again, I was reminded of the Calcutta waterfront and the many buildings crying out to be used, to be given a fresh lease of life.

From here, we took a walk down the road to the largest single section of the Berlin Wall still in existence. Berlin seems a seamless city now: where the fissure was has to be pointed out by those who know. It is so difficult – being in this vibrant, connected and cosmopolitan city – to believe that barely 20-odd years ago, it was the site of the bitterest of conflicts and separation.

That evening we saw a very different piece – No Time to Fly, by American dancer-choreographer Deborah Hay. This was one of the pieces that Motion Bank has developed a documentation and analysis tool for – a tool that takes very strong note of variability in space, time, duration and movement. The film captures six / seven versions of solos by three different dancers responding to a set of instructions from Hay. The instructions are both physical and spatial oriented and more abstract and imaginative. The collection of solos was then mapped on to a single video, and the three sets thus create could then be mapped on to each other to provide material for a piece of choreography.

Deborah Hay

Deborah Hay is now in her seventies. She performed the piece following the structure outlined above. She has a set of instructions – a basic mapping, so to speak – comprising of movement possibilities. And these were played out along with using her voice through sounds or text. I cannot say I liked the piece, but I can’t say I disliked it either. I did not understand it. But there was something about her – her frail aging body, her simple but strong presence, her dignity and grace, her complete belief in what she did AND her disinterest in showing off something to the audience – that engaged and moved me. There was a depth there I could not fathom – but a depth I had sorely missed both in Akram Khan and Carte Blanche. This was just true, it was genuine, she was telling me something pure and beautiful somehow! I had to believe in it. Perhaps dancers need to return to very basic questions: what do we believe in? Why do we dance? Do we need to impress others, or just be true when we perform? Difficult issues all, but one can’t run away from them.