Last night I saw Bolero Variations by Raimund Hoghe. It was surprising and personal and grateful. I entered the performance not knowing what to expect but with hopes for something unique and special. What unraveled in the next two hours was unexpectedly stunning – extremely detailed simple often slow repeated movements would suddenly subvert my expectations and make me gasp. It was like Hoghe and his dancers drew out a continuous line that started before I came into the theater, periodically splintered off into me, then followed them off stage. This line probably has something to do with Hoghe’s artistic integrity – the piece was artistically “unified, unimpaired, and sound in construction” to quote the dictionary definition of integrity.
This morning, I can’t pin down the meaning of the piece but I know that in a year when I think back on it will mean something very important. Important to me as an artist, more importantly to meas a person. It’s not a performance to forget.
Leading up to the show a number of people have asked me what a dramaturge is. It is a flexible term generally referring to the individual in the theatrical creative process who does research into the history and context of a piece, often with an eye on interconnected themes and overarching quality of the production. It’s clear to me now that Raimund Hoghe is a choreographer who privileges overarching quality and interconnected meaning in his dance. He values the ritual of the moving body, “Dance is not to be wasted for it is a rare and precious gift.”
When you see it (and if you can please do) enjoy the themes. I couple of things I watched throughout the piece:
- Black on Black and White on Black and Colors in Black
- Folds in fabric and bodies
- Isolated personal journeys
- Circles and cycles
- Appearing and disappearing
The piece was also unexpectedly political. You’ll understand why if you see it.
After watching the piece and digesting it a bit more, I find myself coming back to the idea of variation. There’s something so satisfying about hearing Ravel’s Bolero over and over through different lenses. It lets us hear something deeper– we can focus on the how instead of the what. One recording crackled a bit more, one recording has TV announcers, another one’s played on traditional japanese instruments etc. In the same way, Hoghe has done that with his movement as well. The sustained and repeated movement allows us to quickly understand what the dancers are doing, and gives us the chance to move on and dissect how they are doing it. In doing so we get to understand the dancers themselves as individuals– as variations. Much as the piles of lentils on stage were all from the same legume family and yet were so brilliantly different in color, each individual dancer, while maybe cut from relatively similar cloth, had his or her own distilled style of movement. It made me wonder what random chance occurrence might cause one person’s spine to be so incredibly curved, and another’s so straight. …or what might cause one person to be denied a travel visa while so many others sail unquestioned across borders.
Comment by Max Wirsing — September 20, 2009 @ 3:04 am