The body’s art

Who stays? Who has to go? Not only oppositional forces like Alexei Navalny have to leave forever. The great change of directors in Russia’s ballet also includes the most famous sacking of all – that of Vladimir Urin from the Bolshoi in Moscow.

Every day, people stand in long queues at the gates of the Louvre in Paris to see ancient art. But sometimes, at night, you can even dance in front of these masterpieces. Choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker has fulfilled this dream.

Ten new issues have been published since the last Chronicle 2022. They are always about dance and what it does in this world. You could report on this in small bites. Or prepare a fresh culinary meal.

Australian dancer Josephine Ann Endicott is one of the treasurers of Pina Bausch’s legacy. And she is a great storyteller. Fifty years of Tanztheater Wuppertal leave no trace on anyone. Humour is the least it takes to be celebrated now with the …

We are in Western Pommerania: Will it be possible in a country whose coastline belongs entirely to tourists in the summer to create a year-round dance culture worthy of the name?

Trajal Harrell from New York works like an explorer. Just as Alexander von Humboldt once explored various cultures across the globe, Harrell seeks out the dances of modernity – voguing, Butoh, Black America. The world is now rewarding him for his endeavors with monographic shows and world tours.

Kyoto is – along with Osaka – the centre of classical Japanese arts. Traditions here are passed down from generation to generation, primarily through individuals who hold the status of “living national treasures”. Like Inoue Yashiyo V, the fifth teacher in a sequence of a dance called Kyomai

Allow me to introduce myself – the name’s Greenland. I am Mars on Earth. The comparison honors me because it is based on my incomparably beautiful scenery.

Oh how the word shimmers: Lazgi. In French it sounds like “lascar,” a sly fellow. It puts us in mind of the word lasciviousness, or Lascaux for the more historically minded – of the cave paintings left behind by prehistoric humans. It was also the discovery of prehistoric rock paintings that saw the Central Asian Lazgi declared one of the oldest dances still practiced today.

Uprisings in Iran come in waves. Again and again. But for the first time, women are dancing in the streets. The country banned them from dancing in 1979. Their headscarf, the hijab, falls. Their hands grab it like a flag in defiance. They set it on fire. Iran is in turmoil – a turmoil born out of hunger for food and freedom in a state that keeps its henchmen and inspectors alive with bureaucratic diligence. And its executioners.

In just ten years, Florentina Holzinger has appeared like a shooting star and then captured her own place in the night sky of European contemporary dance. Wherever she and her all-female troupe of dancers appear, they literally steal the breath away from their audience.

Culture is playing a different role. For eight years now, the independent state of Ukraine, since 31 years only, has been defending itself against the aggressor from the East. Only with weapons, as the news claims? What can defend the people who seek protection from invaders?

Mexico is the country that celebrates the dead. So it’s no wonder that cartels produce them like an assembly line, all the disappeared and murdered. And although no one believes it, in this country, dance is ensuring that the tide can turn again

Choreography has much more to do with a radicality and urgency of action than with consent and dancing along. This is true all over the world, without exception.

A shadow hangs over Namibia–– and not just because of the low-hanging sun over the picturesque Etosha salt pan. Despite all the romanticism surrounding the desert, peace remains elusive even in the wake of the return of the looted artworks to the former German colony. The relationship with those who erected the first German concentration camps is anything but resolved.

Rituals, Elders, Ancestors and lots of land in the Canadian West. Contemporary Indigenous dance is reviving in the Coast Salish Territories. In 1886, the urban settlement of Vancouver was founded here, the inhabitants were displaced. But now the wind is changing.

A mighty festival on the island of Ingøy in northernmost Norway unites audiences and dancers under Arctic skies. Not far from the Russian border, the theatre is celebrating the landscape. Among us: Hans-Thies Lehmann, the late doyen of post-dramatic theatre. For him, landscape was both the adversary and the centre of theatre. A festive description and a last text by him.

The most artistically successful ballet company in the world currently hails from Marseille. Anyone can attend the rehearsals of the Ballet National de Marseille, even the administrative staff. Headed by a three-person collective, this giant company captures the spirit of the times in its productions. Covering everything from Lucinda Childs to Georgian folk dances, the (LA)HORDE collective invites everyone to enjoy dance again.

With its roots submerged in time, nothing is remoter to our Western sensibilities than Indian dance. What’s more, statues of naked female dancers at Karnataka’s temples attract those tourists who yearn to look at bayadères, those Hindu dancers that have been denigrated as prostitutes. In truth, Indian dance is undergoing a continuous reconstruction derived from innumerable fragments of a history spanning centuries. Choreographer Padmini Chettur has embraced this task with great sensitivity.

They call themselves Sorbs and Wends. Strangers often only notice their existence in Germany’s easternmost region when they see the bilingual town signs that come into view as soon as they cross the rolling hills into this other culture. Here, people defend themselves against the loss of self-will with vigorous dances – both old and new.

Modernism would be inconceivable without the interplay of inspiration and appropriation, any by implication the global groove of art, dance, performance, and protest. From a historical perspective, the German expressionist painter Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) was from an early stage enthusiastic not only about non-European cultures, but also for dance. This very intersection was precisely where the avant-garde found its starting point: in movements from elsewhere.

He who fights is a warrior. Or an artist? And where is the border to dance? Israeli choreographer Yotam Peled explores the similarities between combat and dance practices. A conversation about (violent) fantasies, tenderness, pain and vulnerability.

Hong Kong belongs to China. New laws, including those aimed at containing the virus, are not making it any easier for the city to find its way into its still-new role. This is also the case for the dance scene. So is the dance scene: the departure on the one hand, the attempt to go new ways and to break with traditions on the other.

Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries in Africa and indeed the world. Despite a recent military coup, it is the venue for a dance festival that allows guests to gain deep insights into the mentalities of the African dance scene. On stage, people argue, dance, and forge new partnerships. Europe has funded this festival – so that it may approach the scene on an equal footing.

On 12 September 2018, 20 dancers of the Antwerp-based company Troubleyn published an open letter in the Flemish digital art magazine Rekto:Verso accusing the founder and artistic director, Jan Fabre, of having created a misogynistic atmosphere in which: “Humiliation is daily bread in and around the rehearsal space of Troubleyn.

Given my fascination with spirits, I kept asking myself how can we still get to know this endangered species that represent the oldest vision of humanity? Given my fascination with spirits, I kept asking myself how can we still get to know this endangered species that represent the oldest vision of humanity? At best, they are considered as revenants who cavort in virtual reality, in comics, in painting, and on stage, because they embody that yearning to make contact with the beyond.

Millions and millions of kilometers of yarn are unwound unremittingly from bobbins worldwide – in the myriad textile and sewing factories on this earth. Mechanically speaking, bobbins perform an almost endless pirouette. The human body follows exactly the same principle.

Theaters like to be the good guys in three ways: Good for the citizen. Good for culture. And good for the zeitgeist. Being good is part of the essence of theaters; they do not want to be accused of being racist. But does this fit the reality within the institution itself? The case of Raphael Hillebrand casts doubt on this.