Two years ago, their paths crossed for the first time: Julie Anne Stanzak, protagonist of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, brought Senga Nengudis’ piece “Performance Piece” to new life in Munich’s Lenbachhaus. The Afro-American artist’s solo is a hybrid of installation and movement art: a network of nylon straps holds the dancer captive, although the elastic strips adapt to her gestures.
The organic and the inorganic merge into an animated sculpture, into a danced parable of the bondage of female existence. Another project grew out of the Munich revival, a co-production between Tanztheater, Senga Nengudi and the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal. Since last weekend, the museum has housed a kind of double feature: sculptures by Nengudi, dance by Stanzak and colleagues.
The two-pronged format exemplifies fusions that bring together artistic backdrops and moving bodies worldwide: as partners in dialogue or conflict, complement or competitor. Whether it’s the Guggenheim in New York, London’s Tate Modern, the Louvre in Paris or the Bode Museum in Berlin – the list of houses that bring performances of all kinds into their collections is growing. Conversely, the international dance scene has not only been enthusiastic about work outside the classical theater framework since yesterday.
It all started with the revolutionaries of modern dance, who dismissed ballet as the sole ruler and put their bare feet on the museum floor. Isadora Duncan, a pioneer of Expressionism, made her European debut in 1911 in the courtyard of the New Gallery in London. Aesthetically, the dancer was inspired by ancient artefacts in the British Museum. They were followed by post-modern innovators such as Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown, who continued to push the alliance with the fine arts.
On the one hand, they established networks across genre boundaries, on the other hand, they conquered spaces far away from the theater such as studios, museums and galleries. What was trendy at the time has since established itself as a creative practice. Choreographers like William Forsythe, Sasha Waltz or Boris Charmatz like to place their art in environments beyond the traditional proscenium stage: sometimes in the open air, sometimes between paintings, video screens, statues or sarcophagi.
Dance can breathe new life into museum spaces
The attraction of the experimental change of location is obvious. The audience can move more or less freely, discover their own perspectives and thus slip into the role of co-director. By eliminating the ramp, the action is closer. At the same time, the dance seems to breathe air into the space, to change its energy and to place bodies, cubature and art objects in a new relationship to each other. At least when there is an original idea behind it, while half-baked solutions seem as narcoleptic as a boring production that the viewer sits in the parquet armchair. Pipe burst or Renner – what makes the difference could only recently be seen in Berlin, at performances in the Bode Museum and in the New National Gallery.
None other than the grand master of concept dance, Jerôme Bel, failed at the massive neo-baroque of the Bode Museum in Mitte. At the start of a new series called “Choreographing Politics”, the Frenchman mixed snippets from his own depot with work excerpts from two colleagues: Xavier Le Roy and Simone Forti. But nowhere was it clear what Bel was aiming for: exchange between dance and ambience, counterpoint or communication? Bel’s own homage to “Isadora Duncan” (2018) promptly fizzled out in the so-called basilica of the house, which is decorated with exquisite Renaissance paintings.
Xavier Le Roy’s naked lions from “Temporary Title” (2015) met a “Swan Lake” ballerina in the cupola hall and literally went swimming with her – at the feet of the monumental equestrian statue of Elector Friedrich Wilhelm. Most recently, Simone Forti’s iconic climbing study “The Huddle” from 1961 on the Spree Terrace degenerated into a varnished gymnastics exercise in the sunlight. Bel’s arrangement for the Bode Museum might fit into the tourist marketing of the Museum Island, but in the absence of lucid ideas it did not produce any added artistic value.
Quite different is Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, who has already illuminated the Cologne Columba, the Basel Fondation Beyeler and recently the New National Gallery at the Berlin Kulturforum with tailor-made highlights under the title “Dark Red”. No false pathos, because instead of transporting fragments of existing works into the respective setting, the Belgian choreographer deals precisely with the genius loci. She picks up its vibration, extends it into the human kinesphere and draws three-dimensional patterns in the room that reveal architectural structures.
De Keersmaeker brakes, doubles or dissolves the dynamics that arise when walking through the museum. What the transparent national gallery, apparently supported by nothing but glass walls, meant for Mies van der Rohe: inside, the grande dame from Brussels drew strictly geometric paths across the floor together with the dancer Soa Ratsifandrihana, outside, part of her team walked along the window fronts. Also a black-and-white dog in the entourage, matching the purism of the Bauhaus design. The soul of the museum and everyday life in the metropolis blended seamlessly into one another that afternoon.
Keersmaeker’s “Dark Red” shows what makes dance in the museum a model for success – when the choreography is unique, born from the osmosis between dance, art and structural housing. This is exactly what happened two years ago in the Lenbachhaus, with the re-release of Senga Nengudi’s “Performance Piece”. Continuation from now until January 2023 in the Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal.