My dance arises from a desire to reconfigure my identity and wrestle with the various encodings that are social, cultural, and above all gendered. in dance i can become and become and never fossilize. in dance i can be insect, leaf, wind, male, baby, star, ancient crone, madwoman, animal. My becoming is only limited by my inability to listen to my imagination. in dancing i can try to overturn centuries of confusion over my
“sex.” i hope to find wisdom, knowledge, and above all help heal the conflicts that endanger our earth.
—Marie-Gabrielle rotie
“Woman is female to the extent that she feels herself as such,” says Simone de Beauvoir in her 1949 publication The Second Sex. De Beauvoir does not believe the feminine is an unchanging essence.1 In contrast to this view is Camille Pa-glia’s Sexual Personae, published in 1990, which stresses sexual stereotypes. Is sexual freedom and gender liberation a modern delusion, as she asserts? Has feminism “exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate,”
as Paglia also believes?2
There is a line in dance history on feminist questions of contingency, stretch-ing from Mary Wigman’s work early in the twentieth century to that of Marie-Gabrielle Rotie early in the twenty-first century. Roughly ninety-five years con-nect this lineage. Wigman’s first Witch Dance (Hexentanz) was performed in 1914; it was a shamanistic dance that dared to be ugly and defied both seductive and domesticated femininity. Rotie’s perspective on dance and contingency re-flects that of Wigman, and this would include her disciple Dore Hoyer and later
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Neoexpressionists Susanne Linke and Pina Bausch. If Rotie reflects their work, she nevertheless doesn’t copy them.
Rotie accomplishes an interesting connection between three schools of dance—
postmodern minimalism, Neoexpressionism, and butoh—as I show in describing two of her dances in this essay. Linke’s more tightly structured work provides a good example of the continuity between original German Expressionism and newer Expressionist forms. I explore these connections by looking at four of her works. Traces of Wigman and Hoyer recur in Rotie and Linke. All of these artists have furthered dance as theater, and they have all been concerned to em-body circumstances of feminine contingency in the form of dance. What butoh has added to issues of gender and existential contingency is the metamorphic context in which the dance lives. This is apparent in Rotie’s butoh-influenced work. In Linke, we see the Expressionist basis out of which butoh grew, the root of which it ultimately transformed.
On Linke
Susanne Linke studied with Mary Wigman and Dore Hoyer and is regarded as one of the great female figures of the modern German dance theater. Along with Pina Bausch and Reinhild Hoffman, Linke belongs to those acclaimed dancers associated with the Folkwang School of Music and Performing Arts in Essen, whose dance department was established by Kurt Jooss in 1927. She develops a style that combines the Expressionist modern dance tradition in Germany with sensitivity to postmodern deconstructive/minimalist tendencies in contemporary dance, even as deconstruction is an outgrowth of existentialism in its refutation of linear thought and rationalism.3 Her themes remain true to the brooding na-ture of early German Expressionism and the existentialist’s concerns for the indi-vidual. “Who am I?” the basic existential question that Mary Wigman sought to answer through dance,4 is clearly Linke’s as well. I first met Linke at the Wigman School in 1965–66 when we were both students there and performed together in tours of our original works.
Linke’s dances speak to the human condition that concerned Continental existentialism in Germany and France, the courage to be oneself, and the re-sponsibility of confronting our inescapable freedoms. Making choices is funda-mental to human existence. Not to choose is also a choice, in the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre.5 De Beauvoir further identified freedom and self-transcendence as concerns for women in her enduring text The Second Sex.
