Introduction. Welcome to Body of Work. Doing Dance Heritage

In this introductory episode we lay out the episodes of this season of the Body of Work podcast, and take the opportunity to speak with Delphine Hesters, coordinator of dance heritage at STUK. 

Sound featured in the episode: Stage recordings from Bartók / Beethoven / Schönberg, by Rosas/Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, recorded by Olivia Rochette and Gerard-Jan Claes. Music: Grosse Fuge, op.133, by Ludwig van Beethoven, played live by Ictus — Field recordings from THE DOG DAYS ARE OVER 2.0 rehearsals, by Katharina Smets — Live sound from Out of Context – For Pina, by Alain Platel. Music: Sam Serruys, featuring the voices of the cast. Recorded by Beeldstorm, March 2023 — Theme music composed by Inne Eysermans.

Voices of: Delphine Hesters, Naomi Gibson, Laura Maria Poletti, Clinton Stringer, Jacob Storer, Ross McCormack, Tale Dolven, Timmy De Laet, Madeline Ritter. 

Narration: Tessa Hall

Transcript

SPEAKER_07 0:00

We go to museums to see famous paintings. We travel the world to admire ancient architecture. And from our couch at home, we can get lost in books written centuries ago. This is cultural heritage, created in the past and still cherish today. Shared points of reference that shape our cultural identities and bring color and reflection to our lives. When it comes to certain art forms, getting up close to the past is possible. Paintings, sculptures, books, these objects are tangible. You can physically touch them. But what happens when the artwork we're dealing with is not made of stone or canvas, but a performance. What happens when the object is movement? Dance is ephemeral, life, performed in the present and then gone. But the thing is, like any other art form, dance also has its classics. Works of art that are just as skillful and culturally significant as paintings you find in museums. Choreographers whose pieces are being taught and analyzed in art schools around the world. The difference is that these pieces can't be found sitting in frames or resting on pedestals. Sure, archival material like videos and photographs of dance can be found in collections, but we're talking about the encounter with live dance itself. So, how can we experience choreographies from the past the same way we can experience paintings in a museum? How do these intangible artworks survive across time? How can they be seen or danced by generation after generation? Welcome to Body of Work, a podcast that explores the question of doing dance heritage. This is a podcast by Stuck, House for Dance, Image and Sound in the City of Leuven. My name is Tessa Hall. I'm a dancer myself and also a dance heritage researcher. At Stuck, we've been researching the heritage of the contemporary dance scene in Flanders. And with this series, we'll share that with you. If history is about looking back on the past, heritage is a little bit different. It's about engaging with our past now, in the present. When you're busy with your heritage, you're linking your past, present, and future. But when it comes to dance, who carries that past to the present? How is it carried? To keep dance alive, it needs to be transmitted from body to body, audience to audience. Choreographies from the past, revived and performed in the present. This is what we call repertory. And it's a way of keeping dance alive and connecting us to dance heritage. So, with the Body of Work Podcast, we talk to all kinds of people who are connected to the practice of contemporary dance repertory. From dancers to rehearsal directors and even physiotherapists and academics. You'll hear their thoughts and stories, their experiences and expertise. The idea for this podcast came from Delphine Hestis, who leads dance heritage work at Stuck.

SPEAKER_09 4:14

Stuck's commitments to dance heritage comes from the belief that we should not only invest in developing and creating new dance works, but also in ways to give existing works a longer life. And also to make sure that future generations can have access to dance works from the past. In Flanders, we have a rich contemporary dance field which has grown and diversified since the beginning of the 1980s, but at the same time it remains very vulnerable. And if we don't find ways to preserve the richness that has been developed, it can be irrevocably gone pretty quickly. I work as the coordinator of the Dance Heritage Program at Stuck, and the starting point of that program is the question: how can we pass on or transmit dance to new generations? Both new generations of dancemakers, but also of audiences. So on the one hand, we want to develop ways to support dance practitioners in our field in the preservation and transmission of their practice. But on the other hand, at Stuck as an art center, we can also connect to audiences. So how to connect generations in their love for dance. It's so beautiful to have or create shared points of reference. A grandfather taking his grandchild to see a piece that he saw when he was a young man. To share that experience, and in that sharing, also being able to explore the differences, to sense the time that has passed, the time between the grandfather and the child, between what dance is now and how dance was back then, and between the society we are now and back then. What changes and what remains the same. The moment where we bring all of this together is in our yearly body of work festival at Stuk, the Festival for Living Dance Heritage. There we connect new creations to old pieces, research and practice, younger and older audiences, and heritage and innovation. I've worked in the field of dance for a while now, but I love how this notion of cultural heritage really opens up a new dimension or perspective. It really makes me look from a different angle. Cultural heritage is about the community, cherishing and reflecting on elements of culture from the past and carrying them into the future. And that community includes the audience.

