dance on paper

I imagine that the average viewer of Raimund Hoghe’s work throws their arms together and says,“That’s not dance,” or at the very least loses interest and walks out during the performance (which several dozen spectators did on Saturday night, a remarkable event considering it took place at the forward-thinking Pompidou Center). It’s understandable. If you want to see fantastic leaps, daring physicality or even significant amounts of movement, Raimund Hoghe is not your man. For the beauty of Raimund Hoghe’s work is not in its seemingly minimalistic choreography, it is in its honest, inescapable embrace with reality.

“Throw your body into battle”, from Pier Paolo Pasolini, was the quote that inspired Bolero Variations, and he does so with unapologetic sincerity.

Hoghe here tackles yet another musical cliché: Ravel’s Bolero (after working with Swan Lake and the sacred Le Sacre… I repeat myself on this website: Must every choreographer hack up a Rite of Spring?). But instead of sticking to Ravel’s work, he pieces together different examples of the bolero, a genre of Spanish dance from the 18th century inherited from South America. Such, the performance trampses from bolero to bolero, from Eydie Gormé & Trio Los Panchos to Maria Callas to Benny Goodman to Tchaikovsky. He includes several interpretations of Ravel’s Bolero, including an amusing sound recording from Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean’s ice dancing performance at the 1984 Olympics in Sarajevo (commentator remarks included, e.g.: “Here comes the triple lutz!”) and what sounded like an kabuki version on traditional Asian instruments. (A motley musical compilation similar to those of Pina Bausch, for whom Hoghe served as dramaturge from 1980 to 1990 in Wuppertal.)

But what he should have named the work was actually another Ravel piece, Pavane pour une infante défunte, which had the minor role of both introducing and closing the performance. The softly lilting, plaintive melody (“Pavane for a dead princess”) best describes the overall mood of the work, as the dancers meander through each bolero.

One might assume that the average dance interpretation of Bolero, whose structure can be described as one big crescendo, would culminate in some fantastical explosion of dance theatricality or virtuoso (re: Maurice Béjart), heaven forbid Spanish sets or costumes. Hoghe’s is anything but a crescendo. He totally ignores it, opting for monotony instead.

This is not to say there are no dynamics. In fact, the minor dynamic changes cued by the shifting boleros are what kept any sort of momentum going in the work. (Though his patience-testing slowness I believe is what weeded out some spectators.) For instance, a section of slow, minimalist arm work was refreshed by a sarcastically whimsical fox-trot which was followed by a poignant duet between Hoghe and his favorite on-stage partner, Lorenzo de Brabandere, who dipped strips of plaster into a bowl of water and pasted them onto Hoghe’s shoulder –an obvious metaphor (cast, injury) that perhaps suggested more (armor, battle).

The five young male dancers and one female dancer, even though never pushed to excessive physicality (or much at all), are evidently well-trained and beautiful movers. This helped enhance the minimal movement that did exist, and even when I understood that it wasn’t the point, as a dancer I admit I wanted to see more. Even during the most spicy or lively South American bolero, he never strays from anticlimactic reality; dancers don’t “perform” for the audience, they walk off the bare stage only to do some shy, unforced movement on the sidelines. At intermission, when the lights are up and the audience is chattering away, Hoghe promenades around the Grand Studio’s periphery like a despondent security guard. Or a weary soldier. The wingless stage is lit from above with a clean rectangle, clearly defining an onstage/offstage border, outside of which dancers often stand unhidden to the audience. (Lighting design by Johannes Sundrup and Hoghe)

Raimund Hoghe has nothing to hide, nor is he trying to prove anything. He is known for removing his shirt at some point in his choreography, though in my opinion, his onstage presence is powerful enough (re: deadpan) before he even shows us the stark reality of his body. But it is necessary. He is precisely throwing himself into battle- the battle being our eyesight. Whether we choose to hide it or not, we all gawk at the deformed face or handicapped person on the bus or in the subway. Hoghe’s inescapable presence onstage forces us to deal with our own plastered conceptions of abnormality.

One thing that remains unclear for me is the role of the one female dancer, who definitely was secondary in relation to the others. I wasn’t sure if her sidelines status was a statement or an afterthought. She wore tispy, seemingly uncomfortable high heels throughout the performance which were finally removed in the last scene -an interesting detail- but her presence still remains for me an undeveloped subtext.

There is much more to his creation than I mention here; I write about them more from a choreography/movement perspective and less from a performance/art angle, which may be more suitable classification. In any case, he is not concerned with fitting into the dance world nor with achieving success. On his website he explains, “It is important to be able to work and to go your own way –with or without success. I simply do what I have to do.”

Raimund Hoghe’s work is for anyone who has ever felt like an outsider –who has ever looked at others’ supposed “normality” and knew something was wrong. But when I say his work is literally less spectacular, it does not in any way reduce its profundity. It is simply that he rejects any sort of “spectacle” –a refreshing change from so many performances.

Lately, I have personally been fed up with all the advertisements polluting every surface of every wall in cities like Paris or New York, thousands of inevitable images storming into our unconscious, poisoning us with smiling, white straight couples, impossible standards of beauty, and countless things that we “need.” This is why I was quick to shed my secret yearning to see more “dance” and let Hoghe and his dancers take their time and share something very poetic, drastically honest, and quietly resistant.