What am I Looking at? #1

I. The Freedom to Misunderstand
Many years ago, in 2004, I watched Sonja’s research for The Freedom to Misunderstand Chaos, Phase I, a dance piece in development. It was performed by dancer Sonja Si Ahmed and actor Bernd Neunzling to live experimental electronic music by Gloribel Hernandez at Dansateliers Rotterdam. I remember the space, a rehearsal studio with a vinyl floor that was large enough for Neunzling to approach the audience, calmly, regally, from the far end of the room, to turn in front of us, shout the name of an English King – Henry the Second for instance – and run a couple of meters back to the far-end wall, to repeat the sequence with Henry the Third, Henry the Fourth, and so on. I figured they must be plays by Shakespear. The piece was hilarious. Or so I thought.

“You may have noticed,” writes Jonathan Burrows in The Choreographer’s Handbook,1 “that in the inevitable human search for meaning a dance audience will latch on to anything humorous. It’s a blessing and a curse.” The somewhat uncomfortable truth was that no one else laughed. I figured it might be because they were taking the piece too seriously. This, I now know, was slightly beside the point. Discussing humour, Burrows quotes Adrian Heathfield: “The important thing is to find a balance between allowing the humour, and at the same time letting us know that underlying it there remains a serious proposition.”

Right: you can laugh, as long as you take the piece seriously? No, it’s still more complicated. “The laughter of a dance performance is a contrary thing,” says Burrows, “born out of a collision between the tension that arises in the absence of language and the release that comes with anything graspable.” Laughing is easily interpreted as a lack of understanding. And looking back at that performance, I must confess I had no idea what to make of it. Then again, wasn’t the title The Freedom to Misunderstand Chaos?

II. Table Piece
Ever since I filmed Sonja at the dance academy in Tilburg while she was creating her first piece in 1993, with Kim Badira Kwaaital, I struggled to make sense of what she was doing. The performance, which Sonja refers to as the Table Piece because Kim partnered with a wooden table, was emerging somewhere far away in the large rehearsal room. Rather than filming the piece in progress, I focused on Sonja, who was sitting on a grand piano watching Kim, giving her directions. Occasionally, she gave me a puzzled look. What was I doing there anyway?

Over the years, I kept searching for meaning in Sonja’s choreographies and performances, for something graspable. I laughed less, even though I still didn’t quite know where to look for the serious propositions she was articulating. And it wasn’t just Sonja’s work. The more I looked at art and wrote about it, the stronger the feeling grew that something essential in dance was eluding me. But why should it, when one of my closest friends was a dancer and a choreographer?

When did the idea come up to discuss contemporary dance with Sonja in relation to the pieces she made? A diary entry of 27 February 2022 says:
By the end of the evening we talk about her career. Sonja would love to tell a better story about all the things she has done. I propose to take up our old plan to discuss modern dance, taking the pieces she made as a starting point, and turn it into a small publication. She likes the idea.

Apparently, it already was an old idea at the time. Peu importe... Sonja sent me a hard disc that contained all the videos she had of her pieces, and the project slowly evolved from there. Initially, I tried to describe what I saw, and discovered that writing about dance isn’t easy. In an attempt to come to terms with Hellrot, with dancer Eva Kamala Rodenburg and musician Gloribel Hernandez, I detailed the dancer’s every move across the stage. Sonja didn’t like the writing one bit – and it isn’t hard to see why.

In Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism,2 Sally banes quotes poet and dance critic Edwin Denby: “a writer is interesting if he can tell what the dancers did, what they communicated, and how remarkable that was” (p. 24). Description, interpretation and evaluation: those are the tasks of a critic – to which she added contextual explanation. Providing instances of criticism that only focussed on one particular task, Banes shows that it usually falls short of being interesting.

“What’s wrong with pure description?” she asks, in response to Susan Sontag’s call in Against Interpretation for descriptive criticism. And she provides the following answer: “It doesn’t provide a structure for thinking about the work or for understanding it. […] In fact, contra Sontag, it seems to me that often, the more description, the harder it becomes actually to see the work” (p. 30). You need to provide at least some interpretation, if not evaluation and context as well.