SPEAKER_07 6:48

Just so we're all on the same page, we're not talking about Swan Lake. We're talking about contemporary dance repertoire.

SPEAKER_06 6:58

But what do we even mean when we say repertoire? Repertoire in general, I would say, is just previous pieces that have been created by the choreographer and that are being brought back or taught to a new cast or slightly edited and made into a new version, maybe, because people still want to see it. That they're being brought back in the big sense of like we're doing this again, like taking a step back from something and coming back towards it. I think that's also quite a big part of it for me.

SPEAKER_07 7:34

So this is Naomi Gibson, who you're going to meet in the first episode. Repertoire doesn't have just one definition, but I quite like her take on it. She's part of the original cast of The Dog Days Are Over. This piece by Jan Martis has been revived 11 years later with a new cast. We'll meet the choreographer, rehearsal directors, and some of the new dancers to hear why The Dog Days Are Over has been given a 2.0. This is a story of trial and error, of adaptation and continuation. The second episode doesn't start from one specific piece of repertoire, but instead zooms out to the bigger picture of doing repertory work. To learn about the complexities and joys of this, we meet three dancers of Rosas: Lauda Maria Poletti, Clinton Stringer, and Jacob Storer.

SPEAKER_05 8:44

With any repertoire, it's the role of the rehearsal director to be like, okay, how is the best approach?

SPEAKER_07 8:49

A rehearsal director is responsible for passing on work to new dances. But what does it take to be a rehearsal director? What does the transmission of repertoire involve?

SPEAKER_04 9:01

I'm digging through the iterations of each role and trying to understand what the original intention of the writing was, maybe to find the version that I, as an archaeologist, am happy with and proud of to put on stage. You know, I really see it as that, as uh archaeologist, dance archaeologist, and archaeologist.

SPEAKER_07 9:29

And what does it take to perform a role that wasn't actually made for you?

SPEAKER_08 9:34

It's like you wear a costume. That piece of repertory is like a costume that you wear, and it's not necessarily fitting you. But then if you do that work, that physical work, it comes from a very relevant place. It comes from your own body.

SPEAKER_05 9:50

I've danced many people, so to speak. I've been many people, yet always me. And so it's it's interesting to like to face that and to realize, like, okay, there's not one definition of who I am. I'm still me. Yeah, that's a lesson I learned from repertoire in general.

SPEAKER_07 10:15

The third episode moves on to Out of Context for Pina by Alain Platel. Here, we take a different angle on repertory. In our common understanding, we think of repertoire as a piece that is passed on from body to body. But out of context is different. It's never been passed on. Instead, for 15 years, the same group of dancers have kept on performing it. Ross McCormack is one of the three dancers who shares with us what it's like to carry a piece through time. Not as a relay, but as a marathon. Just you and your team.

SPEAKER_00 10:58

Oh man, what if we just did this work forever? Like, what if we did this work until we couldn't move? It was about our bodies to begin with, but it was about our bodies whilst they were in a very dynamic, um, virtuosic kind of peak state. What if we just kept doing this with our bodies as they slowly became affected by just our age and Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 11:28

In episode four, we move back in time to one of the most iconic pieces in Flemish contemporary dance history: Farze, four movements to the music of Steve Reich by Antheresa de Kearsmacker. Back in 1982, De Kearsmacher and her collaborator, Michalandemé, premiered this work as young women. What's it like to perform Farzer? It's very special they're performing a piece that people have a history with. The story of Farza is now over 40 years old, and Tala Dolvin is one of the dancers who's part of the chain.

