WORKING WIHT EMOTION
Ballett International - Tanz Aktuell 1/96
Daniel Goldin, cultural wanderer is to take over the dance company at Münster Municipal Theatre next season
Katja Schneider profiles the Argentinian dancer/choreographer
Daniel Goldin's latest production 'Papirene Kinder, that opened the 'NRW Meeting Neuer Tanz' Festival in September of last year, revolves around the past and the mechanisms of remembrances and feeling. This strongly emotional, personal confrontation with collective and individual history has been apparent right from his earliest works.
For one of his first choreographies, the duet 'La Peregrinación' (The Pilgrimage) the dancer / choreographer took first prize at the 1986 'Las Artes y las Ciencas de Argentina' competition. With his second duet 'La Sombra y la Luna' (The Shadow and the Moon, 1992) for the Folkwang Tanzstudio he won first prize at the international choreography competition' Citá di Cagliari'. As freelance choreographer he went on to create 'A la Deriva' (Flotsam, 1993) and 'Alborada' (Break of Day, 1994). Thematically and musically Goldin has now brought these four pieces together in 'Cuentos del Camino' (Tales of the Road). To traditional music from Galicia, they conjure up an archaic, sparse rural world and are played out, as Goldin says, in the spaces of the memory. 'Finisterre', his 1994 piece on the trials of James, also concerns itself with the past, with legends and the mother tongue in which they are carried by the oral tradition. It's that which was and how it is passed on which interests the choreographer, "I believe in collective memory; how it functions is what I'd like to find out." Daniel Goldin wants to stimulate the collective memory, resurrect times past, the old traditions and stories, "the world of the diaries, the eyewitness accounts, the autobiographical novel, the log book and the traveller's journal, the phantasmagorical literature and the Yiddish tales" in order to "translate the fragrances, the familiar feelings, the pictures of childhood into new images."
Daniel Goldin, born 1958 in Buenos Aires into the second generation of Jewish emigrants from the Ukraine and Bessarabia, was a lively child among the many 'Papirene Kinder'. This Yiddish expression refers to friends and relatives who stayed behind, who didn't emigrate, who are, perhaps, no longer alive, of whom there is only written evidence or with whom one can only communicate through letters but who nevertheless have kept their place in the hearts of those who emigrated.
'Papirene Kinder' is a very atmospheric piece that clearly sets out Goldin's artistic intention It's about the passing on of everyday culture and customs, the unconscious way in which one is shaped by the tradition one grows up in. He carries something of the Judaism of his ancestors although he was not brought up to be religious and wants to trace the way this resonates in socialisation and the emotions-like the Yiddish song 'Papirene Kinder' which he heard from his grandmother and which is sung in the piece it gives its name to by a marionette.
Goldin traces the phases in the everyday life of the survivors, stirred by the question of how, as one of the persecuted, as a Jew, one can go on living after the Third Reich. He drew inspiration from the Munich exhibition on the Displaced Persons Camps entitled 'Ein Leben aufs neu' (Starting life anew).
The first section of 'Papirene Kinder' consists of the tricky attempt to conjure up 'political images' using his finely-honed dance movement vocabulary: images of imprisonment, repression, torture and death but also of resistance and survival. To traditional Ukrainian music (to be followed later with compositions by Orff and Mendelssohn) the dancers enter one by one clad in grey work (or prison) clothes. One by one they fall into some characteristic movement, repeatedly reprised as a leitmotiv, suggesting perhaps the dragging of a heavy burden, holding a flag, the relentless pushing forward by a couple who remain rooted to the spot. This first section is overwhelmingly bleak, grey and oppressive with its unadorned choreography. There's nothing crudely demonstrative about it, but one still sees the exhaustion of emaciated prisoners in the slow slide to the floor, death on the barbed wire in the slide on the knees with twisted shoulders ending in collapse, the mistreated slave labourers in the rearing of the upper body. Later the dancers come together in a group and pose swaying slightly, as if for a photographer. Gradually they fall into a slow motion running-in-place; their expressions change to unbounded joy and lust for life; a Yiddish folk song is heard, first faintly and then becoming ever louder.
