Tanzquartier Wien

When you see some clean-cut, well-clad, lissome-limbed young people gathering before pastel-colored graffiti panels (and if you think “pastel” and “graffiti” are contradictions in terms, you might be right), gazing with an air of wary hostility as if in anticipation of looming aggression, you will be forgiven if you wonder momentarily whether the gang warfare of “West Side Story” has been revived with the wrong kind of cast. But wait a minute: Performers are exposed to potential hostility – from us, the audience, in the form of judgment! And really, aren’t dance ensembles gangs of sorts? As if my thoughts could be read like tickertape, Elio Gervasi’s gang suddenly gloms together and moves amoeba-like, elbowing each other out of the frame, jockeying for front position, for our attention. There is neither drama nor camp; jostling and pushing become means of edgily moving a group, until the smallest member falls.

This metaphorical set-up unlocks the evening: How do you create a spatially, kinetically, dynamically interesting work and a cohesive ensemble while giving dancers of different styles and abilities the space to stretch and shine at what each does best, for they, after all, and their movement qualities, are ultimately your material! How to put them on the stage so that they serve the whole and yet no one is compromised, made to look bad or rendered invisible?

Step One: Choose self-confident, sensitive movers who are interesting performers even if or when they are not perfect dancers, and texture your choreography with their limitations and quirks.

Step Two: Make them all do something they haven’t yet mastered, and let them each do something she or he does better than anyone else. Have them try to teach their specialties to the others.

Step Three: Take two steps back from yourself, and call in a dramaturge to help you maintain objectivity for the overall shape of the whole.

The ensemble attempts to take on flamenco. Highlights: When their fake flamenco moves flip poker-faced into a River Dance prance. When clicking and stamping turn to soft silent stealth. When the dancers gather, disperse, and gather again. When the space is charged with different textures, dynamics and tempi, lows and heights. There are two very exciting dancers in this piece: the guy in the blue argyle shirt stomps like a smoldering volcano in the guise of a gentleman and flows like liquefied energy, and the lady with the brown T-shirt and side braids is both focused and fluid and never ever flat, swiftly reshaping three-dimensional space before your very eyes. Yet their being so good doesn’t make anybody else look bad. The man in the white shirt is very appealing, not because he’s a great breakdancer, which he is not (yet), but because he is willing to try anything. The surprise of the evening is the lady in the red shirt. Compare her “good pupil” ensemble work with the unleashed energy of her solo, when she abandons the verticality her height would seem to predestine her to, to hurl herself around horizontally and wonderfully. She is a warning not to judge a dancer’s – or anyone’s! – abilities or potential too soon, including your own! That’s the moral of the story, the uplifting take-home gift from this performance.

Dancers spend their mornings in classrooms, afternoons at rehearsals, and nights on the stage, absorbing technique and seeking to give it their own personal stamp, if you’ll pardon the pun. Whereas people expect to experience and enjoy music rather than “understand” it, many, however, think they should “understand” rather than experience poetry and dance. These art forms have therefore been subject to accusations of elitism if the artists in question have spent their lives cultivating and engaging their technique and craft, and if their work cannot be boiled down to “what it’s trying to say”. Excuse me, but would you pay money to hear an unpracticed musician fumble around? Is there a contradiction between authenticity, identity and inclusion, and exploration and mastery of forms, techniques and styles?

Of late, both poets and dancers are being hailed not so much as unique voices but instead as spokespersons for a particular cultural, social or demographic group, and their poetry or choreography defined by its “content” or subject alone, as if it were an autobiography, a sociological study or a documentary, and not a work of the imagination. It is patronizing to define artists (or anybody, for that matter) first and foremost in terms of their biological or social background.

In his essay “Don Quixote or the Art of Becoming”, author Antonio Molina ponders the pitfalls of equating identity and culture itself with a locality, rather than as something individual and personal that develops continuously through experience and (self-)education:

“When I was a boy growing up in a small provincial Spanish town, culture was something you achieved by your personal effort through reading and learning, with a very distinct impulse to accomplish a better understanding of the world around you and especially of those parts of the world and those fields of experience not easily given to you in the course of your daily life. You were supposed to get culture yourself, to learn as much as your intelligence would allow, and that was what school and education were all about. Now culture is not something you set yourself out to achieve but the original envi­ronment into which you were born, or the long-lost vernacular heritage you should try to recover. The meaning of the word has shifted from the chosen to the given, from the secular to the anthropological. Culture is not about what you freely, even whimsically choose to become, but about what you and your ancestors were destined to be since the time of a common and often sacred past. I find this utterly disgusting.”[1]

Jennifer Homans, author of “Apollo’s Angels”[2], the best history on ballet ever, observes with regret that nowadays seemingly few dancers inherit and master the specific ballet styles developed at the Bolshoi or the Mariinsky, the Royal Danish Ballet, the Royal Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet, or Balanchine’s New York City Ballet; rather, most appear to strive for some sort of amalgamation, resulting in an erosion of stylistic diversity for ballet. Viva the dancers who master one tradition and style, and refresh it with their own movement personality! Viva the dancers who explore, absorb and synthesize different dance languages! Down with dogma, and on with diversity!

[1] Molina, Antonio Muñoz. Don Quixote or the Art of Becoming. Hudson Review, NY 2015.
[2] Homans, Jennifer. Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet. Random House, NY 2010.

Diane Shooman, an eternal optimist living and writing in Vienna, received her Comparative Literature PhD from Brown University and has taught cross-disciplinary courses at the Linz Art University, UAS Technikum-Wien and Hollins University/American Dance Festival MFA program. Diane has written for the Falter weekly paper and corpusweb.net, and recently held the keynote talk “Dance in the Circular City” at the Austrian Studies Association International Conference. Diane’s dance passion has unfurled an ongoing endeavor to rediscover the perceptive powers of the moving body in life largely mediated through windows and screens.

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