Beginning with a twitch

A sudden movement strikes Günther Wilhelm’s arm, which he holds outstretched sideways. The sudden twitch slowly fades, followed by a longer pause. Standing in front of a black molleton curtain, the dancer follows the events in his arm with a neutral expression in his face. Another twitch – fading again slowly. Isolated from the rest of his body, his arm seems to register something, which we cannot see directly, some kind of an impulse that probably would have gone unnoticed without the arm’s movement. An impulse of what exactly? The relaxed lounge atmosphere, the simple stools on which the audience is seated in front of small bistro tables, as well as the room’s even illumination, does not suggest that something mysterious or secret is happening here. On the contrary, the piece rather seems to deal with something obvious, overt, or perhaps rather about the very moment when something becomes visible or appears on the surface. The arm makes the movement visible and vice versa. The audience observes this two-fold becoming-visible along with the dancer. Like a seismograph, the arm is registering signals, reflecting the conditions of its visibility. Movement and visibility mark two central topics in the wide-ranging net of questions, which the visual artist Mariola Groener and dancer Günther Wilhelm unfold in their joint productions. What makes movement visible? Depending on the emphasis, there are two different perspectives implied by this question: a) How can movement itself become visible? b) What else is brought to visibility through movement? Let’s take for instance Günther Wilhelm’s arm and follow its initial impulse: if we regard the rhythm of its repeated pulse as an indicator, then the relation between visibility and movement seems to be relatively well-balanced, calm – at least for the moment, here in the beginning. But the sudden twitching also suggests turbulence, an ‹outlier› from the standard curve, before the subsequent phase of settling and ‹normalization›. Here, the movement implies a moment of unrest, an unpredictability: perhaps something is looming deep within the relation of movement and visibility, something dark, even latently violent underneath the elegant, colorful surfaces, which the piece unfolds as well. In the third part of their trilogy becoming undone, the artist duo WILHELM GROENER not only examine the relation of visibility and movement but, more precisely, take a closer look at the specificity of light. Light is presented in the widest range of its possible meanings: Light as the energy and life-giver source, light as waves in motion. Light as a medium, which – paradoxically – is itself invisible as such, becomes observable only when reflected by other bodies. Light in this sense is seen as a condition of visibility. In different scenes and scenarios, in different experimental arrangements, emerges a multi- faceted set of wide-ranging questions: how is the human body, and how are other objects situated within the complex reciprocity of light and movement? How can bodies become visible, and how do they, in return, ‹produce› light’s visibility? Which insights can bodies give in to light’s different (or differently conceptualized) movement patterns? How do human and non-human bodies behave inside/outside of the light and on the edge of visibility? How do they reflect and move within various forms of projections? How do these bodies reflect their own reflections, their shadows, or their color qualities? The audience, which can be seen both as one and/or as many bodies, is explicitly included in these questions: from the beginning, the performance leads them toward a mode of self-reflection. Seated in a half-circle, they always observe – besides the dancer’s movements – themselves, as well. Similarly, the soundtrack, which welcomes them in the beginning, as a form of ‹epilogue›, consists of mixed up voices of chatting people, into which the audience’s conversations seamlessly merge. The soundscape, composed by collaborator Rudi Fischerlehner, in many regards will emphasize questions on visibility as well. Instrumental loops will later reveal themselves as samples from the song Dreiklangsdimensionen (Rheingold, 1981), which, too, asks about the relation of sound and visibility.
The movement sequence that starts with Günther Wilhelm’s twitching arm is a kind of prelude to the subsequent experimental scenes and scenarios, with which WILHELM GROENER pursue the abovementioned questions. They are decidedly placing the implicit question about the role of body- movement in relation to visibility in the beginning. The following sequence is clearly structured by separate segments. The choreography introduces further movement patterns one-by-one, which will slowly increase energetically. In each new segment, the different movement motives become more and more interwoven. They begin to overlap, influence, and interfere with each other.
