Blue Gestures: Gertrud Kraus archive reconstruction.

2020

(left)Two channel screendance 3:40 minutes, sound, looping. (Right) Diagram - performance still construction

The multimedia installation addresses the fluidity of the space between the personal and the sociocultural that is embodied in dance archives, with an attempt to consider the practice of restaging  or translating historical dances as an investigation of the sociopolitical space of creation.

This work is a tribute to Gertrude Kraus (1935), an Austrian-Jewish modern dance pioneer and choreographer who worked in the expressionist style. Her career began in the 1920s in Vienna, and she went on to perform solo and group recitals throughout Central Europe, becoming a well-known modern dance artist. She fled Vienna during the rise of the Nazi party in 1935, at the height of her career and at the start of World War II, and immigrated to Palestine.

I revived traces of her creative knowledge through performative encounters and conceptual choreographic methods, producing alternative relationships to the materials, movement, and meaning that the archive inhabits.