She won’t get a leg on the floor anymore. This is clear to the East Berlin choreographer Birgit Scherzer when she refuses a state-sponsored commission. The thirty-five-year-old is to turn Mikis Theodorakis’ oratorio “Canto General”, composed to a cycle of poems by Pablo Neruda, into a socialist dance piece. The world premiere is scheduled for the FDJ Whitsun meeting in 1989 in the Palace of the Republic. But the celebrated young artist refuses, does not want to stage the ready-made libretto. Scherzer finds himself trapped in a dilemma, both artistically and morally. What to do – go or stay?
Numerous dancers in the last few years of the GDR have asked themselves this question, as have colleagues from other art disciplines. Ten protagonists, almost all of whom belonged to Tom Schilling’s legendary dance theater at the Komische Oper, are portrayed in the sensitive documentary “Keep in motion”. The director Salar Ghazi produced the two-hour collective psychogram entirely himself, without film funding or sponsorship: perhaps financiers feared the illustration of a remote dance world. But the result of the project, currently on the streaming portal www.sooner.de to see is beyond the insider’s perspective. Ghazi is only marginally interested in training, the ballet hall and the stage. One learns too little rather than too much about dance aesthetics in the GDR, from NVA ensembles to folklore festivals. But the concentrated black and white look at the faces, like the lively stories of the conversation partners, allows an intensive immersion in questions of fate, of which the West hardly imagined.
Birgit Scherzer, for example, has a nine-year-old son in 1989, lives with the dancer Klaus Dünnbier and is nevertheless forced to turn her back on the GDR – in a clandestine action, of course. She pretends to be visiting relatives, marries her partner in a hurry to be able to apply for family reunification later, and gets on the train going west.
What follows is foreseeable and yet pure horror. When the mother does not return home after a week or two, as usual, the child reacted with concern. The man must credibly pretend ignorance, for example to the deputy director, a Stasi informing person, as everyone knows. But because Scherzer already enjoys a certain prominence, the state apparatus does not give up: Dünnbier should bring his wife back from the West, otherwise the son will be given up for adoption. And to complete strangers. Even decades later, the inhuman, dignified and shameless treatment of the GDR with its own citizens aroused anxiety. Fortunately, the fall of the Berlin Wall thwarted the blackmail attempt and undermined the return mission.
The bloodletting was enormous – with the GDR, their dance culture also more or less disappeared
The bloodletting suffered by the dance scene in the dusk of the GDR was evident long before that. Outstanding companies were among the travel cadres as cultural ambassadors, toured regularly in the West and often came back decimated. As Ghazi’s contemporary witnesses report, the departures were kept quiet by the theaters – internally and externally. The fear that an informer would open his ears at the next canteen table was huge and entirely justified. As everywhere else in the country, Erich Mielke’s authority was well networked in the Komische Oper. Not all artists were intimidated by this. Especially since the escape from the republic from 1987 onwards developed into a concrete idea in many minds. Back then, for the 750th anniversary of Berlin, the East organized a veritable exhibition of the West, with guests from the Wuppertal dance theater or from John Neumeier’s Hamburg Ballet. Those who really did it, however, often landed hard: short-term engagements, little reliability.
It’s amazing how many of the interviewees remained connected to the theater in some way. One directs, the other teaches, the next has switched to IT, but still misses the stage. Birgit Scherzer’s sister Steffi, once prima ballerina at the State Opera, now heads the Zurich Dance Academy and impressively describes the ordeal that life in the “prison” called GDR posed to individuals. She stayed in the country without ever blaming her sister for jumping to the West.
With the GDR, their dance culture also more or less disappeared. Nowhere have traditional lines been established like in Stuttgart or Essen. Some things are worth rediscovering. If Salar Ghazi can imagine a continuation of his documentation: That would be an issue.