15 Februari 11 http://hardhoofd.

com/2011/02/15/kijken-is-doen/

Watching Is Doing
By Roos Euwe Dancing in a gallery and learning by watching in a theatre: interactive art makes you alive. Dance is not meant just for watching, is it? An exhibition at the London Hayward Gallery and a performance by choreographer Andrea Bozic provided a rare experience of openness. They even turned Rose into an active observer and dancer. Death to the spectator, long live the participant! Oh, no, I dont want to participate. I cant dance, really, I cant. I havent come here to be on stage myself. Interactive performances and installations often provoke resistance; people get scared and find it easy for an artist to leave it all to the audience, or otherwise they simply hate it. This is understandable one cannot just lean back and relax in such performances however, unjustly. On a gray December Monday morning, I stepped into the Hayward Gallery in London and was taken by surprise: to my great pleasure, I seemed to have landed at a playground. The highly praised Move: Choreographing You is an exhibition where the spectator not only watches but also jumps, dances, balances and swings. The comprehensive exhibition presented a history of the relationship between visual art and dance and between the spectator and the artist. In the 60ies, a radical shift took place in the division line between the artist and their audience; the very presence and experience of the spectator became essential for the artwork itself. A superior artist sending his work into the world for observation by a passive audience, was replaced by an artist that presents his ideas and lets the artwork appear in collaboration with the spectator. Works were presented by prominent artists of the last 50 years. So I swung through a forest of rings by William Forsythe, squeezed through the green passageway by Bruce Nauman and experienced an intimate moment with a dancer in the work of Franz Erhard Walther. After spending three hours at the playground, I found myself standing outside again, wanting to do more, play more, learn more. Why is art still for the largest part made for watching only?

Theatre without spectators

Contemporary French philosopher Jacques Rancire wrote a text titled The Emancipated Spectator where he calls for a theatre without spectators. In this theatre, a spectator can actively learn from a theatre maker instead of passively watching the action taking place. Rancire does not mean that the spectators must physically be present in the artwork, as is the case in the works at the Hayward Gallery; interactive theatre is an attitude, a way of watching and thinking. This idea was clear to me in the performance After Trio A by choreographer Andrea Boi.

Educated as dancer and choreographer in Croatia and Amsterdam, Boi makes performances in which the relationship between reality and virtuality play a central role. For the Cover Project, a project in which choreographers were invited to make a version of another performance, she chose a part of Trio A, a work by an influential American choreographer Yvonne Rainer. She feels affinity with Rainers radical attitude and her pursuit of openness. Besides Trio A, Rainers famous No Manifesto from 1965 was an important source for the performance, says Boi. In this manifesto, Rainer wanted to make a definitive break with the virtuoso and spectacular dance: No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to style. No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer, wrote Rainer and this is what you see in a work like Trio A. Boi: Rainers Trio A, as well as my After Trio A, are based on continuity and the role of the spectator. Continuity means that the dance does not build towards a climax, as is traditionally the case with most of western dancing. In Rainers work, all the movements are equally important and nothing is subordinated to a peak. In addition, Rainer wanted to break with the tradition of a superior narcissistic dancer vs. a voyeuristic spectator. According to Boi, this must be understood in political terms: This is really about how people deal with each other and how we place ourselves in the world. In this dance, a dancer never looks at the audience directly, the face is always turned away or otherwise the eyes are closed.

Yes to mistakes
Boi worked out the two central points of Rainer, continuity and the role of the spectator, even further in her cover. In short, in After Trio A, we see a gritty black and white video with Yvonne Rainer dancing her work herself. The two dancers on stage are asked to copy the piece directly, without any previous knowledge of it. They learn and dance the dance in front of the audience; the first dancer learns from the video of Rainer, the second dancer from the first. They do their utmost best to pick up the dance steps and do the piece almost twenty times in a row, sometimes doing it without the help of the video. Every time the dancers do the piece again, it is different, every time they learn a bit more or forget a part. As a spectator, you see it all, you take part in their learning process, you watch with them, try to remember the right steps and compare the dancers. Watching and learning this way, you see how the dancers make the movements their own, how they interpret them and how different they are from each other. Boi places the dancers into a very fragile position and the spectator into a unusually critical one. Yes to presence. Yes to courage. Yes to mistakes, writes Boi in her After No Manifesto, as a reaction to Rainers. After Trio A is not only a work where the ideas of Rainer and Boi are combined but also a work about making of a copy, interpretation and reaction. Rainers manifesto is obviously an impossibility, it is a no to everything, says Boi. In the 60-ies it became clear what they did not want any more but it is still unclear what we want. We are still in that same time-frame and we have to find answers to the problems that were brought up then. Not only in the area of dance but on the world scale. How do we relate to each other and how do we deal with the world? It is high time not just to remove the borders between the artist and the spectator, but to question them. In live art and dance, makers try to make an open and honest

relationship with the spectator. Watching is not just leaning back: watching becomes learning, learning becomes thinking, thinking becomes doing. This requires courage, both on the part of the maker and the spectator, but hopefully then all theatre will become interactive. Yes to courage!