Featured: Neuer Tanz (Düsseldorf, Germany)

The Neuer Tanz ensemble was founded in 1986 by dancer Wanda Golonka and visual artist VA Wölfl. Since 1987 the company has worked in the Düsseldorf royal stables of Benrath Castle Park. Neuer Tanz was the first independent company awarded the first German Producers prize for choreography. Each piece is a development from the previous one. The production is a continuation of the work with movement, light, sound, space and dance, visual arts, architecture and music.

“War and gallant style, a certain avantgarde decadence, is what interests me.” – VA WÖLFL

“When everyone is striving to do things better and more beautifully, who is working on the opposite? The more one probes beneath the polished surfaces of our time, and the longer one can put up with a supposedly unsuccessful image, the more surprising it turns out to be. NEUER TANZ conducts research at the boundaries of perception and leaves visual unambiguity behind. Shouldn’t it be possible to just hear dance? Or to develop it like a photographic image, so that it only becomes recognisable on later exposure? Or to cut holes in a piece, which you can look in, fall in, or close yourself in? The work of NEUER TANZ is a complex interplay of movements, reflections and experiments with space. Image, sound, light, space and movement have equal significance and are all winners. The dancers are constantly unfaithful. After all, art always builds the boundaries which it breaks itself.”
Jonny Reflector

In 1982 the famous German film maker Werner Nekes made the film “Uli isses” with VA Wölfl in the lead role. Nekes, who analyses his film images with ever new technical methods, is very close to the choreographer and set designer VA Wölfl. Wölfl, too, is fond of such radical mottoes as “Fixation is good – no mercy”. And just like a film, he “develops” the stage spaces with pure movement. “Neuer Tanz” [New Dance] was the name he gave to the company he founded in 1986 together with Wanda Golonka in the Marstall of Schloss Benrath, Dusseldorf. For him, new dance is discovering perception above all. The photo-artist, who trained at the Folkwang University in Essen, is against all “portrayals of reality”.

It should only become visible in a “subsequent illumination” in the eye of the beholder, as in 1994 in “”, when magnesium exploded, a projector unrolled an empty roll of film and the dancers moved in the diagonal for 45 minutes until the “factual aspect” of the dance, the movement itself, seemed to have been made to disappear. With this supposed standstill and running on empty he repeatedly provokes unshocking, uncompromising huge serialistic visions, as most recently in “EVE OHN E”, in Rotterdam in 2002, when he demonstrated the absolute equal rights of two colliding cars, a 20-piece company and an Armada of wind machines dancing to Wagner. Hardly any other German choreographer is so radical and has stayed so radical as VA Wölfl. (Arnd Wesemann, ballettanz at goethe.de)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at 10:40 am. It is filed under Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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