EssayMadelineFAC_eng

Madeline Ritter and Franz Anton Cramer Tanzfonds Erbe – Dance Heritage Fund: A Cure for Dance Loss A German Federal Cultural Foundation Funding Initiative for the History of Dance Since the early 20th century, dance has become one of the most important art forms of the Western canon. But it has not created any monuments. Whereas almost every city has museums of art and cultural history of all kinds, and the preservation of monuments is considered to be one of the most important tasks of state cultural policy, the historical dimension of dance is barely visible. Not only is this inappropriate given the significance of the art form, it also weakens its social recognition. TANZFONDS ERBE intended to address this sad reality. To some extent, the project to bring the history of dance into the living centre of society came about as a follow-up project to Tanzplan Deutschland, which was dedicated to substantially improving institutional and training structures for dance. The preservation of dance heritage was finally to be given a firm place in the overall cultural architecture.

TANZFONDS ERBE, initiated and funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and designed and realised by project director Madeline Ritter and her then partner Ingo Diehl, started in 2011 for a term of nine years. The programme brought the question of tradition and knowledge of the history of dance and its preservation to the cultural policy stage, even before the curtain could be drawn back, allowing artistic practices to be seen. The tanzfonds.de website states the following: “For many years, the history of modern dance was only visible in public to a limited extent – despite the fact that the international renown of numerous artists such as Mary Wigman, Dore Hoyer, Tatjana Gsovsky, Rudolf von Laban, William Forsythe, or Pina Bausch had its beginnings in Germany."

But dance heritage, despite its immaterial nature, also requires specialist knowledge, financial resources, and permanent engagement for it to be preserved: “Processing historical material is a time-consuming endeavour, copyrights are often not clarified, and rights of use, for example for original music, are expensive. In order to close this gap, the Federal Cultural Foundation initiated TANZFONDS ERBE.” “A Cure for Dance Loss” was what Tanzfonds itself called the project in the international context, describing the strategy in impressively simple words: “Involve many people from diverse backgrounds.”

“Make it easy to access available funding.”

“Talk about it frequently and to as many people as possible.”

Innovation and the Norm If dance wants to be the future, it faces major challenges – that was the diagnosis.

Because we had in fact fallen in love with what is all too present in the name of the contemporary, with constant innovation; we worshipped the surpassing of what had been by what is current. This rhetoric has been an intrinsic part of modern dance since 1

around 1900. It even has become a neo-imperialist instrument as a result, used to evaluate the development of the world and its artistic achievements. But this was certainly not what the pioneers of modern dance had intended. On the contrary, for them it was about social progress, even the utopia of a better life. Just think of Isadora Duncan’s The Dance of the Future manifesto from 1904. And Rudolf von Laban, Mary Wigman, Ruth St. Denis, and many others also paid homage to such rhetoric: In the first decades of the 20th century, it was about forging a better future worth living from the presence of the body: humanist sparks from the flint of creativity.

But in contrast to monument preservation or the art collection of a museum, the “monuments” of dance cannot be addressed solely by using technical knowledge and scientific instruments. Because dance is stored in the memory of the body. Its education and formation, its gestures and postures, its potential and its fragility – “the subtle nuances of human feeling”, as the French dialect researcher and director of the Paris Museum of Voice and Gesture, Roger Dévigne, described it in 1935 – present a gigantic treasure trove of experience.

However, this presents us with a problem, or more precisely, a communication problem: Linking current artistic intentions with the values and facts of historical development creates a category that has always given cause for unrest – the norm.

Whether academic, neoclassical, modern, or contemporary: Normative requirements against which all all those involved feel obliged to measure themselves are always present. The history of modern stage dance – torn between the poles of preservation and change, canonisation and reform, and on top of that harried and monitored in everything it does by the instances of taste, criticism, the public sphere, and morality – is primarily presented as a process of constantly redefining the balance between keeping the rules and breaking them. This applies no less to the appropriation of history and the handling of past works. Many questions arise during this process: When we look back, what can we actually see, what can we hear, what can we discern? Are we dealing with the works? The feelings? The forms? Is it about intangible assets like hope, which modern dance expressed, is it about the dreams? Or is it rather about the material appearances, about the body, the possibilities it hides? About the archival material? About the performance venues and the audience?

