In Beirut on the eastern Mediterranean, nothing confronts you with reality as much as the dance, the Arab body, the unadorned, which after years of horror has shed its ornamental dress and speaks directly to you.
Country without a state
Where there are no structures to make art possible, art throws itself a party. It does not need any structures; it creates its own in Beirut, in a deeply shaken city where everything has gone back to square one and anything seems possible again.
A look into the tanz.dance kitchen
Excitingly researched reports and a sensual encounter with the art of dance in richly illustrated stories with depth: These are the ingredients for a culinary journey around the world to meet new people and cultures, their conflicts and their arts.
tanz.dance – The 2023 chronicle
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.
On cold feet
This big, expansive, white country is the bridgehead between Canada and Scandinavia – and Europe’s largest colony. Famous for its icebergs and a culture built on Inuit land, Greenland beckons visitors to break dance and polka on melting ice floes.
Greenland will never be green
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.
An explosion of applause
Lazgi makes the body shake like an earthquake. Wild and spirited, it is one of the oldest dances in the world still practiced today, with rock paintings showing it to be at least 3,000 years old. If you want to experience it in its purest form, you have to travel to a city called Urgench in western Uzbekistan.
Lazgi – Fire dance by candlelight
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.
Rage, beautiful rage
The art of thinking about the body, of writing about it, of collecting its traces, is constantly changing – sometimes for the worse. By now there is hardly a publishing house left that would dare to publish a dance book. And hardly any newspaper prints a longer dance story unless it is about a star, scandal or a salsa party in the local town.
The Body’s Art
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.