Rational Excess
Two Guest Performances at the Leipziger Off-Theater Provide Absolute Dancing Pleasure

The Leipziger Off-Theater is full to capacity and the audience is ecstatic. It’s this weekend’s “Dance Offensive Extra”, and Mette Ingvartsen and Christoph Winkler are receiving elated cheers, though their works are not crowd-pleasers by any means. Both these contemporary choreographers continue to seek in their art the grounding of movement. The theoretical tool they carry with them is conceptual dance, which soberly reduces the appealing rapture of the stage to its intellectual core and its basic everyday movement. If modernizers like Mary Wigman  at the beginning of the 20th century paved the way for this approach, then Yvonne Rainer radicalized the destruction of classic and pop in 1965 with her minimalist “No Manifesto”, which “forbade” intense, expressive emotionality on stage.
Though Rainer’s principle was never put into practice so radically, many of her followers absolutely negated the need for aesthetic spectacle—and were negated by their audience in return. Often without reason, for even reflective negation can elicit beauty. Consider the artist group “frankfurter küche” or, for that matter, Mette Ingvartsen herself. The young Dane answers Rainer’s “no” with a “yes” but remains in her spirit. The break with senselessly bombastic rapture is complete. All that’s left is to make excess itself into an object, which is what Ingvartsen does in her solo piece “50/50”.
Wearing nothing but a red wig, Ingvartsen swings her pelvis to the drum roll of Deep Purple’s “Strange Kind of Woman” so that her flesh vibrates; she extends her fist towards the lamplights; she paces off the positions and affects of an opera performance to the music of Leoncavallo; she energizes herself to Cornelis’s ecstatic electronic noise. This is a work that is  well observed without being deeply felt. The way Ingvartsen makes her exposed body invisible is completely rational, seriously ironic and wonderfully beautiful.