Deli Commedia (Do&Undo II)
Baktruppen
Deli Commedia, som ingick i programmet Baktruppen + Vårfest, premiärvisades i Rui Hortas Centro Coreográfico de Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal, i april 2004.
Baktruppen om Deli Commedia:
Mein Mac Rechnung
Ca Hirn Unmenge Cm
Mach Eng Merci Nun
Mach Neun Cm Ringe
Merce Cunningham:
What more can I say?
Merce Cunningham is old, great, a dance classic, makes fun and is intriguing.
Baktruppen is middleaged, not big enough, can’t really dance, makes fun and once made a choreography (Do & Undo) which was intriguing and once made us want to make another dance.
Anybody can make a dance, and making the first one was easy, but when people appreciated it as a show, we got ambitions on behalf of our dance opus 2, at the same time realising that we don’t know much about dance.
We read and watched videos and started a routine of physical exercise. At the same time, one dance piece made us laugh cats and dogs, and that piece was Deli Commedia, made for a video production only by Merce Cunningham in 1984.
We didn’t wonder much about how it would be or look like, if we would try to restage that choreography, as far from perfect as we could possibly do. We just wanted to do it. In reality we stole it, but that was no problem because later, when we were dancing in New York, we invited some people from the Cunninghams Company and they all were extremely generous. They liked what they saw and they liked the idea, and so did he. Why?
Maybe because he wants his dancers to walk like ordinary, and different, people.
Maybe it is impossible for dancers, not to walk like dancers.
Maybe it makes us seem more or less human, walking in different ways, not like dancers and elegant, no.
Maybe we lack that particular art, but still are capable of moving around in enjoyable ways, to see and to sense and to know each other.
Maybe that is what it’s all about anyway.
Maybe Merce Cunningham is great enough to know that and humble enough to go on, with perfecting his discipline of art.
Maybe we are idiots, and everybody likes to watch idiots dance, it makes them feel cool.
Maybe these words are not just words, maybe they are saturated with the meaning of everyday life and even steirischer Herbst.
Maybe life looks different, when you look at it.
Maybe we have to dance.
Maybe we came to see that quite late in life, as compared to Merce Cunningham.
Maybe we are the old ones and the first to die.
Maybe nobody knows neither shit nor why.
Maybe we all know what this is all about, except Merce Cunningham who believes he has to run around perfecting his art.
“I have always known perfection”, that is the sole English phrase I wrote in my first book, 25 years ago.
Now I don’t know, but don’t care anymore, if I write dancing or dance writing or even stop to think about it: Shortcomings included in perfection. Imperfection is when shortcomings are brusque excluded.
Certainly we dance our perfect dance.
Merce Cunningham?
He dances even more, and I think, even more than ever, now being too old.
You see?
Our words exclude him from the dance and make us lie.
That is what we do, and what we must undo, if only to get up and dance.
Baktruppen 01.07.07
(från Baktruppens hemsida www.baktruppen.org)