Two oppositional motives are striking: on the one side, there are sudden, abrupt figures, like the twitching arm, in the beginning, a sudden hit with the hand or kick with a leg, a body suddenly collapsing to the floor. These sudden, abrupt gestures are contrasted with soft, wave-like, continuous movements of different kinds and qualities. After the first ‹arm-waves› with folded hands, we can find
a reoccurring movement in the form of an ‹8›, e.g., as stretched arms circling the body. These kinds
of large swinging motions can be found again and again. Early on, the calmness, which has been interrupted by the twitching movement, is slowly merging into an increasingly complex choreography, starting from simple rectangular directions, becoming more and diagonal and unsymmetrical over time. The twitching and the wave-movements represent two contrasting, complementary motives. They like two oppositional discursive approaches in dynamic form, which seem to make palpable light’s ambivalent and even contradictory qualities. Fragmented words – swallowed by the curtain
In another scene, fragments of projected words are vanishing in the back curtain, in the silent waves of it folds. Reflected by the black molleton, they appear as bright and at the same time slightly dim words. Numerous syllables are missing, from my perspective from the side, the curtain reflects only fragments of words. Dealing with different aspects of the various meanings and forms of light, in these typological fragments, there’s an echo of Günther Wilhelm’s previous scene. Light and language – there is not an obvious or causal connection between the two. Nevertheless, they do influence each other. The projected words make the curtain’s folds more visible through their fragmentation, while the folds, in return, interfere with the language, changing our thoughts and views on light and movement. In the semi-darkness, we can hear the typing, which restlessly carries the text further, together with a voice, which translates the German text into English. The cursor on the screen rushes back and forth, bringing mixed up letters into the proper position – a typing that seems to be correcting itself visibly. A text that keeps writing itself in a constant wave-like movement. Could it be the same text we heard Günther Wilhelm whisper, quietly, audible only in fragments; while performing his fragmented, increasingly complex movement sequences? The very movement sequence began with the twitching of his arm that soon transformed into diverse wave-like movements of his body, his arms, his hands? The projected, continuously advancing and receding text that keeps correcting itself, partly swallowed by the curtain ́s silent folds, re-produces performatively, what the production’s title had announced: becoming undone (after a book by philosopher Elizabeth Grosz).1 Again, the title bears a double meaning: either we put emphasis on the second part, in which case it’s the state of becoming that is unfinished or understood as a verb, it refers to the process of reaching ‹undone-ness›. In her book, Grosz understands various forms of ‹becoming› as ‹invisible movements› that permeate the natural, cultural and political life. Simultaneously the idea of such knowledge can productively challenge the supposed stability of identity, understanding, place, and being. According to Grosz, such different kinds of knowledge can trigger new forces, dynamics, and new directions within traditional theories.
A similar kind of ‹undoing› we can find concerning the name and artistic label WILHELM GROENER: over a decade and a half ago, Mariola Groener and Günther Wilhelm gave up the autonomy of their individual names as artists, merging them into a collective name, which, slightly confusing, sounds again like an individual name, including a ‹proper› first and family name. Just like the black theater curtain with its folds, their new name swallowed parts of their individual names, becoming the foundation for joint productions, collective artistic experiments, or, more precisely, the beginning of a systematic, performative analysis of the relation between visuality and movement.

Thinking in textures and fabrics – moving models

If we were to look for models or predecessors for this kind of systematic artistic engagement with topics such as light, movement, visuality, we might turn to Loïe Fuller.2 Around the turn of the nineteenth century, the American dancer became famous for her serpentine dance, in which the moving fabric of her costume and spectacular light effects stood at the center of her dramaturgy, thus rejecting the idea of a classical narrative. As it has been remarked occasionally, in this literally ‹manifold› material spectacle of light and fabric, the dancer ́s body became almost invisible. Her emphatic solos, which brought about a new relation between the material and the materiality of movement, led to a sustained paradigm shift in Western theatrical dance. Fuller replaced the familiar narratives in ballet with abstract, avantgarde experimental approaches, becoming an important protagonist of the upcoming modern era. It was no coincidence that this new relation between dance, movement, and light-effects came about in the early times of cinematic projections; Fuller’s dances have been an integral part of these early developments of ‹movie›-projections – as filmed ‹object› as well as the important initiator of optical and visual experimentations. Fuller herself contributed with her technical innovations to the development of the cinematic dispositive.
Concerning the body movements, it is remarkable that Fuller introduced in her serpentine dance characteristic movements in the form of an ‹8›: wave-like movements and spirals, executed with her arms and torso. The dynamic waveforms seemed to imply a potentially infinite movement, in consonance with the horizontal eight ́s symbolic meaning as a sign of infinity. In these undulated movements that point at potential infinity, we might recognize a figure of transgression: «Body waves transgress and go beyond the body itself,» Gabriele Brandstetter writes in her article on body waves, emphasizing as its foundation an open, incomplete body concept that is deeply connected to and embedded in its surrounding.»3 WILHELM GROENER’s base their work on such open movement- and body-concepts explicitly, as well. Accordingly, the chosen title of their trilogy becoming undone becomes the discursive reso- nance chamber for diverse questions regarding the unfinished, the becoming, unveiling a productive contradiction between the notion of ‹undone› as a state of being and the notion of becoming as a constant process. About the connection between bodies and body waves, Gabriele Brandstetter unfolds a similar processual scenario, full of inherent ambivalences and productive contradictions: «Body waves/resonances as topic shift the perspective from borders as thresholds toward processes