Erbestatements_Eng

Jochen Roller, Berlin Choreographer I have never been interested in the reconstruction of dance. Of all the art forms, I chose contemporary dance because its fleetingness holds this magical potential to be open to rejuvenation.

If I want, I can simply change a choreography from one performance to another. With a painted image exhibited in a gallery, this is difficult, as it is with a printed book in a bookstore. That is why I have never understood why choreographies should be archaeologically excavated. A choreography is not a painted picture or a printed book.

But when TANZFONDS ERBE was set up, I did indeed become interested in dance reconstruction.

When six-figure funding comes into play, an artist can become interested in pretty much anything.

And so I came to my dance heritage.

My dance heritage is the work of Gertrud Bodenwieser. The Australian part of her work, mind you.

Because in my search for a dance heritage, I realised that it is a very competitive capital market in which artists and scientists claim ownership of a dance heritage that cannot defend itself against being appropriated.

I too have obtained such heritage by devious means. Interviews with contemporary witnesses, library research, site visits. Suddenly, I was an “expert”; I was invited to conferences, even though I had just become proficient in my heritage. As an “expert”, it is strange to speak about a choreography whose movements the body has not yet properly mastered. The market demands such experts. Experts impart certainty that dance heritage can actually be preserved. Questions about Bodenwieser? Ask Roller.

Of course I know almost nothing about Gertrud Bodenwieser. I studied her work for six months; she choreographed for thirty-five years and created over two hundred pieces.

If I do know something about Bodenwieser, it’s that she was constantly changing. Because for her, the fleetingness of dance was its greatest asset. She had never been interested in dance heritage.

And didn’t ever want her works to be reconstructed.

My dance heritage is therefore not a reconstruction that I tour festivals with. My dance heritage is a feeling. It is principles such as: Improvisation belongs to a class of technique, or: Misunderstanding creates the most beautiful dances. It is the exchange with and connection to contemporary witnesses you can never again let go of. And so I went from being a legacy hunter to being a dance heir myself.

End Statement Roller

Carena Schlewitt Artistic Director/ HELLERAU – European Centre for the Arts, Dresden André Schallenberg Programme Director for Theatre and Dance/ HELLERAU – European Centre for the Arts, Dresden For our work at HELLERAU – European Centre for the Arts, we are interested in the commonly used term ‘heritage’ for the ambiguity of what it means: a complex conglomerate of the notions of tradition, identity and homeland; a progressive and inspiring basis for different cultures; but also a power structure, a burdensome, restrictive evil.

HELLERAU lives from, and with, a complex historical heritage: equally a part of the royal seat of Dresden as the utopic garden city of Hellerau; as an architectural vision in the shape of the festival theatre built by Heinrich Tessenow; as the birthplace of early dance modernism in Europe, and avantgarde theatre, at the start of the 20th century; and as a site for the revival of independent performing arts and contemporary music after the fall of the wall in 1989. But the festival theatre is also imbued with the heritage of its many years of military usage – as a police and SS barracks during the Second World War and as a gymnasium for the Soviet Union’s Red Army after 1945. Lying atop all these historical layers today is a highly topical and explosive social development that also has very deep roots in Dresden and Saxony: right-wing populist movements such as Pegida are claiming for themselves alone the preservation of a ‘German heritage’, that there’s a need for protection against alleged ‘foreign infiltration’.

So HELLERAU, as a Dresden institution, is in many respects a ‘heritage bearer’, with both positive and problematic connotations. For us, this heritage primarily means an obligation towards further treatment within our artistic programme – as a co-production and residency partner for numerous choreographers and companies regionally, nationally and internationally; as an active partner in the Alliance of International Production Houses; as the host for major utopian undertakings such as the Dance Congress 2019; or as a comrade-in-arms for Tanzpakt Dresden (Dance Pact Dresden) together with the Villa Wigman für TANZ (Villa Wigman for Dance) association. We are less interested in the notion of heritage as a purely historical dimension, but rather as a seismograph of our era.

By funding reconstructions, Tanzfonds Erbe (the Dance Heritage Fund) has done invaluable work for cultural memory and the appreciation of dance as an art form. Based on this foundational work, (dance) heritage now needs to be seen as material and as a catalyst, in order to talk about the present and future. In 2019, we launched the festival Erbstücke (Heirloom) for this purpose. Heritage must always be looked at and investigated anew from all sides, as this is the only way that it can ‘move with the times’. These maxims apply to our treatment of HELLERAU’s heritage and dance heritage in equal measure.

Susanne Traub Deputy Head of the Theatre and Dance Division/ Goethe-Institut, Munich With his notion of the Dionysian and Apollonian principle, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche made a dynamic suggestion as to how humankind and the world, and therein dancing and thinking, may interrelate. By contrast, René Descartes’ earlier suggestion – “I think, therefore I am” – adheres to a certain static. Taking these two philosophical positions alone already creates a dilemma, a ‘bang in the middle’ when dealing with subject and object, with past and present, with body and mind.