Linke’s dances also grapple with freedom and constraint, especially the limita-tions of feminine immanence, best explained in the words of de Beauvoir:
Da Vinci 141 What peculiarly signalizes the situation of woman is that she—a free and au-tonomous being like all human creatures—nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other. They propose to stabilize her as object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and forever transcended by another ego (conscience), which is essential, and sovereign.6
Linke’s works explore immanence and contingency, key concepts in existen-tialist thought. Tenuous and fragile connections develop in her dance—nothing seems certain. Her conditions are not fixed, and her limitations not final, in other words. Thus her dances walk a fine line in their feminism. They expose human contingency from the perspective of woman, the female body and experience;
like de Beauvoir’s philosophy, Linke’s dances challenge fixed conditions and ste-reotypes. At the same time, they hold emotional ambivalence and “not-knowing.”
Linke’s style is shadowed and fatalistic, admitting the limits of ego and rational-ity. Her dances materialize the dilemma of feminine immanence; they make it matter, and they also voice an existential contingency that all humans share. In fact this seems their starting point.
Dolor, a solo I saw in Tokyo in 1990, is Linke’s homage to Dore Hoyer and a bridge between Hoyer’s work and her own. It speaks clearly of human con-tingency, though it speaks very softly, and its feminine beauty is austere. Linke dances Dolor in a long, black dress of plain classic lines, beginning with a slow walk to the center of the stage and down toward the audience, hands open with palms gently exposed, slightly breaking the line at the wrists and elbows so the arms and fingers slope downward. In the droop of the hand, a crucifix might be perceived. The exposed wrist makes this a vulnerable image. There is an aura of futility in it as the arms give up, allowing the wrists and hands to fall limp in a single gesture. The face remains serene.
Linke develops Dolor as a meditation on death, relying on composure rather than drama. Performed in half-light, its images are greatly distanced and soft-ened. As she backs away from her original approach toward the audience, her arms open slightly to the side, never extending completely. They fall, barely to lift again and again, always receding—moving back into the distance. When she touches the back curtain, the lights drop suddenly, almost to black.
The rest of the dance builds a drone step pattern reminiscent of the Dreh Monot-onie (Turning Monotony) developed in works of both Wigman and Hoyer. I saw Hoyer dance her Dreh Monotonie in Berlin in 1965. Gathering tension throughout this work, she repeats its patterns until they become frantic. But Linke’s dance goes the other direction. It decreases by leaving out one step then another, so the pattern becomes ever more contracted in time and reduced in space, its final steps
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disappearing into the dark corner. The music ends the dance in a reflection on death with Janet Baker’s singing of Mahler’s “I Disappeared from This World.”
Hoyer took her own life on the eve of 1968. She was considered by Wigman to be her closest heir and was indeed the last ember of the original German Expressionists. Dolor is the center section of a longer work, Affecte (1987), that Linke based on a dance by Hoyer and dedicated to her. I have written about other sections of this dance elsewhere.7 With the passing of Wigman and Hoyer, contemporary European artists like Linke and Rotie create new Expressionist forms and lived states of immanence.
Linke’s dark work on a score by Iannis Xenakis, Orient-Occident (1984), por-trays immanence in a state of floating suspense, at the same time executing a tug-of-war between opposing directions. There is tension toward resolution, but no literal scenario and no finality. Her struggles take place as part of the struc-ture of the dance and within herself, moving in visceral paths—like the solving of a life problem, if not satisfactorily solved, at least spiritually risked.
Like many modern dancers, especially Ruth St. Denis, Linke finds in the East a fullness of spirit she seeks in her own dance, she told me in an interview. While acknowledging the West in her dances, she deplores the “intellectual” influence of Merce Cunningham, despite his association with Japanese Zen and the Chinese I Ching. She feels close to the “honesty” of Chandralekha and Western female choreographers Isadora Duncan, Pina Bausch, Mary Wigman, and Dore Hoyer.
Like these authors of modern dance, Linke is adamantly opposed to sexual and social stereotypes and to what she and de Beauvoir decades before her call the masculine “ego.”8 She might put it differently in today’s less bifurcated gender milieu, but her early work makes use of dualisms. Orient-Occident shows Linke’s strength, determination, and spirit to overcome, danced complexly in dualistic splits of temperament.
