Curtain Call

Definitely "Maybe"

By Jay Weitz

In the nearly two decades that the Wexner Center has been reshaping our vision of the world, Columbus has been treated to countless performances seared into the memory. Among the most indelible are those from choreographer Meg Stuart.

Born in New Orleans but based in Europe since 1994, Stuart has grown to become "one of the most influential figures on the European dance scene in the last 10, 15 years," said Charles Helm, the Wexner's performing arts director, and the man probably most responsible for bringing Stuart here.

Stuart and her company Damaged Goods, based officially in Brussels, first came to Columbus with the feverish and fascinating No Longer Readymade in February 1995. In October 1998, they returned for the U.S. premiere of appetite, Stuart's collaboration with Ohio State faculty member and visual miracle worker Ann Hamilton.

Anyone who attended the show will recall appetite as the work where mud caked on the dance floor first became part of the dancers' skin, then part of the air we all breathed. It blurred the boundaries between performer and observer, between interior and exterior. In its movement and text, appetite was about finding a place in the world. In its environmentalism, it was also about the world finding a place in each of us.

A decade later, Stuart and the Austrian choreographer and dancer Philipp Gehmacher will present the United States premiere of Maybe Forever, a duet that the Wexner co-commissioned with Kaaitheater of Brussels, Thé?tre de la Ville of Paris, and Volksb?hne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz of Berlin.

Since its world premiere on June 7 of last year, Maybe Forever has been touring Europe. The show will return there in February.

Its only two stops on the North American portion of the tour are at New York's Dance Theatre Workshop and here at the Wex.

As Helm puts it, "It's sort of a measure of ... how Columbus has become part of the map of where this kind of work goes. That's as much about the audience's work as it is of our role in trying to attract these artists here."

In the years since her last Columbus visit, