With Martin Nachbar in a grey zone

N:

My favourite childhood dish is Himmel und Erde, which is a mix of mashed potatoes and mashed apples and you eat it with either liver or blood sausages.

M:

Wow.

N:

Children usually don't like liver and blood sausages but I did.

M:

You put photos of yourself as a child in the publication (to Urheben Aufheben). I wonder if you have any childhood memory that came to your mind while working for this piece?

N:

Yeah, I have a memory of my mom having a migraine. I was with my dad and we had to go out so that she had some peace. We said good-bye at the door. She was lying on the sofa and she was very far away to me, seemed very far. And somehow this stuck with me. I think I had to cut off a certain desire to go to her and try to help her.

When I think of Dore Hoyer, she seems somehow very lonely. I wasn't really in my life but in this particular moment I was. It is a memory I had been having anyway but at a certain moment I connected it, really, to this dance. Until this Tuesday I used to dance these dances of Hoyer with breaking the wrists slightly, out of habit. But in this rehearsal in Berlin, for the first time, I managed not to break my wrist at any point and not to over-tense my hands. So suddenly the energy went out. When you see the video of Hoyer carefully, she is very careful about letting the energy in and out of her body. And Tuesday was the first time I found this. This dance called "Hate", the one I always felt more like anger than hate, I suddenly felt hate and, wow, this is hate. It is hate. Anger is just anger. In hate you feel love at the same time. It's very strange. It was very sad also ... That was interesting. Now I feel something start floating. It's something new.

I also had other memories but they are not to be shared publicly.

M:

You told me about your recent dream of meeting Kurt Jooss.

N:

Haha. He looked great.

A few weeks ago I thought of doing or enacting, whatever you call it, some of Simone Forti's dances. She was important but in today's perception she is a bit of a side figure in the Judson Church round. When she talks about herself, she talks a lot about feelings. And you know, as conceptual dance has been so little talking about feelings, I found her quite interesting. But then shortly after I thought this would again be a cross-gender heritage with one translation already. And, if I reconstruct or enact something again, maybe I should actually do something by a man. Then I dreamt of meeting Kurt Jooss. He looked very funny with a bold head with some hair at the sides that was sticking out far ... But I don't think I will be interested in working on his dances.

M:

What I found interesting was humour or even comicalness, besides your seriousness, that occurred by you doing Hoyer's dances. One of many reasons for that is that her dance is very female in certain gestures.

N:

To some extent, stereotypes of bodies in gender are physical realities. For example, we men can't become pregnant. That is reality, not a construction! I am aware that it is always tricky to say this, because what is reality? The construction of reality is just as real as reality itself, and biological reality is also a culturally constructed reality.

M:

It is a fine line between accepting your body and liberating it from the cultural codes of bodies. Our bodies didn't change much since Hoyer made her dances, although some views or wishes about our bodies might have changed a little bit.

N:

Yeah, Judith Butler is great but deconstruction can go only so far, you can only deconstruct what is already constructed. And thinking about bodies, deconstruction is a problem, an interesting one - but: What would you deconstruct if you deconstructed your body? Signs of the body? Connotations around the body? Gender connotations or gender bodies?

M:

I think it is not about deconstructing the body. It is rather deconstructing the contemporary codes of body language.

N:

Yeah, you are right.

M:

What are the things you like and dislike about Dore Hoyer's choreography?

N:

There is something about movement research she did that I found really great, although I don't necessarily agree with the kind of dance she developed.

I don't like the very strong signs of her dance ... Following Charles Sanders Peirce, you can divide signs into three categories. One is index. Index is necessarily connected to the cause. Smoke is an index of that there is a fire somewhere. An index is almost like a symptom. For example fever is a symptom, or an index, of an illness in the body. Another example that is more connected to language experience is "this" glass. It is about "this" specific glass and not any glass. "This" becomes an index and connects the physical experience of this glass with the language experience of the word "glass".

Two is icon, which connects the sign by resemblance. An icon looks or sounds like that which is signified, like toilet signs. You have the icon of a person who looks like a man or a woman. Three is symbol. It is a sign that signifies its object by shared habit. It is based on our habits. When I say "cup" you know what I mean by us sharing the habit of signifying a cup by saying the word "cup". - Of course all three mix up with each other though.

In Dore Hoyer's work she is so symbolic and this is what I don't like. I think the body is not so symbolic but rather indexical. For me, the dancing body is more a symptom than a symbol of whatever ...

Like you mentioned before (in this talk), the symbolic use of dance or the body makes it very theatrical. She uses theatrical conventions and gestural conventions. Theatricality relies more on understandability. Different from "performativity", where you can work on something that is not understandable, at least to me.

When I think of Dore Hoyer's dance, I have to think of (Philipp) Gehmacher, he also works very gestural but somehow he treats gestures more like symptoms, it is not symbolic but more of an index. You can sense certain intensities or affects but you won't name them. His work is not so much in theatricality mode but more in performativity mode, whereas Dore Hoyer - as much as she's working with intensities in her dancing - tends more to the side of symbolic theatricality, at least in the way she choreographed.

What I find interesting in dance is the relation between gesture and dance as gesture.

M:

Did you have difficulties in the working process?

N:

In the beginning it was a problem that her dance uses the body very differently from what I am used to. The difference seemed very big between her aesthetics and ours or mine. But I found more and more little holes where they connect to each other. She also had the same 256 joints that we have and the same organs. It is not so much a division anymore, it is now more in a grey zone.