Peter Stamer, May 4th, 2005
I.
So what do I do when I am not in China? That’s I think at the core of Wengwuang’s question if I interpret it correctly. At the moment, I am preparing an article on our stay that is meant to be published in an anthology that deals with “subject, body, city”. Then I will have to correct a text that is due to be published in the next weeks in an anthology of German contemporary dance. Next week, I will have to do give an interview on a piece by Willi Dorner that will be published by the Salzburg Festival. The week after, I will be going to Lyon to an artistic residence with Philipp Gehmacher in order to work again on ‘incubator’, which will be shown on the occasion of Les Subsistances. During summer, I will direct a series of public talks that is designed and executed by me. During the same festival, ‘incubator’ will be shown in a different, reworked version. In automn, I then work on a book publication on this production series. And besides this, I have to dedicate some time for a PhD?-thesis on dance theory that still waits (and wants) to be completed.
And not to forget the artistic taming of our Beijing material, photos, texts, films, experiences in order to prepare a further stay and performance in 2006.
During our stay in Beijing, somebody asked me how I earn my living. The answer: by giving lectures, publishing articles, doing artistic work, being dramaturg, a free-lancer. This is a privilege even in Europe, I would say, for I (and some others) consider it being a privilege. This brings me in touch with a lot of people, countries, ideas, concepts. Although this makes me happy and satisfied, it is sometimes hard to always start from anew, to reset again and again, to adapt to new artistic projects or partners with every change of process. Being a one-man-company, this can be very tiring, but always challenging.
II.
Working mainly as a dramaturg, I maintain a binocular perspective on the arts. One eye tries to see what exactly, matter of factly takes place, whereas the other is constantly preoccupied with seeing the invisible. The invisible for me is the potential, the possible, that what could become into being, factual. Working as a dramaturg means this: to try to see what is there and also what could be there. Whereas the first has to do with an artistic analysis of the given, in order to understand what is presented, in order to understand the structure, meaning, or expression of the art process and work, the second tries to find out what the choreographer or the responsible artist could add or take away, could change in order to put his/her concept more straight forward, in order to render the art piece more talkative.
Perhaps, a dramaturg has also to be able to distinguish between presence and visibility. Looking on a piece sometimes reveals that what is very visible has no presence at all, no presence of meaning or material fact. It might not say anything although it is very loud, very visible, an overload of signs, gestures, bodies. His/her task then would be to find out how this visibility of a given scene (and scene has the same pronounciation as seen = seeing) could be rendered present within the piece, within the intentions of the choreographer: how (perhaps) the form is no longer contentless. On the other side, by trusting both his/her gaze and imagination, he senses a presence in the piece that is not yet visible. A hidden presence, concealed, not yet articulated, not yet presented. Then his task would be to develop an artistic, choreographic concept or structure to render this invisible presence visible: how (perhaps) to give a certain content a shape, a form.
Therefore, I would call me both a reader and a writer, in a metaphorical sense. The dramaturg is reading an art piece and also (re-)writes it to a certain extent by commenting on it, by proposing changes. In both practices, the dramaturg shouldn’t force the artist to do what the dramaturg wants. Rather, the dramaturg is like the lawyer of the piece, tries to find some arguments to enhance the ideas of the artist, sometimes even supports what the artist has just alluded to but without really expressing it. And sometimes he is even defending the piece against the artist who is neglecting an idea. On the search for the invisible, the dramaturg sometimes works like a criminologist, a detective, looking for foot prints, traces, hidden hints of meaning, left overs, developing a hypothesis how the piece could like.