of bordering under observation. The observation is confronted, in the sense of Heisenberg’s formulation of his uncertainty principle, with undecidability between (an impossible simultaneity of) a representation of bodies as particles or waves.»4 Unlike Loië Fuller, WILHELM GROENER is not so much interested in the spectacular potential of light, which shapes their approach to the body and its movement capacities, but exactly the contra- dicting characteristics of light as ‹object› and subject of investigation. In both cases, we can observe aspects of a dissolution of the body and blur its boundaries, even though in very different forms. While Fuller seemed to vanish in her exuberant moving fabrics, becoming a dynamic figure of light (‹Licht- Gestalt›), Mariola Groener, in another sequence, turns into a different light (and shadow-) figure. Wrapped in a dark hoodie, she projects with a laser beam scintillating, dancing figures of light on the back wall. The dynamic, multicolored, constantly changing figures are reminiscent of natural phenomena like the Northern lights or St. Elmo’s fire. As in Fuller’s case, here it is the bodyless movements of light itself, which attracts the audience’s attention in a mesmerizing manner. However, in the case of WILHELM GROENER, the process of its making, the technical aspect is displayed as well, rather than being hidden theatrically. On the contrary, the theatrical dispositive, its operating mode itself, is put on display. In different scenes, the relation between light, color, bodies, movement, and representation on stage is brought into question. In yet another scene, Mariola Groener is experimenting with soap bubbles, which are illuminated and projected by an old-fashioned overhead beamer, resulting in impressive color figures on the back wall. The straw, which Mariola uses to blow the bubbles, in the projection turns into a pipette used for artificial insemination; the bubbles look like fertilised ova under the microscope. The projected images are playing with ideas of two- and three-dimensionality, of having-body and being-surface, and again, of bodily dissolution. The seemingly obsolete technique of the overhead projection makes visible the role of representation in and through media, and the differences between direct and indirect obser- vation, much more than a state-of-the-art device could. The audience’s eyes go back and forth between the enlarged projection on the back wall and the pile of bubbles on the projector’s stage. The seemingly old-fashioned projection technique resonates with former visuality models, reminding us of the constant change brought about through new media and techniques that require different modes of perception.The topic of corporeality is simultaneously present and absent in this scene: As the illuminated, transparent bubbles of soap burst and unite, they are continually forming new temporary constellations. In the final scene, the manually produced soap-bubble-bodies, will climb out of their ‹petri-dish› – speaking in a figurative sense: Now produced by a mechanical bubble machine, larger bubbles pile on the dance-floor, forming a wobbly, seemingly organic body, a soap bubble monster that crouches in the middle of the ‹salon› until the end of the performance, inviting the audience to contemplate on its changing shape and state of being. The mental step from these translucent bubble-bodies toward topics like DNA sequencing and the production of artificial organs, bodies, and life forms is only a small one. The audience is left pondering the past scenes and their associations while taking a sip from the self-brewed, multi-colored drinks – with and without alcohol – that are passed around at the end of the show. There’s something dark and shady about the performance that deals with the topic of light. The entertaining and colorful production leaves a deliberate aftertaste, due to certain scenes, the audience is left with the feeling of a latent threat: whether it’s in the bright flashes that briefly illuminate the salon and interrupt the cozy atmosphere, leaving sharp afterimages of the opposite audience members on the retina. Or whether it’s the scene in which the other back curtain is pulled open, revealing spotlights that are directly pointed at the audience: in this backlight, we can see only a silhouette, the contour of Günther Wilhelm’s body, laid out on one of the benches, his hands folded on his belly, breathing gently – a dancer, barely moving, almost only a silhouette, and a body resisting its screening. This image of the dancer softly breathing in the backlight connects retrospectively, perhaps in
a complex way, to the scene of the twitching arm. In contrast to the model of the wave, a continuous, potentially indefinite movement in the form of ‹eights› here, something (in-) visibly different emerges in the scene. WILHELM GROENER ́s visual reflections on light are interrupted by a moment of caesura, a pause, maybe even a rupture – perhaps this moment has been there the whole time, silently, as an implicit counterpoint. These exceptions, these outliers from the dominant norms are forming a resonance chamber, similar to how André Lepecki’s conceptualizes the political ontology of movement: The entering of interruptions, immobilization as an element in contemporary dance that scrutinizes «a deep disjuncture between current choreographic practices and a mode of writing still very much attached to ideals of dancing as constant agitation and continuous mobility.»5 Despite the evening’s colorfulness and lightness, there seems to be a political moment that can be discovered in the relation of light and movement: the making-visible of a latent trace of violence, which is hiding behind the visibility generated by light – even more so in today’s imperative for a hyper- visibility. It’s about a latent violence that is hiding in the open, on the surface of visibility. WILHELM GROENER open with their spectacularly non-spectacular salon evening a small window of resistance: it’s about certain moments, those breaks, those gaps in the visibility, those moments of movement’s standstill, those outliers from the standard curves, twitches, interruptions within the imperative of visibility and a break from constantly being-in-flow, which open spaces for reflection and allow for different perspectives.

References:
1 Cf. Grosz: Becoming undone: Darwinian reflections on life, politics, and art, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
2 Cf. Albright: Traces of light: absence and presence in the work of Loie Fuller, 2007.
3 Brandstetter, Gabriele: "Körperwellen – Miszellen zu Körperkultur und Gedächtnis,“ in: Resonanz. Potentiale einer akustischen Figur, eds. Karsten Lichau, Viktoria Tkaczyk, Rebecca Wolf, München: Fink 2009, pp. 205-210. Here p. 207. 4 Ibid.
5 Lepecki, André: Exhausting Dance. Performance and the Politics of Movement. New York & London: Routledge, 2006, p. 2. 8