Essays

At first glance, no two art forms seem further apart as literature and dance. Words, almost purely arising from thoughts, land on paper or on a screen, where they remain for quite a long time, often for centuries. Steps, turns, jumps on the other hand seem to come from somewhere else in the body and are only for fractions of a second to see. If we disregard the documentary record, they continue to exist only as more or less a distinct memory of the viewer.

There are certainly similarities. If I go by "language" as a basis for literature and poetry, and "motion" as a basis for dance, then speaking and moving - in individually varying degrees – are actually the most primitive means of everyday communication, means of daily life and survival - while the respective base for art, music or drama has already exceeded this level. Nobody must necessarily sing at the bakery in order to make himself understood. Thus, literature and dance have actually the same, low-threshold approaches.

As a poet and performer from Germany wanting to remark about the local interaction and interplay of literature and dance, speech and motion, I can hardly be confined to the German-speaking countries. Especially, when I speak of dance, I have to at least think "European". ¹. But, considering such collaborations from a historical perspective, one cannot ignore ballet, and that's not a German invention. "Romeo and Juliet", "The Wayward Daughter" (La fille mal gardée) "Sleeping Beauty", "Coppelia" and "The Pirate" (Le Corsaire) are just a few of many ballets implementing the literary models. Likewise, two well-known and dance significant literary texts that deal with dance, and not written by German authors: Stéphane Mallarmé’s "Ballets" and "Another dance study" and Paul Valéry's "The discourse on poetry" deal intensively with the essence of the dance and the dancer (Men, at the time, played no role in the European dance). ² Over and above the theoretical / art aesthetic dimension, they are necessarily to be regarded as independent literary texts.

In the German literature - or rather philosophy here - Friedrich Nietzsche had engaged with dance in detail. While I continue to read the texts of Mallamé and Valéry with interest and always try to find an application on today's dance- and performative work in them, reading Nietzsche's texts does not really ignite such an interest. Nietzsche - so I comprehend – does not write about dance as dance, but about dancing as representative of something else, of intoxication, ecstasy, and humour. And that is in a rather German tradition, dance not to be taken seriously as a dance, as a physical practice, but to transform it into something spiritual, disembodied (this issue is worth a separate, very extensive text). ³In this conjunction, Heinrich von Kleist’s essayistic narrative "On the Marionette Theatre" is also relevant, where among other things a dancer defines the concept of "grace" as the absence of any consciousness. In dance discourses, there is little reference to both. I am only aware of a handful of implementations, which relate to these works. ⁴

When speaking of dance in recent times in Germany, which also uses language and, at the least, incorporates literature in dance-events, Pina Bausch and her dance Theatre definitely deserve a mention. Bausch did not explicitly process literary texts, but involved speech, song, everyday gestures in her choreographies and was thus one of the first dance professionals in Germany who just opened up the boundaries of the genre for some talking. In the nineties, the choreographer William Forsythe, the director of the former Frankfurt Ballet and later the Forsythe Company worked several times along with the Canadian poet Anne Carson. The productions "Chamber Chamber" (Kammer Kammer) and "Decreation" refer to, or use articles from Carson. Within the free dance scene that does not pertain to fixed theatres, there are a variety of approaches that involve language and literature. On tanzforumberlin.de one gets a good overview of current productions in contemporary dance.

And what is the situation in today's poetic practice? Are there implementations, transformations, adaptations of dance, and what do they possibly look like? I can, currently, speak only for myself, since I am not aware of the works of other poets from Germany who either deal or focus largely on dance and movement at present. ⁵ In one of my own works, I have tried to bring movements and gestures of everyday life in a form of translation – namely in the literary language. br>
Apart from my own poetic works, I constantly endeavour to initiate collaborative works or participate in suchlike. In December 2012, I conducted, among other things, together with the choreographer Ingo Reulecke and the Berlin poet Alexander Gumz the project "Motion Recorder". ⁶ Moreover, I show short solo performances, which (also) refer to my own literary texts or to that of the other poets.

References

1. Or rather "western" because I speak below of dance and performance practices, as encountered by me most commonly, here in Germany - namely productions / works that originate from a European-western notion and tradition of dance. Currently, this focus on the Western dance is expanding increasingly to non-European dance forms.
2. Stéphane Mallarmé’s: "Ballets" and "Another dance study", in Stéphane Mallarmé: Critical writings, translation by Gerhard Goebel, Gerlingen 1998 Paul Valéry: "The discourse on poetry", in Paul Valéry: The theory of poetry, essays and lectures, Frankfurt / M. 1975
3. I, indeed, refer to the following Essay: Christina Thurner: Movements to / for the same fundamentals. Emphatic interference between dance and text appeared in the issue 216, December 2015, The literary journal- Language in the technical age.
4. als an example is shown here: http://www.kulturstiftung-des-bundes.de/cms/de/projekte/buehne_und_bewegung/archiv/nicht_ich_ueber_das_marionettentheater.html
5. Martina Hefter: Vom Gehen und Stehen. Ein Handbuch. Gedichte, kookbooks-Verlag, Berlin 2013
6. short Trailerfor the works here:
   http://tanzforumberlin.de/559.php
http://tanzforumberlin.de/556.php
http://tanzforumberlin.de/557.php
http://tanzforumberlin.de/558.php