Throwing Body into Fight: A Portrait of Raimund Hoghe - Brossura

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ISBN 10: 1783200340 ISBN 13: 9781783200344

Casa editrice: Intellect L & D E F A E, 2013

Riassunto

Throwing the Body into the Fight is the first English-language publication dedicated to the German choreographer Raimund Hoghe. Curated and edited by Mary Kate Connolly, the book operates as a collage, drawing together a variety of international voices to create a fragmented portrait of the artist. Lavishly illustrated with photographs by Rosa Frank, who has collaborated closely with Hoghe for two decades, this book will be welcomed by all who admire a man described by the New York Times—in its review of Hoghe’s 2012 “Pas de Deux” with Japanese dancer Takashi Ueno—as “a lover of romance and beautiful things.”

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull'autore

Mary Kate Connolly is a freelance writer who has written on performance for a variety of publications in the United Kingdom and abroad, including Dance Theatre Journal, RealTime, Londondance, and Forum Modernes Theater.

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

Throwing the Body into the Fight

A Portrait of Raimund Hoghe

By Mary Kate Connolly, Rosa Frank, Boris Charmatz, Laurent Goumarre

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2013 Individual Contributors
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78320-034-4

Contents

In Conversation, 7, 
Editor's Note 18 In Conversation, 9, 
An Introduction to Raimund Hoghe by Mary Kate Connolly, 21, 
Lettere Amorose: Lois Keidan, 32, 
Raimund Hoghe's Emblems of Absence by Gerald Siegmund, 37, 
In Conversation, 51, 
Lettere Amorose: Finola Cronin, 52, 
Luca Giacomo Schulte, 54, 
Rosa Frank, 60, 
In Conversation, 63, 
Undone by Martin Hargreaves, 65, 
Lettere Amorose: Philipp Gehmacher, 78, 
In Conversation, 82, 
Guerre et Paix by Laurent Goumarre, 85, 
Young People, Old Voices, 90, 
In Conversation, 92, 
Lorenzo De Brabandere 98 Emmanuel Eggermont, 96, 
Ornella Balestra, 100, 
Lettere Amorose: Boris Charmatz, 102, 
In Conversation, 106, 
Stay a While: Raimund Hoghe's Histories by Dominic Johnson, 109, 
Lettere Amorose: Meryl Tankard, 114, 
In Conversation, 116, 
Lettere Amorose: Franko B, 118, 
In Conversation, 120, 
Photo Archive, 124, 
Contributor Biographies, 134, 
Credits, 140, 

CHAPTER 1

Lois Keidan

Lettere Amorose

As is the way with the most interesting artists, I first heard about Raimund Hoghe, not from a critic or a curator, but from another artist, Ajaykumar. Artists always know about significant artists and ideas way ahead of others, and this is often the case for those artists who are marginalized within more traditional cultural frameworks because of the radical nature of their practices and approaches. For an artist so explicitly addressing issues of cultural identity, disability and sexuality as Raimund Hoghe was in his first solo performance Meinwärts, it was, sadly, no surprise that he was ignored by most critics and curators. It took them years to catch up, but catch up they did, and I am delighted that Raimund is now one of the most celebrated choreographers and performance makers in the world.

But back to 1994 and Ajaykumar. Catherine Ugwu and I were running the performance space at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and were developing new programming strands that set out to reflect, contextualize and support the highly politicized performances being created by a new generation of artists in the UK and internationally (especially those forged in the culture wars raging across the USA). Ajay was keen to tell us about a German artist he had recently met, Raimund Hoghe, and a piece he had created about the life and death of the Jewish German singer Joseph Schmidt in the 1940s, and the ways in which Hoghe used Schmidt's experiences to mirror the AIDS pandemic and the rise of neo Nazis in the 1990s.

We were excited and intrigued, and immediately invited Raimund to London to present Meinwärts in a season we were curating about the relationships between biography and autobiography; how artists were telling the stories of themselves through the lives of others. Meinwärts proved to be one of the most exhilarating and moving performances that many of us had experienced for years. Unlike Hoghe's presentations of the piece in Germany and Austria where, he told us, many in the audience had walked out in disgust at its content, audiences in London were rapt and in turn Raimund felt that he had, at last, found a context for his work in Live Art.

