Modern Dancers Captivate Audience, Share History

Dancer Gottschild Recalls Post-War Germany

The 2000-2001 dance season opens with two weekends of performances and three public lectures from dancer Hellmut Gottschild and his wife, dancer and scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild. Last Saturday and Sunday Gottschild, founder of Philadelphia's Zeromoving dance company and protegé of German master Mary Wigman, performed Mary's Ark, Blue Eyes, and the Inability to Dissolve, a narrative piece exploring his coming of age in post-war Germany and his work in Wigman's Berlin studio.

The performance opened with Gottschild rotating his head ponderously while a recording or his voice conceded the shortcomings of memory. According to Gottschild, recalling past events is like trying to force a foot back into its footprint. "The forcing itself," he said, "is an act of destruction."

Despite this acknowledgement, Gottschild, running backwards on stage, returned theatrically to 1936, the year of his birth and of the infamous Berlin Olympics, hosted by the Nazis. With only his voice and Dixon Gottschild's occasional drumming for rhythmic support, he paced around the stage, gesturing sporadically, celebrating Wigman's once subversive credo that dance should depend more on body rhythms than music.

The relatively spare stage set included a chair for Wigman, a gong similar to the one she had used to call dance students from their dressing rooms, and a television on which Gottschild showed a recording of Wigman's "Witch Dance."

Gottschild recalled his first encounter with his teacher and her striking blue eyes, saying, "I then imagined to be the only one to be invited into those eyes, and through the eyes, into her body." He explained how Wigman taught her students to spin in place, sometimes up to 90 minutes. While spinning, Wigman had explained, "there will come the moment when we seem to stand still and it is the space that turns."

This blurring of the boundary between the dancer and the dancer's space has been a recurring theme throughout Gottschild's performances and talks. At last Friday's lecture, "Of Touching and Being Touched," Gottschild, explaining that he had just bought a house, challenged the concept of property. Dancers, like everyone, he argued, cannot claim to own their bodies or make accurate distinctions between themselves and the outer world. "I rather forget about ownership," Gottschild said, "and go to the concept of the brain, the shoulder, the arm, the hand, the tree, the world out there, the whole space being conduits, some of which were entrusted to me for a time, available to receive me, and filled with the life that is me."

Gottschild spoke of a "constant exchange" between the outer world and inner world, a quality of his dancing that departs from the tenets of ballet and classic form. Whereas in Wigman's school of dancing, one harmonizes with the surrounding space, in ballet, Gottschild said, "The dancing body is actually the center of the universeŠ [the ballet dancers'] energy goes outward more."

Brenda Dixon Gottschild, critic for Dance Magazine, is the author of Digging: the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts and Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era. She was also the beloved instructor of new Oberlin dance teacher Jonathon David Jackson. This week, Ms. Dixon Gottschild gave two lectures in the Environmental Studies center, "Ballrooms, Nightclubs, and the Vaudeville Stage: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era" on Tuesday, and "Stripping the Emperor: The Africanist Presence in American Performance" on Thursday.

This Friday and Saturday, she will collaborate with her husband in performances of Tongue Smell Color(Warner Main Space, 8:00p.m.), an exploration of the couple's relationship and, in the words of choreographer and scholar Susan Leigh Foster, "what it means to be white, black, male, female, older and in love at this moment in history."

Dance professor Nusha Martynuk, once a member of Zeromoving dance company, considers Hellmut Gottschild her mentor. Introducing him at last Friday's lecture, she said, "The whimsical and intelligent titles that he uses for his dances are indicative of the way he approaches his work ‹ with imagination, with humor, and yet with a rigor that, over the years, has been my guiding light."

Through a rich medley of scholarship, performance, autobiography, and cultural history, Hellmut Gottschild and Brenda Dixon Gottschild have affirmed this week that the relevance and implications of modern dance reach far beyond the stage.

Junior Claire Miller contributed to this report, providing historical and technical background.