Leaving behind the overt tension of Orient-Occident, her dance Flood turns to-ward an existential void, making it beautiful. With its air of inevitability, however, this dance is also fatalistic. Indeed the most breathtaking moment is the complete withdrawal of the dance at the end, when the blue silk the dancer has laboriously unraveled as a watery floor for her elegant arabesques and descents is sucked like a fluid fog into the wings, leaving her alone and more aware, having undergone her flood. The final maturing, however, is given as emptiness, not fullness. Linke walks off, as if submitted to (or flooded by) an inner truth given and not asked for. The audience watches the empty stage, still listening to the recording of a re-hearsal with Pablo Casals as conductor of Elegie by Gabriel Faure.
Linke lets the emptiness speak. She describes her dance in program notes as
“that moment of dismay in which all horizons start to disappear.” In her note,
Da Vinci 143 I hear the German root of existentialism in Friedrich Nietzsche as he laments the death of God: “Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon,”9 he asks incredulously. Without God as its ordering principle, Nietzsche sees life cast into an “open sea.”10 Similarly, Linke’s Flood uses the instability of water as a metaphor for existence—tilting, balancing tenuously, and using space to no avail. Like Nietzsche, she seems a wanderer in a watery abyss. What he says in Joyful Wisdom could easily describe her dance:
Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly?
Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and be-low? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us?11
In 1980, Linke choreographed her first famous work, Bath Tubbing, to Erik Satie’s Gymnopedies and brought a poetic and chiseled expressive imagery to female solo dance, not seen since the early innovative period of the 1920s and 1930s. The solo dancing of Linke, like that of Hoyer and Wigman, accomplishes an inner plot and communicates through plastique, or a sculpting of the body in space. Time for Linke is conceived emotionally in its lived dimensions or ac-cording to the ripening and fading of gestural movement. Bath Tubbing lives in gestural time and is an original interpretation of Satie’s music, which has served as background for many dances. Linke’s shaping of her body within and around the oval, small, and Germanically clean bathtub must certainly be the most original juxtaposition of dance with Satie’s music, riding its hypnotically slow rhythm without actually dancing to it. She embodies its containment and then grates against its repose in agitated moments. Throughout, she strokes and caresses the tub, sustaining the repetitive ground bass of the music.
When she suddenly overturns the tub and tips it toward the audience with the inside squarely exposed, she manages to place herself instantaneously inside, remaining motionless for a while in one of the stony shapes that come and go throughout the work. The bathtub frames her, supports her, and presents tasks to be accomplished in a postmodern, mundane sense, real tasks, like polish-ing with a cloth, and abstract ones, as when she postures against it, uspolish-ing it as a background to enhance a shape, or dunks her head and upper body inside unrealistically. The dance is of reality (she polishes the tub) and unreality (who dances with a bathtub?). Most of all, it is a dance of beauty, of square-shouldered and gently draped elegance, of Grecian goddesses emerging from the bath. But it is beauty subverted or held immanent, turned away from itself in soft, femi-nine draping of blond beauty stretched, splayed, rolled, and dunked—languid, peacefully reclined, and fearfully imprisoned in cold marble.
144 Essays and Poetry on Transformation On rotie
Rotie acknowledges a debt to the foundations of butoh laid by Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo. At the same time, she says she is not trying to dance butoh, but to find her own dance. Like many performers who have studied butoh, she is trying to interrogate butoh stereotypes and assumptions. What she has retained of butoh, it seems to me, is its metamorphic context and transformative essence.
Her work would not be as interesting without butoh, but neither would it com-municate so well without Neoexpressionist developments in Tanztheater and the abstract minimalist tendencies of postmodern dance techniques. Rotie holds as much in common with Wigman, Laban, and Linke as she does with Hijikata.
In Flying Chair for Da Vinci (2002), she sways to begin with, wearing a simple black dress below the knee and black slippers. She just sways back and forth near the dining room chair that provides the set for her dance.
Out of the Sway Comes the running
Force of it. The repetitive surge On short pert angles
Forward and Back.