Of course things have changed enormously since those days and Raimund's work is now feted by the Dance world as much as the Live Art world, graces the world's grandest stages and is acclaimed by critics. But what has not changed is the uncompromising nature of Hoghe's work and his extraordinary vision and integrity as an artist.

CHAPTER 2

Gerald Siegmund

Raimund Hoghe's Emblems of Absence

The empty stage is lined by five young men with lowered heads and downcast eyes. They listen attentively to the Mozart tune that fills the air. One by one, the little man in black calls out their names. One by one they leave the stage to take a seat in the auditorium. The sound of their names reverberates in our head. They are gone, and where they once were, only emptiness remains. They have changed sides. They are with us now, but since they have thus opened up the space of the stage, by extension we might equally well have been where they once were. They become stand-ins for us, stand-ins in the place where we are not – which is the stage. Their absence is marked in the course of the performance by a bunch of flowers that Raimund Hoghe leaves in their stead. At the end, when Lettere Amorose is over, he will call them by name again. They will rise from their seats to take up again the places they had at the beginning. But now, they hold on to a bunch of flowers.

Flowers take the place of a person, who is a substitute for everybody in the audience. What we watch is therefore our own absence from the scene that is performed for us. An absence that is made felt by stressing it. Objects stand in for something absent – that is one way of characterizing the performances of Raimund Hoghe.

After the young men have left, Hoghe brings on lots of other objects from the wings. A glass of water and small bundle of flowers, little paravants, a pair of wooden Japanese shoes, Mikado sticks and, above all, various pieces of fabric which he will unfold in the course of the performance. He will dip the flowers in the glass to toss the water over his shoulder while kneeling on a long piece of cloth. He will hide behind the paravants like a small boy would lie behind them seeking shelter from the wind on a beach. He will build houses with little sticks and then destroy them again. He will traipse across the stage wearing the shoes with his head covered by a veil.

The connection between Raimund Hoghe's art and ritual, which I will explore in this text, has its origin in this time-consuming attention to detail. Every step and every gesture are meticulously articulated by a performer who is completely absorbed in what he does. He appears calm and composed, almost neutral, displaying no emotions while performing. Rigidly he adheres to a fixed sequence of steps and gestures whose rules are not to be altered, or the act performed might lose its magical power. In little choreographies, Hoghe performs geometrical patterns on the floor. He structures space and time as if the world would lose its coherence if the patterns were broken. But perhaps the world is already broken, and Hoghe establishes order where there is none simply by performing. He casts a spell over his objects in order to work miracles. All this draws on ritual practices, but as I would like to argue, it is at the same time closely linked to a poetic practice. Both ritual and poetry make use of the strategic device of repetition that serves a commemorative purpose. Raimund Hoghe's poetic rituals remember the absence of bodies and people, an absence that remains inscribed into the very presence of performing. To conceptualise this, I will draw on Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory and melancholy to define Hoghe's art as the production of what I call 'emblems of absence.'

A Space for His Body

In all of his pieces, Raimund Hoghe acts as a master of ceremonies. Just watch him lead dancer Sarah Chase back to her seat in the first row of the auditorium in Sarah, Vincent et moi, while he protectively holds a Japanese umbrella over her head. The space is his. The performances that take place here are tied to his body. In Lettere Amorose he takes off his shirt to reveal his hump. A red line marks the crookedness of his spine. With arms open wide he turns himself along the back wall of the stage thus measuring its distance according to the form and dimension of his body. His body is a presence in the space of the symbolic site of representation that is the theatre. He is present in a space where people like him, especially in the world of dance with which he associates himself, are traditionally absent. The objects with which he performs only take on meaning in relation to his body in a performative act that actually puts them to use. His pieces are dialogues with objects.