The reality of dance is characterised by subjective experience – of the dancer, but also of the spectator. However, it is also defined by the respective regimes of visibility that make dance possible in the first place – even in its historical forms of storage. These forms of memory include not only the works themselves. It is perhaps the middle ground and the background that are far more revealing: the schools and teachers, the techniques and methods used for training, the economic situation and the entertainment industry, the social prestige of art, the influence of the media on what is seen and shown, concepts of beauty, role models and power relations, not to mention body ideals and gender systems. Even though individual figures have been in the foreground throughout the context of art as it has developed since the dawn of the 2

modern era in the Western world: The individual elements of art, and of course the art of dance as well, remain incomprehensible without the totality of the artistic relationships. “There is a link between cabinet decisions and the way candidates move in entrance exams – this link must be understood”, Gérard Mayen wrote in 2012 in his study of contemporary dance training in France.

Invitation to Dance TANZFONDS ERBE was an “invitation to dance” – with history. Carl Maria von Weber’s famous composition of the same name from 1819, which inspired Vaslav Nijinsky’s erotic choreography Spirit of the Rose one hundred years later, was passed on to numerous others after a further one hundred years: artists, institutions, authorities, archives, the audience. They were to address the question of their own past, the history of their discipline, the aesthetics of appropriation, and the study of the sources.

The instructions were quite broad. The website states: “Ritter and Diehl [who developed the Tanzfonds Erbe project] deliberately agreed not to specify a canon of important historical works. They wanted the applicants themselves to decide and argue their case as to why the historical choreographers, works, and themes they selected are of significance to the present. This open approach allowed dance history to be addressed in a range of different ways.”

In fact, all those interested reacted differently; moreover, the sixty heritage projects funded bear eloquent witness to this. Both the names of the historical figures and the list of works – and also the diversity of the developed formats for research, presentation, communication, and documentation – in turn tell of the complexity of historical events in the present. The interest presented in the applications was almost evenly spread across pre- and post-war modernism: approximately twenty positions focused on the period up to 1940; and twenty on the period after 1950. These figures and their works – the list contained around thirty-five pieces – were addressed by a total of sixty contemporary artists from different genres, including of course choreography, but, in accordance with the overall approach of the funding programme, also film, directing, literature, and science. “A total of sixty projects were selected as examples of an artistic approach to dance heritage: The funded artists use a wide variety of archives for their in-depth research, work closely with experts, and also contribute to the clarification of copyright issues. The artistic results of these processes give the public access to a vivid dance history that was previously reserved for a handful of experts. The resulting productions become part of the programmes at the participating theatres and dance companies. A guest performance fund set up in 2014 for the TANZFONDS ERBE projects promotes the national visibility of the works.” (tanzfonds.de) And this diversity is also the main finding of the project: The history of dance in its present form does not come across as dogmatic, there is no fixed form, no cast-iron specification as to how historical aspects should be envisioned or what they should 3

consist of. In any case, TANZFONDS ERBE was not interested in a new canon (even if the project may have resulted in the creation of a new one or confirmation of the old).

The diversity of artistic interests is reflected more in the diversity of answers to the question as to what the history of dance actually is and where it is to be found.

So there has been a total of sixty funded projects in the period from 2012 to 2019 – examining the significance of heritage today in many different forms, including exhibitions, books, films, installations, concerts, lecture performances, new productions, new creations, online projects, participation, performance, reenactment, re-creation, re-construction, symposiums, text documentation, and presentations; performed in individual presentations and at festivals, programme series and university modules, free production houses and municipal theatres, museums, archives, and public spaces.