Dealing with activities of dance and thought influenced the way I approached the former and my involvement with it. This relationship was always productive when I was unable to evade history and dance heritage: in the midst of sources, notations and documents; of bodily inscriptions, drawings, images, codes and narratives; of analysis, evaluation and interpretation of objective and subjective observations, through various lenses; of mechanisms; of abstraction, distance and reflection; of involving and experimenting – in a jumble arose assumptions, speculations, settings, certainties, uncertainty and a discarding of questions and answers while at the same time taking them up.

Observation, perception and movement. Exchange and access.

For me, moving in and with the complex of dance means moving in history. It means managing a heritage (to put it slightly more technically) and doing that entirely irrespective of whether I’m conducting artistic or scientific research, developing projects, curating, teaching, or fostering cultural exchange.

Dance is a somatic activity that is rooted in the present but, rather than skipping the past, it brings it into society and influences social awareness, generates experience and even helps to explain the world’s basic interrelations. Using the broader concept of dance, choreography and philosophy generates participation in a common history of body and subject.

For thinking in bodies, a broad range of treatments of dance heritage is absolutely, and urgently, necessary so that the past can’t haunt us with repression.

Andrea Amort, Vienna Dance historian and dramaturge Remembering and preserving dance heritage in Vienna, and continuing it into a future, has a lot to do with the passionate interest to manage different types of projects with extreme care despite the lack of resources. This includes the publication of the first history of dance in Austria, österreich tanzt.

Geschichte und Gegenwart (Austria Dances. Past and Present; Böhlau, 2001); the event series Dance in exile since 1998, also with an exhibition (Theatre Museum Vienna, 2000); the dance focus of the festivals tanz.2000.at and Touches. Dance before 1938 – Dance today (Odeon theatre, Vienna, 2008); the first publication of the monograph Hanna Berger. Spuren einer Tänzerin im Widerstand (Hanna Berger. Following the Traces of a Dancer in the Resistance; Brandstätter, 2010); and the foundation of the Dance Archive Vienna at the der Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna (MUK) in 2015.

My work with dance heritage thus oscillates between applied and theoretical research, and curatorial and organisational activities.

What has moved me since the outset, at a time when I was still a journalist, is the social question of how I can support the dance genre and make its protagonists visible? For me, dance in Vienna has always been the genre that has needed and still needs to fight for recognition, visibility, appreciation and a perception of its own past, and therefore of ancestors. That my research focus shifted increasingly into the first half of the 20th century was to a large extent due to personalities who were active at this time and whom I still knew well myself. These included Rosalia Chladek and Andrei Jerschik, then increasingly personalities who had been ostracised by National Socialism, for example Wera Goldman, Stella Mann, Yehudit Arnon and the dance critics Walter Sorell, George Jackson and Giora Manor. It was in this connection that the attempts to ‘secure traces’ arose. It is important for me bring old and young together in an exchange and thereby activate a flow of information from doubtlessly (re-)constructed dance history.

Most recently, this idea advanced my concept for the exhibition Everybody dances. The Cosmos of Viennese Dance Modernism (Theatre Museum Vienna, 20/3/2019 – 10/2/2020), a co-operation with the MUK. This densely packed illustration uses documents such as rare new and historical films to depict the female-dominated early Viennese dance movement and includes Austro-fascism, National Socialist policy, and exile. In another room, an attempt is made to use contemporary film samples to illustrate an artistic succession associated with the interwar period, using both dance techniques and content-related material. Film material by Carol Brown, Thomas Kampe, Amanda Piña, Doris Uhlich, Simon Wachsmuth and others is on show.

Complementary to this, I curated a multi-component dance programme entitled Rosalia Chladek Reenacted that showed young artists working with Chladek solos that have been handed down but also with works by Hanna Berger. Small performances run directly and regularly into the exhibition.

Its accompanying 384-page book with lexicon – Alles tanzt. Kosmos Wiener Tanzmoderne (Hatje Cantz, 2019) – also represents the notion of bringing the past to life from a present-day viewpoint and includes authors from various academic fields as well as dance artists.

Britta Wirthmüller, Berlin Choreographer An inheritance comes either unexpectedly or in the wake of long-nurtured hopes. Sometimes the legacy is a revelation, sometimes a burden, and sometimes it’s just totally different than expected.

As a dancer, choreographer, and teacher, I address dance heritage in two ways. On the one hand, there is the dance history which inhabits my own body and which has, for the most part, crept in uninvited. On the other hand, I’m fascinated by histories of dance that seem lost, and by how they lead me to search for traces in the archives, libraries, or living rooms of contemporary witnesses.

Recently, on the west coast of Canada, someone told me after she had seen me dancing that she immediately saw Mary Wigman’s influence both in the way I use space and in the clarity my body conveys. If we trust this observation, then we must ask what has been passed down to me through at least four generations? A technique, a model of motor skills, a body concept? It is a dance heritage I certainly did not ask for and did not consciously choose. Because when I began to study dance at the Palucca School at the age of nineteen, there was only one thing I wanted more than all else: to be a dancer. I was unaware and unconcerned about which tradition this dance education was rooted in.