Dialogue with Objects

In The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels), where he unfolds his theory of melancholy, Walter Benjamin is above all a reader of Baroque literature and dramatic texts, a fact that is as banal as it is crucial for his perception of melancholy. Like his own times – the book was written in 1925 – Benjamin considers the seventeenth century a time of decline and fall. The Baroque period for Benjamin becomes an allegorical signature for his own times: the conditions of modernity. Benjamin's world, like Hoghe's, is already broken. What was lost then was the eschatological horizon that instils phenomena with meaning and gives them a reason to exist. The experience of seventeenth-century men and women is therefore marked by the uncertainty about the status of objects and, by extension, their own subjectivity and its position in the order of things. What the reader, and above all the modern reader for whom the loss of (religious) certainties is a founding experience, is confronted with, is a set of hieroglyphic signs. Mute, they leave the reader at a loss about their significance and yet constantly appeal to his or her ability to rescue them from oblivion. As a vivid reminder of death they become mementi mori filling the absence with their fetishistic presence. As with Freud, melancholy for Benjamin – and in extension in my argument concerning Raimund Hoghe – is not so much the loss of an object. Objects are indeed everywhere. It is the loss of a small detail about the object, which leaves the subject adrift towards its own absence from the field of meaning.

Still and immobile, the objects in Raimund Hoghe's pieces wait for an operation to be performed on them. They rely on the gaze of the reader, who is also a spectator, to take on a meaning. Only when the figures in space and time are looked at, when they display themselves to the melancholy allegorical eye for which their existence takes on a meaning, can they be saved from oblivion. Reading thus becomes a performative act that, paradoxically, rescues that which is already absent and dead. The objects saved will inevitably sink back into their state of unredeemability. Hoghe leaves them behind and moves on to the next object. They thereby remind the spectator of his or her own inevitable absence to be – which is death.

Emblems of Absence

In this respect, the musical dramaturgy of Raimund Hoghe's pieces takes on a different meaning. In his productions, every scene is accompanied by a song. For every image Hoghe creates on stage there is an atmosphere and a text that goes with it. The crucial point, here too, is the undefined space between stage and text, between the body performing and the body singing, between movement and voice. His pieces thrive on a series of dissociations that create absences between objects and meaning. There is no intrinsic motivation that links song to action, rather Hoghe as allegorical melancholic combines them in performance. These dissociations reconfigure voice and body into a visual phenomenon. The set-up of his pieces therefore resembles a sequence of emblems. An emblem consists of three parts: an inscriptio, or title, a pictura, the image that the title refers to, and the subscriptio, a kind of morale or meaning underneath the image. The allegorical images consist of heterogeneous parts already encoded with meaning, which are combined to produce a message. Since meaning, however, is no longer inherent in the objects as such, everything can indeed mean everything. In the Baroque tradition, the same items could mean different things in different contexts. To guide the viewer, who is at the same time a reader, towards the intended meaning, the titles were necessary.

Hoghe's emblems are of a much more open character. Since they have no titles, the combination of object-images and text does not produce a fixed meaning or morale. Yet the lyrics of the songs create a context for the actions on stage, opening up room for associations. In Lettere Amorose, the overall subject of the five letters that he reads out loud is alienation, being a stranger in a strange country. The songs that Hoghe has chosen are all sung in Italian, French or Greek. In a German context this hints at the experience of immigrants or guest-workers, of uprooted people far away from the place they call home. Hoghe's emblems do not overcome absence, but leave the space open for personal desire as a kind of memory that is never in the present, but always in the past future instead. Past future here means a prefiguring expectation of something that, by desiring or fearing it, already has the status of a past thing or event, even though it has not yet occurred (or might indeed never happen).

In Hoghe's performances, references to ballet as an art form and simultaneously as a space for desire are frequent. His piece Tanzgeschichten opens with music from The Nutcracker. Like Sarah, Vincent et moi and Dialogue with Charlotte it also includes strong images to Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. In Sarah, Vincent et moi, dancer Sarah Chase gets up from her seat in the first row of the auditorium. She lies down with her back to the audience lifting her left arm in the air. She tilts her wrist and twirls arm and hand as if it were the extended neck of a swan, while the central motif of Swan Lake is playing. Object-Images and music-text in Hoghe's pieces create emblems of absence that are emblems of desire for an Other that is forever out of reach.