This gestural and physically expressed emotional metamorphosis leads into the second section that, after a change of costumes, begins with a rousing music-hall tango. The actors become the audience when, in a play within the play, a marionette accompanies the sad song of the 'Papirene Kinder'. After that the mood has changed: the dancers move quietly, a Chagallesque puppet fiddler flies through the air to Max Bruch's 'Kol Nidrei' and, in a dream theatre world, everything seems possible: the ballet blanc, the dying swan, pantomime, modern dance. The dancers reel back from their temperamental character variations, form up once again for the camera and freeze.
In their ever-changing emotional content and their precision, the images are as if in a photograph album that shows us new situations, feelings and atmospheres with each turn of the page and releases similar feelings in the watcher. For Goldin, working with the emotions is crucial - as much for the creation of choreography as for the way it is received. "A memory," he says, "produces an emotion and contains a particular energy" that manifests itself in the movement that arises from it. Its duty is to make a clear, precise statement - for someone who regards art as communication each new piece is another challenge.
Formative experiences for Goldin were the visits to Argentina by the Tanztheater Wuppertal, the Folkwang Tanzstudio and Susanne Linke. When he came to Germany in 1987, he joined the FTS, studied with Folkwang teacher Hans Zülig and danced as guest with Pina Bausch's company.
"Arriving at Folkwang I arrived in an artistic sense as well. It wasn't a completely strange world to me; there was already an inner feeling of belonging."
The foundation of this familiarity had been laid in Argentina by his teacher Renate Schottelius, who'd fled from the Nazis. After his private drama and dance education she taught him in the Wigman style and philosophy at the contemporary dance school attached to the Teatro Municipal General San Martin in Buenos Aires, where he also studied classical dance and Graham technique, choreography and music, and in addition drew considerably on the energy-techniques of Feodora Aberastury. And now the wheel has come full circle: Daniel Goldin, a traveller between cultures, has brought a multicultural -influenced, 'German Dance'- inspired art back to Germany from Argentina. As of the 1996/97 season, he is to take over the dance theater in Münster and for the following three years he's been guaranteed three new productions with nine dancers. First he's going to choreograph a new piece for the FTS to be premiered at the Ruhrfestspiele.
He's delighted that the Münster dancers "will always be there" to work with and won't - as iscustomary on the independent scene for financial reasons - have to be drummed together every time.
"What freedom have I got as a freelance choreographer?" he asks, referring to the precarious situation of the German independent scene. The term 'free' can really only be used in quotation marks here. Free from what? Free for what? Free in the free market sense? Or free as a euphemism for 'young' and by 'young' (as formulated by Belgian dance critic Myriam van Imshoot): "working for free and being offered only chances." It seems to be the general opinion that whoever counts as a young artist doesn't need a grown-up wage. The artistic freedom that the so-called independent scene claims is often paid for by the exploitation of its members. The wind blows cold across Germany for any dancer, choreographer or group shut out of the state and civic theatres; there's a shortage of rehearsal space, venues and money. Nevertheless Daniel Goldin has kept pushing on independently and attempted - as in 'Papirene Kinder'- to find international organisations (in this case the European Network for the Research of Contemporary Dance Production through whom he could prepare the work at the CNDC in Angers and the Kunstencentrum Vooruit, Ghent) to support his work. "I'd go wherever I could find a place to go on dancing and choreographing," he says, both earnestly and humorously. Now the place is Germany, but he's no more at home here than in Argentina. He doesn't feel like a Jew, but it's only in Germany that he's begun to ask what being a Jew means. He's less disturbed by the country's past than by the mentality (and legal attitude), which regards one's parenthood as more important than one's country of birth. "For me that was just as strange as discovering how small Europe is; you get out of the car after two hours and people are speaking a different language, there are different customs and ways of behaving." He's fascinated by the cultural and sociological differences.
The next piece, the third section of his trilogy that he's already planning for Münster is to address the emergence of cultures and South America, where an existing culture was violently eradicated by an alien invasion and where, in his opinion, a completely new one has grown up. His nightmare experiences with the Argentinian military dictatorship have, he says, been fed indirectly into his pieces. Perhaps that goes some way towards explaining why his choreographies are often regarded as heavy and grim. He denies this interpretation while admitting that he's not the most joyous of people, "Neither was I as a child."
Fears and obsessions meander through his work but they are also shot through with a cheerful composure. "In the end I'm bound up in my character with the themes of Jew, Catholic pilgrim or poor farmer. I look into my own crystal, my own experiences."