SPEAKER_03 12:08

That's very unique in Belgium, I think, that the kind of general audience have this history with dance, and that they've seen the pieces throughout the years, or with different dancers, or and then they see it again, and I remember I saw it 20 years ago. These kind of experiences are so special.

SPEAKER_09 12:26

At Stuck, we're currently part of a European research project and network called Dance Map. This podcast, and also the research it's based on, is part of DanceMep's endeavor to research and highlight European dance heritage with the goal of supporting the future of our field.

SPEAKER_07 12:48

After talking with the dancers and other people who make all this happen, I went to meet academics and cultural heritage workers connected to Dance Map. For the last episode, I wanted to ask their opinion on what it means to do dance heritage and to ask it from a zoomed-out lens. We'll hear from people like Madeline Ritte, the initiator of our Dance Map Network.

SPEAKER_01 13:17

Imagine you don't know the name of your grandmother. Imagine you had no stories about how your mother was brought up in what kind of surrounding, in what city. And imagine there would be no stories about anything before your own time.

SPEAKER_09 13:37

What Madeline said really touched me. Like in any other art form or even any part of life. If you know about your history and learn from those who came before you, you strengthen your own way of doing what you do and you position yourself. It supports you to become more fully and consciously immersed in your present.

SPEAKER_07 13:58

For the last episode, we'll dive into questions like how can archiving play an active role in the intangible history of dance? What are the sticky points of heritage? The problems, the issues, the stumbling blocks. As we continue doing dance heritage, what can be reimagined, repurposed, and refocused? We'll hear from people like Professor Timmy Delarte from the University of Antwerp.

SPEAKER_02 14:32

Why do people go to museums? What does a museum do? It brings together very different artworks from very different periods, and then you can start to see cross-connections. What stays, what what disappears, what what trends were there, what what comes again, what and then it becomes interesting. So when there is no repertoire, there is also no memory of dance, and hence no history. And there it stops. And then we can continue going on in circles again and again and again.

SPEAKER_09 15:07

It's important to make sure that dance repertory can exist, but it's also not enough. It's a starting point for diving deeper, to make connections, to weave a web of stories, and to give meaning to the traces that we still have in the archives, even though what happened on stage is gone. Therefore, it's also very important to document performances and dance practices more broadly, to tell the story of a dance field as a whole, from what happens on stage to what happens off stage, from new creations to repertory. Repertory is only the tip of the iceberg. So dance heritage is something we actively do today. We need to actively keep on adding layers to our dance history, to add voices and perspectives and singular stories, because history is never finished. In this podcast, we consciously focus on the perspective of the dancers within repertory work. It is surprising how obviously central dancers are to the dance field, yet how underrepresented their voices and their knowledge are in our dance history. And there is still so much else unexplored, so many dance artists of many different generations, different genres in dance, but also teaching dance artists, dramaturges, critics, light designers. We are only just starting.

SPEAKER_07 16:39

You're listening to Body of Work, a podcast created by Stuck, House for Dance, Image and Sound in the city of Leuven. This series is developed in the frame of Dance Map, a European research project and network funded by the European Union, Horizon Europe. The interviews featured in this podcast have been conducted by myself, Tessa Hall, in the frame of our Dance Map research, as well as Katarina Smetz and Delphine Hestes as part of Stuck's ongoing commitment to highlighting and strengthening dance heritage here in Flanders. Body of Work was conceived by Delphine Hestes. Katarina Smetz worked on the edit and the scenario. Tessa Hall, that's me, I did research and narration. Teresa van Eken assisted the audio production. The theme music for the podcast was composed by Ina Essermans, and the mix was done by Ina Essermans and Yves Demay. You heard the voices of Naomi Gibson, Jacob Storer, Clinton Stringer, Laura Maria Poletti, Ross McCormack, Tala Dolven, Madeleine Ritter, Timmy Delat, and Delphine Hesters. Special thanks to Clankverbont for using their studio at Passa Porta.