Poetry, Ritual and Repetition

After what I have just outlined about the use of objects in Raimund Hoghe's pieces, can we still talk about ritual? On the one hand, clearly not. A ritual is grounded in a community's religious belief that does not question the sequence of events that belong to a ritualistic ceremony. It accepts the events unfolding and trusts in its outcome. It requires specialists like priests, who have been given the mandate by society to speak and act for everybody, to heal violence or other disruptive acts that would ultimately destroy the community. Since the Renaissance, our world has become increasingly secularized, and ever since Kant's Critique of Judgment in the late eighteenth century, art is part of the autonomous realm of aesthetics and not of religion. Our institution of the theatre depends upon this split, which is also a split between stage and auditorium. Things are presented from a distance for us to see, hear, feel and judge. Unlike ritual, art questions the rules of society and its ways of functioning. Art instils distrust and rupture, because it is not primarily a celebratory practice but a reflexive practice of signification.

On the other hand, perhaps we can talk of Raimund Hoghe's pieces as being rituals after all. Performance Studies scholars have repeatedly pointed towards a ritual aspect of performance and art that has survived its shift into the realm of autonomous aesthetics. In his text A Performative Approach to Ritual, Stanley J. Tambiah refers ritual to art which, in reverse, allows me to link art to ritual. According to Tambiah, ritual is a type of play which allows human beings to step out of their ordinary lives into the sphere of play with its own structures and rules. Therefore, the distinction between the religious and the secular in relation to ritual is a moot point. When playing, everything may acquire the status of holiness even when it does not have a religious meaning or content. A ritual seen as a playful activity also holds the dimension of a "staged performance" in which the participants use different channels and media to experience an event intensively. A ritual consists of various elements, the composition of which is characterised by the following devices: formality (conventionality), stereotypy (rigidity), condensation (convergence) and redundance (repetition).

On the basis of the form the ritual produces, Tambiah argues against the idea that rituals serve a primarily expressive purpose. In contrast to this, he holds that the formal elements mentioned above distance the participants from the event. Thus an immediate discharge of emotions or an expression of private feelings is replaced by a distant and therefore public and symbolic interaction not unlike that of a drama. Through its form in which repetition plays an important role, ritual acquires the status of poetry or art in general.

A hallmark of the arts and crafts – poetry, painting, dancing, music, pottery design and so on – is the reduction of the random by restraint (...), indeed the creation of recognizable patterns and unanticipated tensions and outcomes, by means of redundancy and recursive loops.

Referring to Roman Jacobson's structuralist definition of the functions of language, Tambiah defines the artistic and poetic dimension in ritual as a "recurrent returns" or a parallelism and resemblance of certain elements. Vice versa, the ritualistic dimension of art and poetry lies in the recurrent return of words, syllables and vowels that may culminate in rhyme. Ritual and art thus produces a "new organization" of elements as "the creative product of the spell." In poetry like in ritual, form becomes content. The content depends on the specific order of the elements and can therefore not be a linear message that is simply couched in words and communicated. Tambiah thinks of ritual as a "dramatic actualization whose distinctive structure including its stereotypy and redundancy has something to do with the production of a sense of heightened and intensified and fused communication." Through repetition and variation of patterns art is linked to ritual and ritual to art. The ritualistic dimension of art lies in its formal devices that do not communicate a simple message. Rather, communication consists in the emergence of a shared space of heightened communication. Just what it is that is communicated seems to be of secondary importance because it is already known and just needs to be re-emphasised by means of the performance.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Throwing the Body into the Fight by Mary Kate Connolly, Rosa Frank, Boris Charmatz, Laurent Goumarre. Copyright © 2013 Individual Contributors. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Intellect L & D E F A E
• Data di pubblicazione: 2013
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1783200340
• ISBN 13: 9781783200344
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 140
• Redattore: Connolly Mary Kate
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Germania