Memories, Engagement and Promises

The 30th anniversary of Tanz im August takes places within a complex historical constellation: the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx and 50 years since the riots by French students and workers in 1968. Invited by Tanz im August to take part in the festival as a moderator, I was encouraged by the given historical context and the possibility of reflecting it in relation to projects programmed for the festival. Departing from the tension between different regimes of temporality immanent in choreography (on the one hand) and history (on the other), it is worth identifying their points of intersection, with the intention to articulate the discoursive potentiality of that encounter. In other words, with the On the Sofa discussions “What remains? On Archives and Dance” and “1968 – Promise of Collectivity”, the idea is to stimulate a dialogue about the social and political framings of dance being understood as a corporeal reflection of the complicated dialectics of the turbulent decades and the unimagined future, which at the moment does not seem at all promising. 

Against the (mis)belief that dance performance resists any kind of archiving and exists only as a temporality of accumulation, exhaustion and absences, the panel on archives intends to shed a different light on the subject. Addressing the idea of the archive not merely as the ‘house arrest’ of lifeless files and documents, the proposition is to rethink the (false) dichotomy presence/absence and life/mediated, and to reconsider both the performative qualities of the archive and the immanent archival impulses of dance. At the same time, insisting that dance does not disappear, but is constituted through different somatic and conceptual traces, implies the possibility of inscription, knowledge and writing. Thus archive and dance are by no means in opposition to one other, but rather exist in a state of dynamic and delicate interrelation. Forgetting dance – it might be said – equals the forgetting of our power to move freely, generating with movements the unthought utopia of togetherness.

While the panel on archives discusses the fleeting materiality of dance, and concentrates on questions of how dance can be saved, restored and taken care of, the panel “1968 – Promise of collectivity” maps out memories of the ‘social choreography’ of the ‘68 revolution. Bringing together different perspectives and examples, and juxtaposing trans-generational experiences, the talk aims to reflect the notion of collectivity and the ways it has been thwarted and eroded due to the retrograde socio-political developments over the past 50 years, which fostered narcissistic individualism instead of collective action. On the other hand, this dialogue tries to open the question of whether the revolutionary legacy is still somehow resonating in the politics of moving bodies today? How are we to imagine the choreography of a revolution yet to come? Could its shape be that of a movement through space unrestrained by fear and hopelessness?

Although it might at first glance seem that the two subjects (archives and the 1968 revolution) do not have many things in common and do not overlap, the events of ‘68 signalled a change in the way memory and history have been understood, reconstructed and approached. This can particularly be true given the political and cultural climate in post-war Germany, divided between the West and the East and loaded with a heavy burden of guilt with regard to Nazi attrocities. As Oskar Negt, one of the key figures of the leftist intelligentsia in Germany, observes in his publication dedicated to ‘68, “The year 1968 [...] is neither a revolution nor a festering wound, a crime; it is a time of unresolved problems.” Situating some aspects of the problem in the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, Negt maintains that one of the positive outcomes of ‘68 was the enhanced “struggle for historical legitimation”, which breaks with the patriotic notion of history and foregrounds the fragile memory of subaltern groups that had been suppressed in favour of the historical remembrance of (conservative) state ideologies. The fragile archive of dance is one such counter-memory of invisible and precarious subjecivities.

The new aesthetic direction of theatre and dance in West Germany since the 1960s brought to the fore an idea of engaged art, understood as a tool for confronting society with the phantoms of its unresolved past and the nihilism of neoliberal progress. Hans Kresnik’s claim in 1970 that “Ballet can fight” signified the potentiality of choreographic practices to critically intervene in existing social and political structures, and to confront the authoritarian apparatus of the state with an undisciplined, anarchic, joyful and sensual body. At this point it became clear that dance theatre, which was developing in close dialogue with other arts (visual arts, text, film and so on), had the power to pose awkward questions and provoke the status quo. 50 years later, dance still continues to challenge dominant social schemes, offering alternative rhythms, races, genders and (corpo)realities of freedom. However, the utopia of an unrestricted, emancipated society grounded on solidarity and equality – as envisaged by the ‘68 generation – seems to be further away then ever.