The Body’s Art

The map is upside down, oriented toward the Global South, and shows the locations of our reports. The latest story flashes like a lighthouse.

07.10.2022

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.

Arnd Wesemann

People like to say that the dance scene is so preoccupied with the body that the only thing that counts is concern for ourselves or concern for our careers. But that’s not true. Because it is the relentless curiosity about others alone that makes a person interesting in the first place.

That is also exactly what drives tanz.dance. Relentless curiosity – because it is a gathering place for voices from all over the world, voices of dance journalists on five continents. They tell the stories dance tells albeit in a different way: not on paper, not to decorate a coffee table or a book shelf (that wallpaper of expertise for the educated), but digitally and in a way that can be read everywhere. After all, if the dance scene is anything, it is mobile.

Like Anamaria Klajnšček and Magí Serra. These two dance an ideal – equality, the balances of partnership, the search for equilibrium when the Slovenian Anamaria Klajnšček lifts her partner onto her shoulders and carries him, only for him to then sway his partner dangerously back and forth just as high under the ceiling between the turning fans as she marvels at the world. During this process, their bodies are always tenderly intertwined. We discovered her art in Bobo-Dioulasso, in the middle of a military camp in Burkina Faso, Africa.

Helena Waldmann

There is also dancing in Siberia. Shamanism seeks a connection to supernatural authority. The dancing ecstasy is proof of contact with the gods. Of course, this is a production, says well-traveled dance artist Choy Ka-Fei. Centuries of oppression and injustice have led to a desire to be able to “do magic” and take supernatural revenge. The shaman invokes a “counter-spell” in order to bring about a well-staged conflict resolution through cleverly-worded oracles, seemingly transmitted by the spirits of the ancestors and the gods.

Choy Ka Fai

The world turns like a spindle, but it doesn’t revolve around itself. After all, merely pirouetting around your own ego is not an option – not even in art.

Instead, dance journalism is about freedom of opinion, and dance science is about new insights thanks to new artistic trends. Dance archives store that which carries this ephemeral art forward into the present. All three are concerned with the meaning of dance – with the artists, their incentive, their desire, the drive, the motivation, the research that gave rise to their work of art in the first place.

Anna Saup

The world turns like a spindle, but it doesn’t revolve around itself. After all, merely pirouetting around your own ego is not an option – not even in art.

Instead, dance journalism is about freedom of opinion, and dance science is about new insights thanks to new artistic trends. Dance archives store that which carries this ephemeral art forward into the present. All three are concerned with the meaning of dance – with the artists, their incentive, their desire, the drive, the motivation, the research that gave rise to their work of art in the first place.

Or immediately to Bangladesh

Anna Saup

When they make art, most choreographers don’t simply follow a notion. Rather, they have a real idea, an urgent need, and use their idea to do battle. They go on an adventure to formulate their pressing questions with the body in such a way that these questions can spill over to another body, that of the audience. Of course, you can simply review such a piece, record it, study it. Or you can ask about the research, about the adventure, about the source of this art. That’s when things get really exciting.

Exciting thanks to a special trick: the cliffhanger. Before things get truly interesting, there’s a button – down here one – to ensure that the authors, translators, and photographers receive their fees. Not through a publisher, advertising, subscriptions or the like, but instead directly from the readers themselves, with their avowed interest in dance. This button is, of course, a hurdle, because it thankfully requires a conscious decision to pay approximately three euros in acknowledging that your interest has been piqued. Only this time you don’t even have to pay the cent that is still displayed here…

Rage, beautiful rage

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