In total, according to internal statistics, in the first funding phase from 2012 to 2014 alone, 100,000 spectators were reached – with both local productions and guest performances. If you add the approximately 1,800 project participants and 500 other participants (research, communication, archiving, etc.), it makes for an impressive panorama of reception. This trend continued in the second funding phase, with fewer large establishments involved but with the scope remaining constant at 90,000 spectators. At first, no one dared to hope that there would be so much interest. But it was not only the audiences who discovered their passion for tradition; the artists also overcame their initial scepticism and continued to present new research topics and concepts.

Working with History And so the work with dance history was taken up across a broad front. As a result, TANZFONDS ERBE demonstrated in particular how easily these complex past experiences could be made accessible to new bodies, new spectators, new forms of experiencing, how quickly the desire for the past could be rekindled. Most notably, the element of experience as an immaterial shell of appearances gave many artists the opportunity to address the fleeting nature of a dance work, for in the end it is not the form that is transitory but the effect it has on the observer.

The connection between history and the present in dance is so complicated because no one is ever outside of history and one’s own oeuvre is constantly changing in time.

Seen in this way, there is no original version in dance, only constant reshaping, the passing on of material – be it visually, mentally, somatically, aesthetically, or otherwise.

It is always the impressions and experiences that define both the effect and the interpretation of dance works; they emerge as momentary constellations at a particular point in time and almost never retain a permanent form.

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Rudolf von Laban concluded in 1929: “The art reaches the people through dance works that are reproducible according to written record.” Because, as he correctly realised, in order to establish itself within a culture of the monumental, dance would have to objectify itself beyond its ephemeral and experience-based appearance. Laban himself was one of the most ardent supporters of this idea. According to his work programme, a work could only, or at best, be handed down in written form, as a source in the broadest sense. But this understanding also includes the super-personal: “Today, only very few people see the impersonal dance work, most only see the dancer and his personal peculiarities,” he added.

But Laban was wrong here, as we know today: A work of dance must first and foremost be danced, because it is only in the here and now of the show, in the experiential constellation of the performance that its intention can be expressed, that it can reveal its entirely sensual effect, that it can cling to the dancing bodies like a waving robe. It is not without reason that the veil dances of Loïe Fuller are considered to be the first manifestation of modern dance, or that the veil dance, which simultaneously conceals and reveals, presents pictures and takes forms, is associated with seduction (which is why Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils became a symbol of the Art Nouveau). It is only in the performance that the work can be read, enjoyed, loved, even desired.

If one assumes that interiority and visualisation are crucial elements of tradition in dance, then there still does not seem to be a sustainable solution to the problems connected to preservation. Interiority and visualisation are not part of any form that one might describe as a work in contrast to mere execution – unlike many other forms of art. Dance works can only be experienced directly, unless they are transmitted using other media, such as photographs or notations, or, as is more often the case, through film and video. In addition to performances at theatres and the numerous lessons offered, it is precisely these visual records that can always be found somewhere in this world dominated by the media – on YouTube, in music videos, in films, libraries, and archives, or even in new works.

In this context, the documentation concept of TANZFONDS ERBE, under the direction of Isabel Niederhagen, takes on a special significance. All the funded projects were recorded by the video documentary maker Andrea Keiz; this resulted in recordings of the performances, process documentation, and expert interviews. The rights to publish the videos were obtained from all of the participants, while music licenses were acquired from the composers and music publishers. The tanzfonds.de digital archive makes comprehensively prepared and multifaceted knowledge available. The filmic documents provide low-threshold access, without compromising the quality of the content. This aspect resulted, not least, in the project winning the 2016 European Union Prize for Cultural Heritage / Europa Nostra Award. The jury recognised dance heritage as European heritage for the very first time – on a par with projects for the preservation of monuments and museum practice.

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Artistic Responses A large number of the funded and realised projects aimed at revival, new stagings, new creations, or reworkings of mostly full-length choreographic works. With great care and the helpful advice of former dancers, companions, or teachers of the respective dance artists, it was about presenting as true a picture as possible of the works that wrote stage history. The most prominent example is Oskar Schlemmer’s The Triadic Ballet (1922) in the new version by Gerhard Bohner dating from 1977, now danced by the Bavarian Junior Ballet Munich. Two dancers who had directly participated in Bohner’s project, Ivan Liška and Colleen Scott, were involved, as was Nele Hertling of the Akademie der Künste, who was the initiator of both the 1977 and 2014 versions.

