Big Movements, Small Impulses

NRZ Essen 11.2007
Dagmar Schenk – Güllich

Henrietta Horn, one of the two directors of the Folkwang Tanzstudio (together with Pina Bausch), while always ready to go out into the big wide world with her company, is also very interested in guest performances near her headquarters at the Folkwang Hochschule in Werden. She is currently performing on five evenings at the Forum Kunst und Architektur (art and architecture) at Kopstadtplatz. The renowned choreographer can be relied upon to offer more than the mere performance of a tried and tested production in this new space... She gives free reign to her taste for experiments in the Forum where graphic artists and architects rule, having thoroughly infected her eleven dancers with this lust of experimentation. Dialoge (Dialogues) is the title of her project, which stays open up to the very last moment, for every night starts with a lottery. Only then do the dancers learn who will encounter whom. Of course, music plays a part in this: Peter Eisold, percussionist and composer, bangs and stirs his drums, timbals, gongs, moves and shakes everything that makes a sound.
Nils Ostendorf, who was awarded the Folkwang Prize in 2000 for his delicate trumpet playing, can be heard here, breathing, whispering, tapping, while tenor Jürgen Kohl sings to his heart’s content, sometimes the first bars of a well-known song in traditional style, sometimes naughtily breaking up the melodies. He is well-versed in adapting to his respective partners, more of an actor than a singer in this.
As to adapting to one’s partner, this is where the Folkwang Tanzstudio shows its finest work. No gesture, no twitch, no expression is left unanswered. They sense their partners’ wishes and desires, calculating his or her answers to their own response in advance.
This dialogue involves body language, facial expressions, big movements as well as small impulses. As examples of this great sensitivity let me name Andrea Maria Mendez Torres interacting with Hyun Jin Kim, whose dialogue was distinguished by a great calm and mutual understanding as well as an extremely imaginative expressive quality. Physical and verbal wit are part of these evenings – as they usually are with the Folkwang dancers who always know how to amuse their audience.

The Folkwang Tanzstudio performs “Dialoge” (Dialogues)

Wordless

K.West 12.2007
Melanie Suchy

The dialogue partners meet each other without memorized lines, without even a subject of discussion. They do just about anything but speak (almost). The encounters between two dancers or a dancer and a musician resemble a game taking place within clearly delineated spatial and temporal borders whose objective is to achieve a common state of mind, a stretch of harmony. This unpredictable magic of improvisation grips musicians (percussion, trumpet, tenor), dancers and the audience – always very close by – alike in the Folkwang Tanzstudio’s Dialoge project.
The gallery of the Forum für Kunst und Architektur (art and architecture) offers two sparse performance spaces and a friendly salon in a mini-mall at the end of Essen’s shopping street. Huge display windows give the stages an interesting fuzziness caused by the mirror-effects when looking out or in.

“Dialoge” is a continuation of “Freigang”, which was improvised by the FTS company at Zeche Zolllverein in May. The freedom doesn’t always make every dancer happy, inhibits some of them, but much of this evening is a success.
A female dancer, holding her colleague by the hand, gently guides him across the room in sinuous lines, and then they clap hands, hook their knees around each other. She’s hanging on to his neck, he carries her back and forth; the percussionist takes his seat behind the drum kit, starts playing, and a new dancer starts to shake her shoulders and hop up and down, animated by the beat.
He stops; she stands still, sadly always waiting for the musician’s impulse. With another couple of dancers you can literally see how they enjoy their shared inventiveness. First only their eyes meet, then she bounces up and down like a rubber ball; looks, until they both bounce, their breathing becoming audible in the rhythm of their jumping. Suddenly they break into a race. It takes so little – plucking the seam of a dress, bending one’s hip.
These improvisations are not out to get laughs, but a delicate element of situation comedy occasionally emerges. Their basic elements are repetitions, whose excellent timing makes for successful scenes – feeling their way towards a narrative, towards development or disruption.

Moving to the Limits of Dance

Special Night concludes “Dialoge” (Dialogues) of the FTS

WAZ 12.2007
Dirk Aschendorf

You are sitting on a white plush sofa or a sphere-shaped sixties-style chair, later approach the dancing slowly. Or more precisely: the improvisations with or without music which the Folkwang Tanzstudio (FTS) experimented with in the convoluted glass architecture of the mini-mall at Kopstadtplatz. This series of performance which were anything but serial culminated in a Special Night on Saturday.
Henrietta Horn, choreographer and director of the FTS, had given her company free rein on five evenings. “Dialoge” was her simple name for this open format in which dancers encountered musicians, literally “trying themselves out”, quite often reaching the limits of expression. Sure, tension cannot be maintained indefinitely, let alone raised. But the way they worked with – sometimes on – each other in ever-new, unknown formations remained stimulating, sometimes even exciting until the last night.
In addition to musicians Peter Eisold and Nils Ostendorf and tenor Jürgen Kohl, they had engaged for this Special Night, among others, singer Jens Thomas and Dutch violinist Nicoline Soeter who frequently fed electronically multiplied elements into her live playing. It was certainly the workshop atmosphere of this work in constant progress which fascinated the numerous spectators, who used the mall and the rooms of the Forum für Kunst und Architektur (art and architecture) as a lobby to walk around in. It’s a pity that artist VA Wölfl’s chocolate fountain did not bubble and spread its fragrance at the “Kunstverein Ruhr” that night.