Raimound Hoghe cares deeply about history—the history of divas, the history of dance, the history of pop culture, and the history of politics. His works investigate the poetics of memory: how we remember, how easily we forget, how often
Hoghe’s own history as an artist is remarkable. He worked throughout the 1980s as a critic and dramaturge with Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal, a position that presumably required him to provide a literary context for the world-renown choreographer’s often baffling dance-theater images. Though the intricacies of any collaboration are left outside of history, a dramaturge typically collaborates with a choreographer by asking her questions aimed at unveiling the driving forces behind a work. (Collections of Hoghe’s writings as a dramaturge with Bausch have been published in several languages though not yet in English).
In the early 1990s, despite a spinal deformity that has left him with a prominent curve in his back, Hoghe began to make dances for himself and eventually for others. The rest is history: over the past decade, Hoghe’s work has achieved nearly as much international renown as that of his former colleague in Wuppertal. Perhaps that is where the comparisons must end, however. Hoghe’s choreographic practice favors duration and minimalism—a kind of slowing down of time and a cooling off of affect—to the hyper-expressive gestures, collage-like construction, and overall theatricality of Bausch’s works and more generally the German tanzteatertradition.
To New Yorkers Hoghe’s naked stages, unchanging lights, and slow, minimal movements may feel utterly familiar. His dances recall the iconic works of Judson Dance Theatre and the varieties of American minimalism that have transformed dance, art, music and fashion since the 1960s. Why is the distillation of expressionism—its slowing down and emptying out—so important to Hoghe? He seems to be urging us to rethink empathy in the theater; he is looking for a way to be expressive without emotionally manipulating his audience. For Hoghe, an artist who came to political consciousness through his experience of German history, the recuperation of expressivity in the theater must be found without the reinscription of fascist aesthetics. By prolonging the affective tools of the expressive tanzteater, Hoghe constructs a space for the viewer in which a critical appreciation is possible, a space in which the spectator can be both near and far from the work or as Hoghe likes to say of his own role in the performance, both “the observer and the object of observation.”
For Hoghe, the project of remembering the details of history is political. Whether it is the particular slant of Nijinsky’s hand inPrélude à l'après-midi d'un faune or the recollections of a Jewish musician rehearsing Ravel in a Third Reich concentration camp, it is the details that must be recuperated. In order to remember, time must slow, events must repeat, first impressions must be subject to critical reconsiderations. His theater becomes the space for collective memory, a political space in which a community temporarily forms, organized not by a shared geography, culture, or ideology but by a shared activity (remembering). In Hoghe’s performances you hear people sigh and cough; some people leave out of boredom. But beneath the chatter of the present you feel the heat of focus and you hear the buzz of a public temporarily suspended in time, living in a history unfolding before our eyes.
Published by Dance Theater Workshop as a "context note" in the program for Raimund Hoghe with Faustin Linyekula, September 16-18, 2010.
-B.G. & R.K.