Resplendent with recreated costumes, the work is to be shown at theatres, museums, and festivals, especially for the Year of Bauhaus 2019.

But representatives of post-war modernism and dance theatre have also been addressed. The list of funded projects includes works by Uwe Scholz, Susanne Linke, Reinhild Hoffmann, Pina Bausch, Kenneth Macmillan, and Johann Kresnik. Ballett Rossa created a new version of Jochen Ulrich’s 1990 ballet Lulu at Halle Opera House in 2015, and several works by Mary Wigman were on stage in Osnabrück (Städtische Bühnen), Berlin (Sophiensæle), and Dresden (Societaetstheater).

The Green Table But it was not always about a presentation of works at full length and as close to the original as possible. Many projects focused on other aspects of the life of choreographic works: the history of their effect, for example. Olga de Soto carried out focused research on Kurt Jooss’s classic The Green Table (1932). In contrast to works in the category of “reconstruction/new staging”, The Green Table has never been off the programme. De Soto asked why this anti-war ballet has been able to survive all over the world for so many decades. Since the early 2000s, de Soto has been researching the reception history of key works from the history of dance, in Histoires (2003) on The Young Man and Death (1946) by Roland Petit, in Une introduction (2010), and in Débords: Reflections on the Green Table (2012). Thanks to the support of TANZFONDS ERBE, she was able to conduct interviews with eyewitnesses all over the world and develop a performance installation that staged a large number of eyewitness reports, retracing the emergence of the legend that The Green Table has become.

Undo, Redo, and Repeat The work of remembering and passing on dance experience was looked at by Christina Ciupke and Anna Till in their undo, redo and repeat project (2014), which was also based in part on an installation approach. This project asked the question: Which part of dance knowledge, experience, and physicality is passed on through the generations, forming the framework of knowledge for the future, in that the dance works are preserved in their sensuality. It was not just direct contemporary witnesses and bearers of artistic knowledge who were important during this process, but also the 6

experiences of spectators and “outsiders”; in other words, the indirect recipients of the works were allowed to have their say too.

Gertrud Bodenwieser Jochen Roller’s project The Source Code (2014) – one of the projects that are still ongoing to this day, and which has even exceeded itself so to speak – was designed as active archiving. The Austrian expressionist dancer Gertrud Bodenwieser went into exile in Australia in 1938 and built a new artistic life for herself there. Roller undertook wide-ranging research on Bodenwieser’s new life: conducting interviews, collecting archive material, sifting through correspondence, and working on her choreographies.

He rejected the idea of a “reconstruction”, even though the choreographies of Gertrud Bodenwieser (in particular Errand into the Maze, 1954) constitute a large part of the project – but as “non-reconstruction”. The handling of sources (in particular film recordings), the conceptual difficulty of reconstructions, and the technical and historical distance forced Roller to circle the work instead of claiming it in a specific form. This process is not to be understood on stage but rather through the knowledge mode of the website. The form of choreographic works in time remains an unsolved problem or a never-ending task – this was evidenced not only in The Source Code but throughout TANZFONDS ERBE. Just in Time Quite apart from individual works or artists, the artist duo deufert+plischke worked on the Just in Time (2016) project. Initially, people from three cities – Berlin, Tel Aviv, New York – wrote “letters to dance” at the invitation of the duo and documented their personal bond, their experiences, their desires, their experience of dance. This became a book as well as dance events with all of the participants – one could call them dance heritage balls – where the communal elements in memory formation were celebrated (most recently in Brussels, 2019).

It is clear from these few examples that, according to the present understanding, the history of dance can no longer simply be discussed as the history of canonical works.