This nervy woman is pressed Pushed back, head thrown back—
To stop in a backbend with her Arms feeling their way Up.
She speaks silently after the soft grating sounds cease, drawing her center away from her voice and hunching through the tiny, pinched vocal accompaniment.
She piles sticks under the chair.
Will she light a fire?
Stay hunched over like a squeaky old woman?
Why does she sit in the spotlight?
When will the shape shift in which she remains?
Her hands thaw gestures in percussive streams of cramped gestures. Now she squats on the chair, her dress draping her legs and feet, as she holds the chair back, arching her spine and huddling close for comfort. The crouching dancer, or bird, cranes her neck, reaching behind her waist so that just the witching ges-ture of her spreading fingers appear.
Her arms throw hard flings
With a vengeance. The pulsing fingers reach high
Da Vinci 145 Stretching her whole body up.
She leans back and sadly hunches over again, with no emotion, As the music plucks and strums a cold remote air.
By now, we begin to know her.
But then, she shrinks to walk in a low squat, Casting large shadows on the backdrop.
Finally she is seen looking through the slats of the chair As the stage lights fade to black, and her face becomes bright.
The dancer gone, an image of a large feather and candle projects onto the back-drop. We watch the feather burn in the flame of the candle. Its spine remains, charred, and only partly solid, like mine I fear. We watch the burning in silence, and meditate on the delicate feather.
Then return to the chair in the middle of the stage, As the dancer commences where she left off, Somewhere in the middle of Tanztheater.
But she is only one, this solo dancer, and not in social conflicts Or gender snares. Nevertheless, she is anxious and
Tense with The sitting The waiting
The bleak lonely dance
The black dress, while meant for pearls, not festive The repetition that intensifies
The constant tapping of feet The residual uneasiness.
Strings play in the musical distance, a blurring repetitious sound.
The woman in black pitches herself into liminal time, Below which she cannot feel,
Where there is only the in-between, and this A gray ma,
Even as a smile breaks her face.
The stage is dark, but still we see a dress on a hook descend from the ceiling.
No, it is a coat with puffy pouches on the bottom, a flying coat that billows round when the dancer puts it on.
Especially when she whips and turns through space.
The inflated coat, adds levitation.
But she comes down,
Sits again on the chair, and pulls feathers From the pouches, throwing them up
146 Essays and Poetry on Transformation And over her, as she stands up on the chair.
They float white and go gently down, down over her Flying invention.
Brutality
Rotie’s Brutality of Fact (2004), performed in three squares of light, is a trio she choreographed for herself and two other women. The narrow lights show sleek costumes of bluish green and pure lines of movement in multiple shadings. This dance moves past butoh and Expressionist sources in its abstract minimalism.
Francis Bacon’s 1944 painting Three Studies of Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, motivated Brutality. Bacon based his work on the ancient Greek legend of the Fu-ries, revealing oddly proportioned and mutated avenging goddesses in confined figures, their heads perched on long necks with bare and sightless eyes.
In the beginning, Rotie rises alone in spurts and tremors; then slowly, the squares light the other two caught in their boxes, until the three dance in unison for a time. The aesthetic of the dance inheres in the movement—how the danc-ers shift together or with differences in their confinement, extending their legs into long arabesques with their hands fastened to the floor, rippling and twining their limbs like leafless branches.
I notice that the dancers stay close to the floor and don’t explore the airy space around them. I am drawn to their sudden fits and starts, their scrambles that
FiGUrE 18. Marie-Gabrielle rotie in her work Brutality of Fact (2004). Photograph by Marian Alonso, © 2007. Used by permission of Marian Alonso.
Da Vinci 147 settle down. The dance also features a falling motif with a cruel side landing, not cushioned but really let go. Unison movement unravels with shoulders
Da Vinci 147 settle down. The dance also features a falling motif with a cruel side landing, not cushioned but really let go. Unison movement unravels with shoulders