However, Sonja’s rejection of a descriptive mode was not just a lack of conceptual categories. To her, meaning isn’t necessarily found in the steps. Her material is more “what happens in the gap between two movements,” as Burrows (p. 6) puts it. At the same time, the movements do constitute or induce a certain mood, a mode of being. Writing about ‘other bodies’ and ‘states’, Burrows provides a clear description, which I think is worth quoting at length:

Other bodies
There are other ways of experiencing or thinking about the body than steps or movement.

Many dance and performance practitioners build their relationship with the performing body upon other, perhaps less easily definable, approaches and strategies.

These include working with experiential or imagined states of being – physical, emotional or mental.

Also socially and politically motivated work, for instance that dealing with gender, minority rights or specific cultural issues.

Or more philosophically and conceptually driven pieces, where the body may become a site for representation and reference, rather than physical invention.

Each of these bodies demands its own approach to time, space and continuity, and each of them can arrive at something that we recognise as a choreography. (p. 99)

This takes me back to Table Piece. I found back the negatives of the screenshots. There is a series of images of Sonja working with Kim, which I never took the trouble to print. The table is vertical, like a backdrop, and choreographer and performer are sitting on the floor, rehearsing movements. It’s just a fragment, a brief moment that doesn’t tell me much. But last September, Sonja had retrieved a box full of notebooks that contained reflections on various pieces. We were going through them, and opening one at random, I read:

There’s a strong sense of unity and security + perfect aesthetics. But loneliness and grief are also clearly present for me. The room is filled, or rather, the music fills up a room, with clear boundaries.

Kim: the noblewoman
Always preoccupied with herself to be beautiful and noble. Completely lonely as a consequence, frustrated not to comply with society. Expecting visitors or not really; has long ago lost control of herself.

Sonja was studying dance theatre in Tilburg, and with Table Piece she was exploring for the first time how to work with characters and moods as a choreographer. The piece revolves around the idea that the dancer and the table are the same: the table was Kim, and she was the table. Other considerations – social or political; philosophical or conceptual – are far less relevant. From the very start, Sonja was investigating states of being, and the approaches to time, space and continuity they demand. A choreographer who was invited to come and see the finished piece said: “Tables can’t be people.”

1. Burrows, J. (2010). A Choreographer’s Handbook. Routledge.
2. Banes, S. (1994). Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism. Wesleyan University Press.

Test

Ha Sonja,

prachtig beeld in Slagerij Van Hest. Die lange magere witgeschminkte man die naakt door de slagerij dwaalt met de motoriek van een etalagepop. Het koele tl-licht, de tegels, de worsten, het metaal van snijmachines, haken en hakmessen – ik vind het indrukwekkend hoe Victor gestalte geeft aan deze poging tot plaatsbepaling. Hij weet dat hij hier thuishoort, of thuishoorde, maar hoe dan? Er zijn vage herinneringen aan handelingen, hun betekenis is verdwenen, de onderliggende samenhang is verloren gegaan. Dat je Victor inwikkelt in folie en hem in de vitrine legt... het is bijna alsof je hem uit zijn lijden verlost.

Encore!

Hi Sonja,

It was great to meet you at Spring Dance (thanks for helping us navigate Utrecht) and interesting to hear about your work. I'll add you to our database to ensure you know what's going on here in Nottingham and in nottdance.

Keep in touch
Steph Crawford
Dance4
www.dance4.co.uk

Hey Sonja,

ik moest aan je denken en ik vond je mooie site
very impressive! you don a lot.
groetjes Randy

cool, cool, tegenwoordig mijn vervelend stopwoordje, maar ik meen het wel! ziet er goed uit
xxx

Hoi Sonja,
Met bewondering naar je mooie website gekeken!
Niet alle maar zeker een aantal producties hebben mij zeker geboeid.
Hopende elkaar weer een keer tegen te komen!
Groetjes,
Yvonne

Hi Sonja,
Keep up the good work.
I'm working on a project right now dealing with movement, site/locative media and motion capture. Have a look when u have a moment.

x
milo

Haa...!
Daar sta je dan, sterk en eigenzinnig!!
X
Minke

He Sonja,

Leuke site man.

gr
Arno