Indeed, the complex processes of appropriation and selection are the subject of critical examination – an examination that generally scrutinises the understanding of history and does not accept the existence of works as timeless revelation, but rather strives to re-record this in temporality itself, and thus also in the present.

Depot Erbe This approach perhaps also governed the most open examination of the topic of heritage, namely the exhibition and discourse project “Depot Erbe” in 2017 at Theater Freiburg and the local Museum of Modern Art. This project did not actually address the individual works or artistic legacy of prominent choreographers; instead it focused on the higher-level aspects of heritage. In a series of lectures and artistic interventions, it addressed power structures and interpretive power – meaning the respective 7

appropriation of the inherited, this “confused archive of secret and hidden legacies where our voices interweave”, as it says in the description. As was evidenced at the groundbreaking participatory exhibition “Familienmacher: Vom Festhalten, Verbinden und Loswerden”, about the intangible relationships of kinship, family, and heritage, which was on at Vienna Museum of Ethnology at the same time as the beginnings of TANZFONDS ERBE (2011/2012), it turns out that the conditions of ownership, knowledge, and tradition are essentially made up of the immaterial, and we can only have time-bound traces and materialisations of these at hand. We build our relationships ourselves, so to speak, we change history to suit us. And so it becomes clear that the presence of the reality of dance, and the dialogical principle inherent to it, the principle of simultaneity and participation, also requires analogue thought spaces, even in the age where the digital world is constantly present. This includes correspondence, archives, or memorandums on aspects of dance, on the protagonists and the social realities. They preserve what is beyond the reach of pure experience and sheer visibility. But the actual immaterial element of dance – its specific combination of presence, spirituality, and aspects of materiality – means it can only be preserved through action.

Material of Eternity No dance work can be identical to itself. We know that quite clearly from the recent past, for example in the works of Pina Bausch and William Forsythe, who continually made changes and for whom there ultimately was and is no “definitive form of the work”. It is instructive that, for these two artists in particular, the efforts at selfarchiving are especially extensive and new technologies as well as new archiving concepts are being developed in order to do justice to this constant process of change, which is at the same time the essential artistic resource.

This is why the term reconstruction is used very reluctantly in professional circles. Of course, there is no original version in the narrow sense, and even if there were, purely formal accordance cannot suffice; after all, it is always about the experiential qualities too, the memories, subjectively seeing and remembering. This entails specific forms of transmission and appropriation, the making of history, which are addressed not only in the TANZFONDS ERBE projects. The exhibition project “Retrospective by Xavier Le Roy”, which was created in 2012 and has since been shown around the world, also deals with exactly this question. On Le Roy’s website, one finds the following short description of Retrospective: “Retrospective is an exhibition involving 6 performers unfolding in 3 gallery spaces. Each edition is created with local artists and produced by the museum inviting the work.”

Two aspects form the core of the project: implementation in a museum context and the participation of different performers from the respective local contexts. The theme of the exhibition is the solo works of Xavier Le Roy since 1996. But it is precisely about not showing or performing these solo works at full length. With all of the participants 8

developing and presenting their own subjective view of the subject matter of the exhibition, transformation, change, adaptation, and the performative elements are integrated directly into the exhibition, indeed they are the actual subject matter. Thus, both the subjectively experienced presence of the performance (the “immaterial”) and the historical evidence, as it were, the factual aspects of what has become reality (the “material” form of the work), are preserved in the medium of the body and the medium of observation.

Reconstructions, as artistic activist Emil Hrvatin alias Janez Janša once said, are therefore impossible, simply because the audience cannot be reconstructed. What the audience experiences is closely linked to the many levels on which the individual is constituted – education, social background, gender, and many other aspects. Dance is contemporary, even if it is historical, even if it has been snatched from eternity in order to appear in the present; works are contemporary, according to Giorgio Agamben, first and foremost in one’s own body. Because there is no cultural policy that is capable of making the body eternal. But the tensions between the time-bound manifestation of dance and the continuous inner drive, in which the history asserts itself – these relationships can indeed be preserved. This has been shown by the TANZFONDS ERBE initiative.

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