Today – eighteen years later – Mary Wigman is still there, along with all the others. And slowly I have come to understand what I’ve inherited, as this kind of dance heritage has proven persistent.

Anything but fleeting and almost impossible to get rid of, this heritage usually leaves no traces in dance archives but remains all the more present in our bodies.

That’s one relation to dance heritage. The other lies in histories nobody speaks about and in questions regarding what this silence tells us about the present. What has changed and what repeats? What is lost and what endures? In the discourses, in bodies? How is it that one choreographer is forgotten and the works of another permeate so many archives and dissertations?

One such forgotten history is that of the German Jewish dancer and choreographer Ruth Abramowitsch Sorel. She went into exile in 1933, first to Poland, then Brazil, and later Canada. In my project Tracing Ruth Sorel, I followed the story of her life for one year and even lived in the places where she had been in exile. This is the dance heritage I actively seek – a historical search for clues, driven by the hope of finding the last living contemporary witness or that one dusty film reel in a theatre’s attic. At times, this undertaking resembles a forensic investigation, and often the search itself makes a stronger impression than the findings.

That being said, engaging with this form of dance heritage also raises the following question: What are we supposed to do if we don’t find anything? If there is nothing to inherit? Or if we had hoped for something else? Perhaps this disappointment marks the moment when the past connects most strikingly with the present. Perhaps it mirrors our prejudices and expectations and, at the same time, constitutes a challenge to deal with the empty spaces we find. To keep them open, exhibit them, give them space.

Dieter Heitkamp Professor and director of the Contemporary and Classical Dance department at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts Cultural Heritage in Dance was the topic of the 3rd Dance Education Biennale, held in Frankfurt am Main in 2012, and I was the event’s artistic director. The topic was a direct follow-up to Methods of Reconstruction, the focus of the 2nd Dance Education Biennale, which took place in Essen in 2010. It is clear to see from this that dance heritage is an important topic for the member institutions of the Dance Education Conference (AKT).

Culture, heritage and dance – what connections are there between these three terms?

What is considered dance heritage and by whom? What makes culture? What would a culture of dance transfer, of communicating in and about dance, look like? How are dance knowledge and body knowledge generated and how is access to this knowledge facilitated? What is being documented today and how, in order to make dancer heritage accessible for the future? How have dance creations and ideas been documented in the past and how do we deal with this documentation today?

These were the questions that students, education institutions and guest lecturers investigated intensively for a whole week in Frankfurt am Main – in performances, in workshops and training session, and in the public symposium BodyKnowledge. Detailed information can be found at http://2012.biennale-tanzausbildung.de and in the book documentation pARTnering documentation: approaching dance-heritage-culture by Edith Boxberger and Gabriele Wittman.

The 50th anniversary of the dance department at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts in 2011 was an opportunity for the team at ZuKT (the Contemporary and Classical Dance department) to ‘look forward through the past’. “ZuKT links tradition with innovation”. This is no empty phrase but rather a task and a challenge. It was, and is, about the necessity to reappraise the dance heritage of the dance department and dance in general. This has so far included treatment of the Frankfurt Ballet repertoire, of Rui Horta’s S.O.A.P. dance company, and of pieces that I choreographed at the Tanzfabrik in Berlin in the 1980s, but also Katharine Sehnert’s production of Mary Wigman’s Totentanz (Dance of Death) or Claudia Jeschke’s choreography Rötlicher Himmel (Reddish Sky), which was imbued with aspects of the artistic work carried out by Alexander Sacharoff and his partner Clotilde von Derp in the interdisciplinary concept of the Russian Roulette project.

Thomas Thorausch Deputy Director of the German Dance Archive, Cologne The archives’ work, which is essential in the field of dance, a fleeting art form, is to preserve and pass on the cultural heritage and diversity of dance creation for subsequent generations. This is the current self-assessment of the institutions that have come together in the Association of German Dance Archives (VDT).

So far, so good, so bad! The current view of archives and collections focusing on German dance history is being determined by the ubiquitous discourse on its uses. It is in this discourse, which now also includes dance policy, that notions such as heritage, heirlooms and heritage-bearers have found their feet – terms that, contrary to the best intentions, are also likely to drive out any remaining fantasy and creativity from dance archiving and the way its inventory is handled. A new generation of users is growing up and resolutely expressing the wish to deal with dance knowledge, which is precisely also the archives’ knowledge, in a way that is playful and creative rather than reverent and worshipful, and also to integrate this knowledge equally playfully and creatively into the context of education, teaching, research and artistic creation.

In light of the often helpless and uncomprehending reactions of today’s archivists (but also of dance academics) to this ‘turn’, it seems necessary to remember the early founders, and thus also the origin, of dance archives and collections – personalities who imbued their collections with their love of dance, in the truest sense of the words, and thereby created true ‘curiosity cabinets’ of ingenious and imaginative treatment of dance in the past, present and future; and transferred this love and enthusiasm to their users.

The key to dance dreams is lying in the archives. All you need is the courage to find it and use it.