Tanzquartier Wien

I consider myself to be an experienced writer. However, writing about writing numbers among the most delicate of subjects for an author to tackle. I was delighted to be invited to the Reden über Schreiben (Talking about Writing) Lab session as it provided an opportunity to avoid writing itself for five days and embark on an exchange with others to explore the conditions, tasks and responsibilities of writing about dance, performance, choreography and staging. Such an undertaking requires a number of different voices and approaches, positions and interpretations.

TQW Magazin was launched, among other reasons, because writing about dance is being increasingly macro-economically marginalised while the classical media are being downgraded, and because new formats and interests have to be added and promoted on an ongoing basis. If writing about dance is much more than merely penning reviews, then what should the text engage with when the primary concern is no longer to deliver ‘well-made criticism’? This raises issues concerning the politics of writing and the way we as authors use criteria, viewing habits, prejudices and incomprehension, and even exert power. What are the positions we can adopt in writing? Can these be changed? Do we even see through the way we write? It is precisely these questions that routinely make the writer’s life difficult.

The first season’s contributions to TQW Magazin primarily provide documentation of the various authors’ initial positions and their views of the artists’ stance. A personal interest in the issues engaged with in the work, familiarity with the dancers and artists or curiosity about the unseen inform the nature of the discussion rather than the conventions of written dramaturgy. So it is the conceptual associations with societal shifts, political demands and formal experimentation that relate to what both the dancers and their audience engage with. Perhaps this lies in the current dynamics of the notion of ‘OEuvre’. In the classical sense it holds that the production of a work, regardless of whether a work of art or a critique, requires precision and clarity. Certain characteristics are required to achieve — as well as to recognise — such a thing. It is therefore about the moment of encounter, of making contact, when the different systems of thinking, of feeling, of perception and of speech become

visible. Since the work alone is ultimately meaningless; it needs the exchange, the dialogue. But can such a dialogue between an audience and those being watched ever occur at eye level, so to speak? Has the critical gaze not always involved an elevated position from where one can pass down judgements about value and taste? We primarily associate the taste compartment with capriciousness and normativity. However this has not always been so. Friedrich Schiller’s charming invocation of the “quiet work of taste” is aimed, above all, at emancipation and ultimately subversion in a utilitarian civil society where individuals will hardly be able to find themselves. The “quiet work of taste” elevates the individual and ultimately humanity, opening up a more enlightened future for both. As Schiller believed: “if we are to follow that political problem in practice, follow the path of aesthetics, since it is through Beauty that we arrive at Freedom.” However to find this beauteous path to freedom, taste is required as a strategy for making distinctions and drawing conclusions. Accordingly, art and taste could be determined as the radius of action for the capacity to distinguish, and so of self-empowerment — even in society. (Schiller wrote his “On the Aesthetic Education of Man” a few years after the French Revolution.) This idealistic view looks pretty outmoded to us today, especially as emancipation through the voicing of criticism has almost always remained merely a substitute for real emancipation, i.e. political emancipation. That dance and performances are awash with strategies for self-empowerment is undeniable. But how do we reflect this process, this “still work of taste”, in ‘writings about’? Emil Hrvatin, alias Janez Janša, once described this kind of self-inherent critique as the “arrogance of small differences”. It has less to do with an emancipatory situation than with the advantage in know-how, experience and performance attendance. However such a resource is sensitive. It is based on that specific form of presence which affirms and simultaneously diminishes each individual. Our experience of a dance performance is never general. And yet we write for the general public as if we were in their shoes. That is perhaps the power of critique, which demands an ethos of writing as a corrective. Since the reality of the stage needs neither a norm nor judgements, even if it can take both. Although it definitely needs to reverberate. And such reverberation is what we have to contribute in writing about dance.

Source:

Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794). Quoted here from: Trans. R. Snell, Yale University Press, New Haven 1954, Pp 56 & 27

In June Franz Anton Cramer led the lab Talking about Writing at TQW. Together with the participants Jette Büchsenschütz, Christoph Chwatal, Theresa Luise Gindlstrasser, Christian Keller, Anna Kromer, Gianna Virginia Prein, Sara Schausberger and Michael Franz Woels he discussed among other topics TQW Magazin, enquired into the politics of writing and pondered over future models of writing.

Franz Anton Cramer is a dance scholar, philologist and journalist. He has been teaching at artistic and academic institutions, most recently at HZT Berlin and the University of Salzburg. Until March 2016 he was a research associate at the DFG research unit Verzeichnungen (archiving) at the Berlin University of the Arts, and he was a fellow of the Collège international de philosophie Paris from 2007 to 2013. He has been co-editing the e-journal MAP – Media Archive Performance (perfomap.de) with Barbara Büscher since 2009.

More texts in TQW MAGAZIN