Between Sensuous Experience and Reflection

On the stage at the Hebbel am Ufer theater stand two large trampolines. On them, Mettte Ingvartsen and Jephta van Dinther probe the borders of choreographic space and the possibilities of intentional and accidental movement. As the work begins, Ingvartsen and van Dinther slowly and unspectacularly test out the trampolines’ potential, gradually synchronizing their movements and each turning to one half of the audience seated at opposite sides of the stage. Eventually, simultaneity becomes succession. Or is it mimesis? Audience members aren’t sure of their own perceptions. Instead they are confronted with a host of questions: How should we conceive of motion? How does motion realize itself? Where does it start and where does it stop? How can we perceive motion as such? Can the beholder differentiate intentional movements (such as those practiced in traditional dance techniques and methods) from accidental or improvisational ones that intermittently appear?

The audience members have time to enjoy and reflect, even if they regret their own passivity, for the flowing lightness of the work quickly arouses the desire to follow suit. Already at this level, the choreography mobilizes the entire kinesthetic potential of the audience. Amid ecstasy and exhaustion—the trampolines provide not a single moment of rest—a process takes place in the space between sensuous experience and our reflection on it. After an hour of physical expenditure, the focus of the questions shifts slightly. What can the body do? What is it capable of? What are its possibilities and what can its energetic efforts obtain? How far does the body reach within a space? Where does it reach its limits? What underlies its intention and what impels it?

For several years, Ingvartsen has been pursuing constructions of sense for the performing body that qua construction perpetually fail and shift. In “Manual Focus” (2003), three naked women dance on the stage facing away from the audience, each wearing a mask on the back of the head that bears the likeness of an old man. The twisted bodies appear disproportional and falsely put together—like Hans Bellmer’s puppet figures. The inversion and (dis)illusion also extend to depersonalization and nakedness. Ingvartsen irritates our voyeuristic pleasure in beholding the young naked dancers with the grotesque faces of old men staring back at us. The levels become jumbled and the images melt into one another.

In the solo piece “50/50” (2004), Ingvartsen ironically approaches the theatrical gestures of opera singers and rock stars along with their emotional potential. Clothed only in an orange-colored wig and sneakers, she stands, like the dancers in “Manual Focus,” with her back to the audience . And she once again irritates our expectations, moving between pathos and an eroticism thwarted by a comical shaking of her behind. The staging of authentic emotional worlds that flip to the ridiculous and the grotesque are replicated, exceeded, or thwarted in song as well as through the face and body—displaying the transfer of movement between body and mind in all its fragility.

“It’s in the air” goes a step further, not only questioning the images of the body; but also asking what dance can do in particular. As in Ingvartsen’s other two works, “It’s in the air” neither avails itself of a theater system of representation nor simply places Ingvartsen among the choreographers who advocate (the surely erroneously named) “concept dance.” Rather, it appears a new interest in dance, in motion itself, is on the rise. But is this really the case? And if it so, then why?

Bodies in Motion

What connects, in the further sense, these three productions from Ingvartsen appears to lie in a politics of body movement. It is an approach that no longer only asks what the body is within a certain image regime, what it represents on stage, or how it can deconstruct this representation (as Jérôme Bel has done in the last years). This approach also asks what a body in motion can do.
How does it come into motion? What are the modi of the choreographic that frame the specificity of kinesthetic experience? Which transfers are required? Which experiences can be conveyed to the audience? How are they conveyed?

This is not about “pure dance,” however. Rather, interest in “choreography as an organizing maneuver between different forms of expression” (E. Salamon) brings together different elements: the drifting movements that do not yield permanently to any sense attribution, the process that undermines the work character of a performance, and, ultimately, the question of the meaning of the concretization of the moving body on stage—a moving body that even if it defies determination still caries as its political potential the possibility of action, of “relating through movement.”

With all its border crossings into other fields, dance as an art form retains something specific, something unique to sharpen the viewer’s perception and experience of movement. The experimental attempts and procedures I’ve described reveal the specificity of dance by showing exactly what it means to conceive of a body in motion.

- Excerpted from Kirsten Maar, “What a Body Can Do,” TdZ (March 2009) -