The Dancer from the Dance

Abstract

Valda Setterfield is 86. She comes on stage at the HAU theatre in Berlin—hobbles, really—and begins to speak. She stutters. She repeats herself, phrases loop in on each other, long silences sit heavy in the air. Only re-watching the video do I see how carefully the slow, snowballing monologue is structured. And then Gus Solomons Jr. enters and begins his daily exercise routine: touche. Hungarian choreographer Ezster Salamon has titled the piece Monument 0.1: Gus and Valda, pointing with a wink and a nod to how fragile a monument might be. At the end of the performance, the two dancers list their accomplishments, and they are many: professional roles and life experiences running together in a kind of performative slurry. But dance itself as a medium complicates Gus and Valda’s status as a kind of living archive of 20^th century American dance—the choreographies live inside their bodies, but when the bodies are gone? ‘I will always remember, I will always remember, I will always remember how I learned to do that step’ chants Satterfield as Solomons marks the movement, working restrained versions of old scores. They walk offstage arm in arm to the rhythm of Setterfield’s hopeful refrain. This essay is a meditation on Salamon and Wavelet's Monument 0.1 & 0.2 and the questions that they raise about aging, ephemerality, and the archive in the context of contemporary European performance.

Notes

1 That Gus inhabits this more active role also makes one wonder about the identifications that separate Gus from Valda. Is his first act to testify to his bodily ability because, at 76, he is younger than Valda is? Because he is male? Black? Gay?

2 There is also – although for others to elaborate – a strong resonance here with Diana Taylor’s distinction between the archive and the repertoire.

3 ‘Dance is the passing around and the coming around of corporeal formations and transformations by means of excorporations and incorporations of jets of affects (or jets of affective singularities). Thanks to transformative exchanges of steps and sweat, thanks to ongoing transmissions of images and resonances, choreography allows dancers to turn and return on their tracks in order to dance via ex- and incorporations’ (Lepecki 2010: 39)