Dance works as mutable archives

Series: Critical distances

With two major reconstructions having taken place in Athens recently – Pina Bausch’s Kontakthof (1978) with a new cast of exclusively Greek actor-dancers in the National Theatre, and Requiem for the end of love (1995) by Dimitris Papaioannou/Giorgos Koumendakis in the Greek National Opera (GNO) – some interesting questions arise in terms of dance inheritance and cultural memory. What do we do with dance performances of the recent past, how can they be preserved, transmitted, even updated? Can we tell the difference between a stagnant repository and a living archive? Do such endeavours speak loudly of which artistic legacies are significant enough to be treasured, and which are doomed to be lost and forgotten? Is it even possible to have a living archive without the institutional politics that determine which works could be part of history?

Bausch’s artistic legacy is unquestionable: her works allowed us to see the human aspect behind the performer. She invited us to observe, critically yet with compassion, a kind of lived memory which is preserved in minor and grand gestures; to participate in a ‘social theatre’ in which characters are orchestrated through compulsive movements, repetitive actions, sharp outbursts of humour or despair. In Kontakthof, human relations are paradoxical, eccentric, but in the end, they remind us of the deepest, earnest need for affection, the piece becoming thus a staged reflection on human behaviour. It was, after all, what interested Pina Bausch: the emotional expression and the personal accentuation of movements and not just the technical proficiency of the performers.

This is a hard to attain quality in her works, depending heavily on the vagueness of personal renditions of emotions – impossible to archive unless there are practitioners who can guide the performers into the restaging process. Dancers who now teach the parts have been long-term collaborators of Bausch’s – a sign that the successful reconstruction of these works demands physical transmission and embodied knowledge more than notation systems and digital archives. Yet embodied memory also attests to the impossibility of fully restoring an experience. Could we then consider a piece like Kontakthof to be less about choreographic literacy and precision, and more about the spirit of ongoing experimentation, especially when interpreted by new performers?

Papaioannou is better known for his visually striking, dark-ink staged performances: on some occasions, you might get glimpses of the frail human aspect in his otherworldly, painstakingly stylised works. Requiem for the end of love (in collaboration with composer Koumendakis) is an exception in his oeuvre, made in the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic – a ‘queer monument’ as some put it, though for this reconstruction Papaioannou aimed more poignantly at the tragic death toll we still witness today.

For this restaging both the cast and the scale of the set were significantly amplified, creating a spectacular effect of an incessant cascading of 48 dancers in a biblical flight of Tartarean stairs. Requiem, even in its first staging, was not conceived to create a record for the deadly social negligence towards people dying from the virus, but to encourage a form of cultural memory, an archive of emotions which could resonate with people today, evoking loss, fear, and inviting us to grieve queer love desiccated by devastating times.

Does this current, sensationalist version honour its initial political urgency? Presenting this work at a public institution, such as the GNO (where Koumendakis is currently director) with its elitist policies and distinctly different dance repertory, certainly brings conflicting agendas. On the one hand, Papaioannou’s work provides the foundation for an overdue public discussion of the AIDS era and speaks volumes for the amnesiac public policies towards queer trauma. On the other, can this work still count as an affective archive for that era, without also becoming a sort of ‘trauma voyeurism’ that aims to trigger or even overwhelm the audience with its ‘aesthetic exceptionalism’?

Though different in many ways, both these performances confirm that reconstructions and revivals do not merely name or represent. These works uphold two remarkable artistic legacies, which despite the historical burden, can also be laboratories for the future. Some experienced a dissociating ‘pastness’ in Kontakthof, others mild tokenism in the once militant Requiem for the end of love, but if we agree on the performativity of remembering, these revivals point simultaneously to unresolvable reconstruction dilemmas and questionable institutional policies. The ‘uncertainty of inheritance’ resulting from both speaks of discontinuities as well as continuities – for the idea(l) that an unmediated and unchanged archive is, as performance scholar Diana Taylor has argued, a myth. Performances change not only in terms of how they are revived and (re)enacted, but also in terms of how they are perceived, interpreted and appreciated. ●