Notes from Open the Curtain: when the Visual Arts and Dance become Performance, written by Dirk Luckow and Susanne Traub
A catalogue of an exhibition held at Kunstahalle in Kiel, 2003.
Excerpts from the first article in the catalogue: Open the Curtain: when the Visual Arts and Dance become Performance
The desire of the individual to be free of bounds, to break out of social constraints, plays a role in both art forms [visual arts and dance], within their referential systems and in the interrelationship of those systems.
If Performance is involved in contemporary dance, this means dance manifests itself as a model for ways of acting. Here action is no longer staged; instead, it is carried out or takes place.
Valeska Gert's and Oskar Schlemmer's works refer both to the roots of modern dance...What makes both seem so contemporary is the relationship to actuality in their performances, concepts and ideas.
To him [Oskar Schlemmer], the dance opened up a possibility for subjecting the laws governing the performing arts to searching analysis, a chance both to question the assumptions underlying them and to make use of them while setting in motion the subject-object relationships prescribed in his art form, such as the relationship of the individual to his/her own space.
The body, at once medium of representation and representer, is always the focus of dance.
[On Bruce Nauman] Viewed from the performative angle, it is no longer merely objects which are viewed as representations of a culture and the way it sees itself but rather the dynamic prcesses in which they are made and used. The body appears as the materil and the medium of actions as carried out.
These choreographers, dancers and exponents of the visual arts [Yvonne Rainer, Robert Morris, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Carl Andre, Robert Rauschenberg, Trisha Brown and the Judson Dance Theater] thought of their performances as experiments and explorations, as a process approximating life rather than illusionist unreality.
With its fiction of choreographed dance, Sharon Lockhart's collaboration with the choreographer Stephen Galloway in Goshogaoka (1997) reminds us that dance is often configured from the appearance of many players, who are attuned to one another. This is a documentary of girls practicing sports at the Goshogaoka Secondary School in Japan...In it the dance appears as abstract idea and metaphor and, more importantly perhaps, as a behaviour pattern, reproducing constellations of relationships within a group, as epitomizing an ideal of feminine beauty or simply as unspectacular movement, such as walking, which “postmodern dancers” have practiced to excess.
The body, which is invariably also the support for societal codes and meanings, subverts them in Performance.
“Dance as the production of meanings through movement and the visual arts as the inscription of meaning in the picture or object.” Dorothea von Hantelmann, Art moving politics.
Exerpts from Space Dance, written by Oskar Schlemmer
The repertoire of forms which I used in the Triadic Ballet derived, on the one hand, from the rudiments of geometry and solid geometry translated into new, challenging contemporary materials; on the other, from the elements of the human body, which, as I keep saying, is just as much a being of flesh and blood, intellect and emotion as it is a jointed apparatus which is marvellously precise in its functions.
To me, abstract simply means style and style, as is well known, means ultimate form, as close to perfection as possible.
