Deutsche Angst / Im Bade wannen / Flut

A tribute to expressionistic dance

At the Festival of Avignon 2005 the Flemish choreographer Marc Vanrunxt created the solo Deutsche Angst, danced by Etienne Guilloteau to the percussion music of the American composer James Tenney. This was the first time Vanrunxt had written a solo for a male body other than his own. Based on his own idiom of stillness and deceleration, in Deutsche Angst Vanrunxt reverts to a body in full movement, a body that follows a path in space, a body that invites us to watch closely, in the same way that the on-stage percussionist Fedor Teunisse invites us to listen. The language of movement Vanrunxt uses here briefly refers to the source of inspiration for his early works, the Central European Ausdruckstanz, the German expressionist body language of choreographers like Mary Wigman.

It is precisely to explain the origin of this dance by Vanrunxt, and to place it in an historical perspective, that two choreographic works by Susanne Linke are included in this evening programme, in addition to Deutsche Angst. Together with Pina Bausch and Reinhild Hoffmann, Susanne Linke is one of the pioneers of German dance theatre and therefore an heir to the expressionist language of movement. Susanne Linke performs her solo Im Bade wannen, her most famous choreographic work. She shows us a woman in an everyday situation, namely in her bathroom, where she is confronted with her own bathtub and her own tedium. The fact that Linke herself performs this choreographic work, which she has not danced for a long time, gives the work a new dimension, that of an aging body that remembers the movements of days long past.

The second solo is called Flut and will be danced by Linke’s student, colleague and fellow artist Urs Dietrich. To the sonata Elegie by the French composer Gabriel Fauré, which gradually builds up to a crescendo, Dietrich dances a duet with a long piece of cloth that represents a stream or river: a man alone in dialogue with an element of nature, a dialogue about adaptation and liberation, mystery and loneliness, fear and courage, creation and decay.