Gertrud Bodenwieser, continued
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| Dancer Shona Dunlop in the role of Cain in Cain and Abel; 1940; Sydney, Australia. Photographer Unknown. |
I am not a dance historian but a working choreographer and dancer based in London. This activity of research and retrieval has been in part a quest to make sense of the disjunctive experience of growing up in one part of the world, the southern hemisphere, while learning to dance in the style of another part of the world, the Viennese style of Ausdruckstanz. It has also been part of a genealogical quest, a process of re-membering an artistic legacy largely invisible within dominant narratives of modern dance history.
To engage in genealogy involves recognizing the inscriptions of the past on the present. Genealogies of performance can be said to excavate the lineage of behaviors still at least partially visible in contemporary culture. Such an approach is indebted to Michel Foucault’s notion of a "critical genealogy" as "writing the history of the present." (5) Accordingly, history is concerned less with tracing origins than tracing displacements. Genealogy in this sense is about engaging in a choreography of memory and history at the site of the body in motion.
The 'I' stretches through the tendons and spilling, spinning, tripping, moves to an-other place.
Never to close the circle, keep it open, keep it whole.
The schöpfkreis. (6)
Gertrud Bodenwieser, in setting her own body in motion, also set other bodies in motion, and these movements were configured according to the evolving paradigms of her practice as dancer, educator, and choreographer. This is the story of her/my body. In the process of my "becoming dancer," it was her movement ideas, her language, and her philosophy that were translated to me. Or were they? History is about the construction of narratives from the present traces of the past. The transmission of dance knowledge between generations is a malleable process through which traces of dances and their movement fundamentals become reinscribed. The authority of these traces must always be circumspect, however, because the dance artifact exists only in the moment of its performance. As Ann Daly writes, dances are "by definition in constant evolution over time and through space." (7)
Does Bodenwieser’s movement writing still linger in the rippling action of the spine, the welle (the wave)? In the openness of the pelvis as a leg circles in a horizontal arc, the beinkries (leg circle)? In the circular movement of arms whipping above the head, the schlinge (the loop of a knot)? Does my own ongoing research into performance states and the body as a sculpture of time and space signal a continuation or a break with her legacy? What traces remain of her dancing?
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