Even as space remains the same (2020)
In 2018 I began a master’s research project on the migration of gesture across identity, dance, and visual art. While studying early 20th-century women artists I encountered the archive of Gertrud Kraus (1901–1977): Jewish-Austrian pioneer of Ausdruckstanz, pianist, painter, sculptor, and an assistant to the movement theorist Rudolf von Laban. Kraus fled Vienna in 1935 amidst the rise of the Nazi Party and fled to Palestine. For Kraus, choreography was spatial writing—lines, curves, and pauses that moved across body, paper, light, and architecture; she created a choreographic space in which the kinesthetic and the visual dwelt intimately together. “These sketches,” she wrote, “bring me into the action of dancing. It doesn’t matter if one dances on paper.” Her diagrams reveal gestures that unfold inner shifts, temporal ripples, psychic movement, and memory. They also expose her lifelong tension between East and West, exile and home, abstraction and concreteness, embodying the fluidity of the space between the personal and the sociocultural. Most of her repertoire remains undocumented, and only a few traces of it remain in fragments: photographs, notational sketches, a few writings, and oral testimonies collected by Giora Manor.
The title of this project responds to the ways in which Kraus’s conception of space resonates with my artistic process and contemporary moment. As Lior Malk-Yellin writes, for Kraus “Space becomes a lived experience as the moving body is not only located in space but also acts on and, thereby, creates and designs space. Thus, the interrelations Kraus ascribed to body and space in her drawings appear to have sprung from her lived experience as a dancer. In her dancing, space became materialized through her bodily movements. In her drawings she expressed this experience by emphasizing the body-space dynamics.”
Even as Space Remains the Same is a homage to Kraus, reviving her movement vocabulary in two contemporary translations using drawing, performance, digital processing, and screendance: Spatial Drawing Diagram. Graphite on paper, comprising twenty-five iterative drawing panels, constructing two of Kraus’s kinespheric sketches into a spatial diagram. Two-Channel Screendance, HD 3:40 minutes, looping. In collaboration with dancers Cinzia Cavalieri and Sebastián Ureamuno, enacting Kraus’s gestures from drawing to bodily movement. I used experimental digital choreography to construct the movement materials into a two-channel screendance, created through embodied and digital codification of movement language extracted from both her drawing and reading her words. The channels loop out of sync, creating a drifting, polyphonic present.
Acknowledgment of contributions: Zvi Gotheiner, Liora Malka-Yellin & Dr. Yonat Rothman.
Dance: Sebastian Ureamuno, Cinzia Cavalieri
Installation shot: The Varley Art Gallery of Markham, curated by Anik Glaude
Introductory Essay by Tammer El-Sheikh Link