Rolf Borzik – Poetic spaces – Spaces for poetry

One of the strongest drives behind the image of dance theatre may be – as Pina Bausch once put it – not wishing to differentiate, or elevate yourself, from the everyday. Thus apparently normal clothes, suits, shirts and trousers, formal evening wear or light summer dresses, soon became identifying signals for dance theatre. At the same time all these ‘costumes’ are always precisely tuned to the base temperature of each piece, the mood of a scene. The switch from strong colouration to muted tones or clear black-and-white contrasts may mirror or clash with the emotions on stage. Nothing is accidental, but nor do the costumes seem deliberate or stylised. Whatever the people on stage wear, they wear very naturally, and yet the clothes unleash a huge wealth of colour and form.

The effect of the sets is very similar. When an original cast of a street surface fills the stage, in the Brecht-Weill double bill The Seven Deadly Sins / Don’t be afraid, it might initially suggest a kind of realism. The place might provoke all sorts of associations, from the path of life through to the gutter we might land in. In fact, however, the street is merely a hint, a kind of finger pointing out that this here is about the here and now. At the same time this place is presented so openly in the space (and visibly surrounded by spotlights), that the viewer is not forced into any kind of simplistic notion of reality. They might guess that this is about another kind of ‘reality’, an interior one of feelings.

The spacious nineteenth-century rooms of Bluebeard, or the Macbeth project, the empty café in Café Müller, the old ballroom with a cinema screen in Kontakthof – all these spaces seem familiar, touchable, close. Yet at the same time they are also placed in a liminal realm between dream and reality. Bluebeard’s ‘castle’ is strewn with withered autumn leaves, which smell and rustle, absorbing the movements and inscribing traces in the room. Macbeth’s castle is far from grand; simply a room crammed with old furniture and full of toys. Water flows incessantly into the space, tilted to the front, like the audible sound of time passing, or a reminder of guilt which can never be assuaged.

It is one of the unique qualities of these spaces, that they stimulate the imagination, and at the same time give it a free reign, without ever prescribing an interpretation. They are concrete, can be perceived and experienced by the senses, but open themselves up to a breadth of possible perspectives. It isn’t just the proportions of a large opera stage which gives them this breadth; it is the character of the spaces which allows everything to find a place in them – what we know, just as much as what we had barely thought possible.

If Pina Bausch’s pieces grow from the inside out, as she once said herself, their theatrical spaces seem to be making a kind of complementary countermotion: the outside world is coming in, nature is spreading across the stage. It is like in the story Lenz by Georg Büchner; nature is no longer the opponent, a foreign exterior, but an extended showground for the inner life.

In Komm, tanz mit mir (Come dance with me), a hard, white slide cites a bank of snow. Dead branches lie on the ground, with which the protagonists chivvy and chase each other. At the end a heavy tree actually crashes from above the stage into the scene. In the cold winter landscape, singing the title song of the piece, the protagonist obstinately tries to gain a little affection and attention from the men, mostly hidden in thick coats.

In the operetta Renate wandert aus (Renate emigrates), brilliant white icebergs have drifted onstage. Intensely bright, this polar landscape is far from threatening. A large stepladder stands like a reminder that, despite all the seductive beauty, we are in the theatre. The protagonist phones her lover using a flower and at the end all the dancers bring a sea of fresh flowers into the splendid ice palace. Contrasts abound, contrasts which generate friction, which don’t recall and confirm familiar, usual images, instead replacing them with new, much richer ones.

The extent to which the spaces Rolf Borzik developed shifted dance into new, previously unimagined contexts, is perhaps clearest through the profound power of the elements.

In The Rite of Spring, Pina Bausch’s choreography for Igor Stravinsky’s ballet score, a thick layer of earth covers the stage. At the start this arena remains untouched. Essentially defenceless, the dancers enter the room: the men naked from the waist up, wearing simple black trousers; the women in thin pinafores, which gradually cling to their sweating skin, increasingly allowing their bodies to show through. Like all of Borzik’s spaces, this is also ingeniously simple, allowing the essence of a piece to shine through. It incorporates two things at once: the earth refers to the atavistic ritual the libretto is based on; at the same time the openness of the scene allows for a directness which involves every audience member. No symbolism, no scaffolding is necessary to make the fusion of Eros and Thanatos perceptible to the senses. Every movement engraves itself in the earth throughout the piece. Thus the ground records the choreography and holds it safe against its transience. But it isn’t just the stage which changes, so do the dancers. The earth sticks to their clothes, to their skin, their faces. Their movements are wrested from the resistance of the floor, where any lightness would be misplaced. This sacrificial dance is heavy, wrung from the earth, and takes its dynamic and energy precisely from it. The bodies are able to discharge and overexert themselves against the resistance of the earth, not only suffering but, equally, full of power.

In contrast, the power of the water in Arien (Arias), which here too covers the entire stage, open right to the firewalls, is insidious. It soaks into the fine clothes of the soirée, makes them heavy, gradually moulds the bodies out of them. After rapid movements it splashes up or extends the dance into the room in momentum. It dares the dancers to enjoy childish pleasure in bathing and leaves them out in the rain – or in the lurch. It makes both soft and splashing sounds, and sounds of exuberant energy. And the water too is an opponent they can work away at, a landscape full of poetry, which reveals the direct, physical reality of dance.

In Arien (Arias) there is also a wonderfully gentle love story, as sad as it is beautiful, between a woman and a hippopotamus. It stomps ponderously through the scene, stops to gaze, takes a bath, stands mute – like an embarrassing declaration of love – by the table the ensemble sits around.

In Keuschheitslegende (Legend of Chastity) we have enormous crocodiles moving among the performers on a painted sea as if perfectly natural. In one scene they are fed with raw chunks of meat, otherwise they are just there. Various associations could be provoked: with the voracity of love or the dangerous intensity of drives.

The animals too – real and portrayed – represent nature, not only the purported ‘external’, but equally the inner nature of feelings. Like the stuffed stag, the animals in dance theatre pieces always take the role of mute witness. They seem ­to rest in a state of enviable innocence – untouched by the ebb and flow of human passions, hopes and desires. It seems nothing can drive them out of it. Unlike the human beings, they face the world without questions and thus too without worries. With awareness of themselves and the world, the human, however, is excluded from this state of paradise. The animals remind us that the happiness of being at one with ourselves and the world must first be reinstated. The human has been driven from paradise and should such happiness exist, it can only be sought in the future.

It is as if dance theatre repeatedly revolves in its innermost core around this question, as if it tests out new answers with tireless vigour. This may be a Sisyphean task, a question which might never be answered. The important thing is to ask it, and with all honesty to try and get to the bottom of it. It isn’t important to arrive, but to be on the journey.

The spaces, the clothes, the things used on stage, are all a part, as carefully measured as they are logical, of this questioning drive. This why Rolf Borzik created sets which retain the chronology of events within them – against transience and mortality. By the end, the sites of action have almost always changed, just as in turn the dancers often carry traces of the materials. The relationship between the humans and the things becomes visible, humans only now perceptible altogether, in a sensory, concrete way, in their existential dimensions of time and space.

These are spaces which record the tracks of time, not static unchangeable venues but spaces in motion. They record precisely the daily drama of existence. In that sense they are spaces of memory, against forgetting and decay. At the same time these spaces open themselves invitingly to the viewer’s imagination, who is reminded, thanks to this poetic pointer, that everything is possible, even that which we have not yet seen and never yet thought of.