The Absence Drinkers

The new Jewish Museum in Berlin is an impressive, sleek structure with a grey zinc façade punctuated by broken crosses and irregular shards of windows that seem to explode like a shattered Star of David. Situated in an inauspicious old Jewish neighbourhood, the bold design is imposing, an impenetrable mausoleum concealing irreconcilable truths. It makes you want to get inside. That is, if you can find the “invisible” entrance in the adjacent baroque Berlin Museum that leads below street level to the basement of the new structure. Above ground, the contradictory autonomy of the buildings is retained. This purposeful ambiguity is part of architect Daniel Libeskind’s concept to design a building that embodies such a difficult history.

Inside, the building rises three storeys from a base whose line is frequently broken. The floor plan looks like a lightning bolt, long grey corridors zigzagging off three central axes. One axis leads to the exhibition halls; a second to the Garden of Exile, an outdoor forest of concrete slabs, where no surface is horizontal or vertical. Here, the ground seems to slip away as if you were on a ship, a physical sensation paralleling the unsettling sense of being culturally adrift, in exile. The third axis leads to the 27-metre-high Holocaust Tower. A heavy metal door closes behind. The unheated concrete room is cold and dark. A delicate shard of light penetrates the darkness. It is a chilling expression of hopelessness.

A straight line of five empty spaces, “voids,” transverses the corridors. Visible, yet cut off from the viewer, this elegant backbone of vertical shafts stretches from the basement to the roof in a design which speaks in the manner of history.

Libeskind’s concepts realized in the Jewish Museum are similar to those in the work of Canadian choreographer Benoit Lachambre. Lachambre was the reason I was in Berlin. He and performers Robin Poitras, Diane Leduc and Genevieve Pepin were artists-in-residence at TanzWerkstatt Berlin in the Podewil Centre for Contemporary Arts, where they workshopped a new work, L’aberrations des traces. At the heart of the architectural and choreographic space is the notion of absence, or disappearance, leading to a sense of destabilization.

After Lachambre’s father died the choreographer had a dream that he had to eat his father to keep him alive. L’aberrations des traces is a longing for the person who isn’t there in the same way that the museum honours the disappearance of the Jews in German history. Lachambre is also inspired by George Pereque’s novel Disparu, which is written entirely without the letter “e,” a metaphor of the absence of an extinguished tribe. In L’aberrations des traces his innovative approach to movement erases traditional dance convention and in the process reveals what lies beneath its muscular surface.

We climb inside artist Julie Andrée T’s site-specific installation and navigate through a maze of string to view the performance from the perspective of our choice. The piece begins almost imperceptibly with three performers moving in different parts of the set. There are moments of incredible intimacy and stillness, where spectators breathe in harmony with the performers, until it becomes necessary to move out of the path of a flailing dancer who seems to thrash unpredictably through space. There is a continual negotiation of personal space for both the spectator and the performer and it becomes increasingly difficult to know who is the “doer” and who is the “viewer.”

Well-known in Europe, Lachambre is a rebel inside the muscle-bound Quebec choreographic milieu for his “release technique” approach to movement that challenges classical notions of controlling the body. Ballet and modern dance techniques tend to be built around the musculature system with an emphasis on holding up the body against gravity. Lachambre asks, instead, his performers to sink to the ground.

Leduc falls backwards into space like an angel, suspended from a wall in a parachute harness. Poitras sinks to the floor with the same kind of suspended weightlessness. Then, led by her solar plexus, she floats up to a horizontal position and, as if unable to summon the energy to stand on her feet, sinks down again. Her body seems stripped of external strength and relies on some mysterious inner energy field as the source for movement. Without any recognizable movement vocabulary, these performers use their bodies in a way that speaks from personal experience, rather than from training. The movement reveals an emotional integrity that expresses the human psyche.

Not all the movement is slow. What begins as a placid solo with yoga-like movement set against a white shag backdrop is soon whipped into a frenzied prayer. Only partially visible under a strobe light, the wildly gesturing Pepin looks like a shaman struck by lightning. Later, Poitras appears ghost-like, intuitively tracing a path along the strings of the visual installation that seem to pass through her eyes and body like light containing some mysterious genetic code.

The most intriguing image is “skin folding.” Pepin sits in a chair, grasps hold of loose pockets of skin and stretches it in such a way as to pull her entire body through space. Skin becomes the impetus for the movement, as if it had eyes, or some strange intelligence.

Just as physical convention is erased from the body, Lachambre tries to strip logic from the mind. In a primordial scene, Pepin pulls on a pair of soaking wet, men’s suit trousers and sloshes water across the set, while Poitras speaks of a man who is coming to torture her and how she will trick this tormentor and cut out her tongue before he can. Throughout the speech, her thoughts become progressively more fragmented, as if she were shaking her mind free of the corset of language. Sentences are deconstructed in such a way that the movement of thought becomes a physical act. It is through the destabilization of mind and body that the performers arrive at the profound place of vulnerability necessary to speak of loss.

On the surface, both the museum’s deconstructivist architecture and Lachambre’s danceworks can be perplexing and difficult to understand. Like the “invisible” entrance to the museum, it is difficult to know how to enter. L’aberrations des traces is an aberration of meaning. There are many different readings of history, many stories to tell.

Ultimately, both architect and choreographer are less interested in a process of rationalization than in intensifying the mystery in life. And why not? We can see where rational thinking has led us—genocide, oppression and destruction of the spirit. For these artists, the architectural and choreographic spaces they create function like a spiritual domain, an area of invisible presence that deals with the unspeakable. They can be seen as gestures of healing and symbols of hope for the future. ■

L’aberrations des traces premièred at L’Espace Tangente in Montreal in February 2000 and with New Dance Horizons in association with the Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina, February 2000. It will be performed at the Canada Dance Festival in Ottawa in June 2000.

Heather Elton is a writer and photographer living in London, England.