Tanzquartier Wien

Is it Beethoven in Mozart’s clothing, a disentanglement puzzle or an athletic-artistic emergency? Danza Permanente by DD Dorvillier kept the people I talked to after the performance guessing. I’m still puzzling over it too. What’s more, the present text is created at a considerable distance from the choreographer: firstly, I am far less well acquainted with her previous work than with that of many other dance artists, secondly, we obviously have a completely different approach to Beethoven, so that nothing, absolutely nothing at all about her experiment with the String Quartet, op. 132, jumped out at me. So I’m going to puzzle my way through this text with a reviewer-like detachment.

It takes some daring to tackle Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor, op. 132, for two violins, viola and violoncello. It counts among the final canonised string quartets written by the composer as his hearing loss was progressing and he suffered from other diseases as well. A phase in which he broke with formal requirements, shattered the logic of the form. The time of its creation is imbued with the aura of the Great Fugue, which is considered one of the epitomes of genius and madness, detached as it is from the string quartets. People prone to aesthetic glorification think that they should definitely avoid listening to the music of this period without the required higher knowledge. Even Adorno, in a hand-to-heart work-specific analysis, wrote: “[With] the power of dissociation, he tears [the objective and the subjective] apart in time, in order, perhaps, to preserve them for the eternal.”

Dissociation, too, prevails in DD Dorvillier’s piece. Music and sound have been torn apart. Danza Permanente was announced by the choreographer as a choreography following the musical notation of op. 132 without the music being audible. Instead, it should become visible. To this end, she has dressed her quartet in uniform, postmodern costumes varying only in colour: shorts and shirts in orange, light blue, pink and a slightly garish ochre-yellow. In this ice-lolly look (the bare legs are the stick), the four dancers mill through the theme and variation of 132 like caterpillars. They never lose the beat even once. Their feet are working nonstop in triple or quadruple time; in rhythm they expand, contract, dissolve and create new basic graphic elements such as lines, diagonals, diamond shapes, rectangles and circles in space and, most notably, vary them according to leading-voice constellations.

It looks as though, from a New York perspective (that’s where the choreographer was living when she created the piece in 2012), Beethoven was primarily a postmodern composer, no less accomplished in theme and variation, repetition and difference than Steve Reich or Philip Glass. In Dorvillier’s hands, the string quartet becomes “Beethoven on the Beach”. And it’s difficult to say whether it does so intentionally or accidentally, ironically or not. And “Beethoven on the Beach” in turn, whether intentionally or accidentally, becomes something that postmodernism usually does without in terms of style: a parody of modernism. In reduced ballet derivations, the quartet seems to dance around the golden calf that is Beethoven like Nijinsky’s dancers once (1913) did around the “Rite of Spring”. In ritual-like circular formations, with a somewhat pounding step, the arms fly upwards like a licking fire in the centre, as if Viennese Classicism were a retrospection on “foreign countries and people”, whose extinction could only be prevented through art.

Is the choreography’s ironical detachment really intentional? Or is it, in fact, a capitulation to the self-imposed task of translating a musical score to the human body as an instrument? There is one trace left that might clarify the questions regarding irony: the Godfathers. The pre-recorded opening and closing words “Birth, School, Work, Death” are taken from their post-punk song of the same name about life as a worker. They seem like an obviously flippant remark on the motif of four in late Beethoven. But even apart from that, the framing would make self-ironic sense: Dorvillier’s team would have had to train for years to be able to interpret the score of 132 with truly pinpoint precision. The human body may be able to sing, but it cannot be “visible music” any more than a “visible car”. Translating a score into dance note-by-note on all musical levels is exceptionally hard work both physically and metaphorically, even harder work than that of musicians. An experiment that is perhaps undertaken over and over again (for example by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker) to authenticate dance’s aesthetic autonomy ex negativo.

Experiment failed, evidence presented. Punk wins.

Astrid Kaminski publishes texts on culture and social policy (as a journalist), and develops public and dialogic formats in the fields of creative writing, art criticism and social criticism.

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