In Ersan Mondtag's "Terminal Station," trained dancers play residents of a nursing home / Julian Röder

"They don't have to prove anything to anyone anymore"

"We need money! What do you mean, 'no'? Do you see the man crying? Why do you think he's dancing? Give him some and he'll stop," a girl of about ten walks through the rows of the HAU 1 theatre, shaking change from the audience like a street beggar. The audience splits in two with laughter: Christopher Roman walks like a shadow behind the girl along the audience's legs, flapping his hands like a dying swan, sobbing and crying. For almost 20 years he danced for the choreographer-reformer William Forsythe, whose company he also managed for the last two years before its dissolution.

Now Roman is the ideologist, star and protagonist of the new Berlin sensation that emerged in 2015, the Dance On company. Its core consists of six stars of contemporary dance who are over forty. Having earned enough to “eat”, Roman stops crying and pulling his toes, stands on his full foot and, cynically counting the small change he has earned, gives a couple of cents to Ivo Dimchev, the author of the Homerically funny project Out, who is sitting at the synthesizer. The king of performance Dimchev demonstrates the habits of a diva even as a pianist. The two stars coexist playfully on one stage, mocking “old age” in every possible way – as a time of hack work, freedom and shameless extortion.

Dimchev is one of the celebrities working for Dance On. Over four days, the company shows a dozen productions at three Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) venues. Not all of them are premieres, but all of them are made especially for the star "old-timers." The public flocks to one of the new productions as if it were a sensation, although it was already shown in September at the opening of the Volksbühne at Tempelhof Airport - then Christopher Roman and Brit Rodemund showed the first thing that choreographer William Forsythe created after his official retirement (or rather, a professorship at one of the American universities) and a big classical premiere at the Opera de Paris right on the airfield in the crowd that surrounded them. In contrast, Catalogue (First Edition) is the quintessence of contemporary, requiring crazy coordination and that very freedom from technique that dancers accumulate in their bodies over the years. And which for Rabi Mroueh, another director of Dance On, the author of the duet “Elephant” and the interdisciplinary composition Water Beetween the Hands shown at the festival, became a revelation: “They don’t need to prove anything to anyone anymore – they are self-sufficient. And they, like me, are looking not for something new, but for something different. They need a challenge.”

Final or transfer?

It is important to understand that when they talk about the old age of dancing people, they mean a fairly young age. The “shelf life” of a ballet dancer is up to 35. After that, unless you are Mikhail Baryshnikov or Maya Plisetskaya, it is quite difficult to “sell” your changing body. Contemporary dance fought against age restrictions in the same way as any other form of bodily discrimination. The right to dance at any age was legalized not only by butoh dancers who moved like crumbling ancient mummies. Not only by American postmodernists who were in constant confrontation with the dictatorship of the “ideal form”. Or the German dance theater, which placed its bet on the body as an archive of collective experience: in the right to play until death, dancing actors were equal to dramatic actors. The age revolution has also seeped into the territory of modern ballet after the choreographer Jiri Kylián, realizing that he could not part with several of his dancers, created a special company for them – the seniors, or veterans of the NDT (Netherlands Dance Theatre). And he was right – the world’s first choreographers lined up to join Kylián’s “old men”.

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But is it really true that “there is nothing to prove to anyone anymore”, considering that the time of “old men” in contemporary dance, whose companies and leaders are at least over forty, is just beginning? It is enough to sit with your mouth open in amazement at the performance of the dancer Jona San Martin, when she tells and shows how and from what the special “body architecture” of the choreographer William Forsythe is formed (she worked with him for more than 20 years). Or to suddenly realize that the tattooed muscular man with the face of a sad clown Frederic Tavernini is the partner of that very Canadian Louise Lecavalier, dancing with whom is like dancing with a tornado – not everyone is given – this is enough to understand what level and scale of “old men” the entire era has given birth to. You can’t calm them down, you can’t send them off to clubs to sell their former glory. There are a lot of them, they are on fire, they need to do not just something, but something that they are excellent at.

“There will come a time when old age as a topic will simply be closed,” said Christopher Roman in 2015 when he created the Dance On project. But even in 2018, there is still much to discuss. “Great dancers,” said one critic during the festival, “but why stigmatize them as old people?” As if age in dance is still something taboo – something that should be hidden and not put on display. Like sexual orientation or religious orientation.

Thing for dad

One of the Dance On projects is dedicated to exactly this – old age, which causes disgust in youth and a desire to distance itself, old age, labeled by society as inferiority. The play Die letzte Station (The Final Station) was staged this season at the Berliner Ensemble by one of the most radical young German directors, Ersan Mondtag. The Dance On dancers, who play the inhabitants of a nursing home somewhere on the edge of a forest, are unrecognizable here – they creak, groan and barely move, hiding their trained bodies under false old-age forms. And then suddenly they explode and launch into a desperate and powerful macabre dance, demonstrating that very dissolution of physical form for the sake of transcendental content, which is the meaning and essence of more than half a century of anti-aging campaign in dance.

One of the most touching works at the festival is about the fact that in old age the body has a special message and that we may be depriving ourselves of much by not allowing it to speak out. It is called “Repeater. Dance Piece with Dad,” and two performers are involved in it – choreographer Martin Nachbar and his father. The She She Pop company has similar projects – in one, the performers’ mothers are on stage, in the other, their fathers. But in dance theater, this kind of “doc situation” seems to be the first. The body of the choreographer’s elderly father, who has not been trained in any dance academy, is not only a unique archive of rituals, gestures, and movements he and his son perform together, but also an instrument that is surprisingly finely and carefully tuned to contact with another person. If the festival awarded an award for the best contact improvisation, it would definitely go to the 80-year-old salesman from Dusseldorf, Klaus Nachbar.

Berlin

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