It is very clear that – metaphorically spoken – reading and writing are on first sight two different practices of approach towards the arts. Whereas reading art is the position of the critic, the theorist, writing means to bring it into being, to be artistic itself. Nevertheless, both understanding (reading) and creating (writing) maintain a relation in an in-between-space of translation. Translation means a constant change between these two different practices without neglecting one. By this, the dramaturg him/herself is in-between, always having one leg in the other field of practice, and in the same sense, the dramaturg has to translate between the audience and the art piece, between the dancers and the choreographer, between images and words. Perhaps a dramaturg is never where one wants him to be. His/her job is to elude himself in order to keep at the same time a position inside AND outside of the art process. One of the main traits of the dramaturg is his/her schizophrenia without being crazy at all. His/her identity is to be not identifiable, yet to identify the factual and the potential, and by this taking on different positions: his/her position is manifold.
III.
So working as a dramaturg is not only a profession, it is also a way of looking, and not only a way of looking onto art, but mostly and very often of looking onto life. The consequence of binocularity is that dramaturges have to squint in order to focus on the explored object, and don’t dramaturges often have glasses, spectacles on their noses? Through my spectacles, I have to throw a dramaturgical look on our stay in Beijing, I can’t help it, trying to focus on the factual and the potential at the same time. In every regard, I do consider our stay in China as one of the most exciting, breath-taking, and inspiring residences I have ever had. We gathered so much material in terms of film, talks, experiences that it will take quite some time to bring them into an accessible order. Just after quite some while, we will be able to express in words which important imprints this stay has left in us, although I can feel them already now. Here again the factual meets the potential (for the future).
The process and the attempt of translation plays a very big role in this. A lot of things we have experienced in China will remain an enigma, mysterious, keeping their potentiality for ever. Once you have thought you might have understood how things work, the second after, this understanding is blurred, gone. So I cannot say that we have understood everything, but I guess we have understood the potentiality that could possibly reveal its meaning to us one day. We will, I am afraid, have to reside in this dramaturgical in-between-space that will at the same time include and exclude us from what is going on there – in every regard. But this instigates a need and a thorough wish for translation, in order to negotiate between what we see and what it might possibly mean for us, our practices, our approaches.
What was invisible for us although being present, what was visible although not being present, and what have we seen in both of it? Translations always imply failure. A failure of understanding and writing. A failure between seeing and not seeing. And still, failure or misunderstanding creates something new, both for the ones who misunderstand and for those who are misunderstood. So how do both parties profit from this failure of understanding, reading and writing? By this, the following remarks in their approach do mainly mirror a failure that is opened up between visibility and presence and their understanding. Let’s call this failure the effect and process of translation.
IV.
For me, during our stay in Beijing, I had to struggle with the challenge of translation, and by this with its failure. If you not only not speak the people’s language, but also not having a clue of what they talk about amongst themselves, addressed towards you, not being able to literally read motorway signs and so on, this shifts necessarily the lecture from words to the body and their gestures. Very often, I had the striking impression, people would be angry with each other when they communicate, that there was a lack of politeness or respect whilst talking amongst them. It took some time to understand that this has to do with the special sonic quality of the Chinese language and its production. But also I failed in reading their bodies and gestural talks. I misinterpreted some gestures as rigid, even condescending or imperious. Differences in culture are also embedded in the body, and once more it was proved for me that the body and its gestures are not universal or easily graspable. (Rather, the body needs an overall object to which its gestures can be referred. Buying fruit, cake, tooth-paste in the village e.g. made the gesture legible and accessible. Here, they were subjected to the process of selling and buying, ready-mades of an exchange trade. The gestures made sense in this context, although very often, even the signing of the numbers as we didn’t understand the Chinese word for “five” or “twelve yuan” was different to ours.)
The failure of gestural translation also comprises the artistic approach to the body, its gestures, movements, expressivity. When watching the rehearsals of “Report on Temperature”, I was surprised how common the gestures, movements, style looked to me. I reminded my time as dramaturg at the Mannheim ballet in the beginning and middle of the 90ies where the choreographer tried to be expressive with a mix of talking body gestures and objects he liked to make talkative. Here also, it seemed to me that the rehearsals, the work tried to free the body from its muteness, from being silent in order to render the body expressive, and to add that, to make it a site of sociality, even politics. Far from being innocent, these bodies were contextualized with the help of significant gestures (pointing with the finger) or objects (supersized red litter bags; hands) or music (applied machine sounds).
