Dance Techniques 2010

156 Interview with Katharine Sehnert
Which basic principles / qualities are especially
important in the Wigman technique? All of them
(laugh). Over the years my respect and reverence for
the body has only grown stronger. I am more and more
amazed by what the body can do. The fascinating
thing about dance, for me, is that there are infinite possibilities
for development, that one continues to locate
the next layer of the onion, always finding something
new, new knowledge, new ability, and that the
body stores so much that can emerge later and can be
called up. I find that extremely fascinating. I see absolutely
no difference between a person moving in everyday
life or in the studio or on stage. I learn so much from
nature, for instance when I am watching birds, what they
do with their heads because they can’t move their eyes.
One can learn so much by observing.
I think that the critical thing I learned is that one has
to find the path from ‘expressing oneself’ to ‘being it’.
I don’t know if I can give a good example of this in practice.
Let’s take a flower. I portray a flower, and I do
so as if I were a flower and my arms are the leaves, my
hands the flowers, and this flower grows and grows.
Or I try to portray the essence of a flower in dance, and
I ask myself what is being a flower actually all about,
at which point I then perhaps think about the basic human
principle about growing and dying. This particular energy
develops until a certain highpoint and then it disintegrates.
I don’t want to portray what a flower could be,
but want to be this flower, the flower ‘principle’, with
every movement. I am the movement, I am here. And that
is what dance is.
Has the Wigman Technique changed over the
years and generations? Of course it has changed.
It would be a bad thing if it hadn’t. I am kind of the last
generation, if you will. When there is no longer anyone
else who has experienced Wigman directly, I think
this knowledge will disappear. All the efforts to document
her work—film, photos, notation, and movement
descriptions—will never cover everything. Video loses the
three–dimensional aspect; words can only come close
to describing a movement, and you cannot convey feeling
in notation. That is also a characteristic of dance—it
is fleeting and refuses to be held down, refuses to be made
into museum material (laugh). And why should one
want to desperately hold onto it? That said, we can listen
to music from previous centuries, and can look at paintings
by old masters—it’s a shame this isn’t possible with
dance.
Have you continued, developed, expanded, or
modified aspects of the Wigman Technique?
Yes I have, but not in the sense that I have eliminated
those movements that are out of date or that I have tried
to bring movements up to date, rather this happened
in practice more than by thinking about it. I am still alive,
and I change and will hopefully continue to do so.
And I have already said before that one learned certain
tools of the trade from Wigman, and that one is always
developing and fine–tuning this equipment. One
increasingly learns how to master it and increasingly
understands what is behind it, and this is something that
cannot be led by the mind.
My experience and encounter with Butoh was extremely
beneficial, as I discovered my roots in something
foreign, so to speak. It was on this path to somewhere
else that I suddenly realized that my training had been
the best.
Why Butoh and not Graham? Graham wasn’t dance,
as far as I was concerned, as everything happened on
the floor (laugh). Butoh has a great deal in common with
modern dance. There are many parallels in the working
methods and movement concepts. The training I had
with Min Tanaka in Japan in 1988 was energetic and
powerful, and this is how it was at the Wigman Studio
too. We only moved through the space. Even with
Wigman, there were no standing exercises or floorwork.
We sat on the floor only when we stretched, there
was no floor technique. Min Tanaka called his training
‘bodyweather’, which means that the state of the body
is different every day, like the weather outside is always
different. One has to deal with every type of weather:
one can’t say, ‘I don’t feel like it today and so I am
not going training.’ As is always the case, sometimes the
sun shines, sometimes there is a storm, and sometimes
it’s foggy. In Japan, I learned to work with the weather and
to use it as material, and this approach coincided with
all my other experience, as did this permanent moving
‘through the space’, and the one hour purely spent jumping.
It was just like that in the Wigman Studio. Crazy.
I spent an afternoon improvising with Kazuo Ohno.
He sat in a chair, read aloud, and we were given a
cup of tea and a cookie. We sat at his feet, as we did with
Mary. Mary also sat in her chair and told wonderful
stories, read a poem out loud, and we all sat around her
and listened and then improvised the poem. It was the
same with Kazuo Ohno. He was very touched by the
fact that I’d come from Wigman, and my time with him
completed the circle after all my wanderings across
America, England, and wherever else I had been. A real
knot loosened up in me. I only did solos after that,
and I once again achieved a proper, more sophisticated
access to movement.
Where have the specific characteristics of the
Wigman Technique, and of her teaching, left their
mark? Gundel Eplinius was a professor in the dance
department of the university in Hanover for a long time
and taught ‘Wigman’. She came from Wigman’s school
in Leipzig and had systematized the technique a bit. She
taught all the basic movement material. The dance