And this surprise tended to turn into disappointment as I seemed to already know these strategies, strategies of over-expression, of giving a maximum of information in the minimum of time, of being somehow pedagogical in order to show the body, its movements, its gestures off. What was missing from my point of view was the practice of presence, a physical presence that via time, a stretching of time would render the body and its materiality present rather than subordinating it to a machine of meaning. To make the gestures talkative in their proper gesturality rather than making them mimic a meaning that is superimposed upon then. To make the dancers, performers aware about their ways of decision making, to unleash them from their status of objects they are subjected and give them back their subjectivity.
But still, something made me withhold my first impression of disappointment. After the first rehearsals I asked myself due to which of my concepts this disappointment could come up. Which are the concepts of body, style, presence, subjectivity I tried to apply here and myself to impose upon what I have seen? The disappointment was nourished by an imputation of sameness that I thought I would perceive in the rehearsal. How come that I thought that the means that were made use of in the rehearsals do have the same meaning like the means I seemed to know from my European background? And even if it were like this, how would this meaning be read by a Chinese public that in general is not acquainted with European contemporary dance at all? So how come that I very quickly imposed my concept of reading onto theirs and (mis)read this rehearsal as if it took place in Austria, Germany, or Belgium?
Unfortunately, the company and us hadn’t the time or chance to sit down and clarify this question. Where did the authors of that work-in-progress get their means from, what do they want to express with them, what do they think are the hidden and expected meanings, how would a Chinese audience read them? So where do movement, gesture, or body language come from that are used in that production that made me read them under the concept of sameness rather than difference? And how would I be able to understand difference without an idea of sameness between Western and Eastern styles as a starting point at all?
Giving feed-back after the first run through of course still based upon my Western concept of reading the visible and writing the potential. And as a matter of fact, this feed-back had to fail in the light of difference as much as my reading of that run didn’t hit the target. To put it straight: my feed-back is still valid for me, still makes sense as my binocular perspective of the factual and the potential triggered it off. The question is but by which presumptions the potentiality has been fostered. The problem: do the theatrical means bear the same facticity and potentiality as I know them, or are they different although looking the same. And what is that concept of difference?
To use a metaphor: Martin once said that he was marveling at Chinese writing ideographic signs coming from the same pen that a minute before had written Latin letters. Although one uses the same means, although the same means are used for writing, the writing itself is completely different. So perhaps the theatrical means like gestures, movements, bodies are the same, look the same, but their outcome is a different one.
V.
Exchanges and translations do have to struggle with failure. But it would be wrong to put failure into question. Rather, failure is an important tool of and for translation. For without failure, translation can not exist. If it were so, translation would just produce sameness, identities, but not difference. So it is not putting failure into question that forms a big challenge for translation, but rather let questions of sameness fail. I still don’t know how we could do that. But still this knowledge of not knowing is something I can grasp.
After Martin had left, Daniel and me were going to the imperial summer palace. There, we met an old man who drew Chinese ideograms on the soil. He dipped the pencil into water and wrote a Chinese poem, one picture under the other. He was writing with water on imperial tiles. Perhaps his attention was less drawn to the writing, but to making his writing vanish. By waiting until the sun makes the signs disappear, invisible. What remains are gestures that are present, but are no longer visible.
VI.
The woman that had this question for me after the lecture on our last day at Dashanzi made something very clear to me. Although she didn’t know about it – how could she – she made very plain to me that visibility is on top of everything a cultural concept. We see not only what we can see or what we want to see, even the ability or wish is subject to the culture we stem from: I have never seen before so many people that are present but not visible like in China. The wander labourers, the ming-gongs are everywhere but nobody really sees them. This is presence without visibility.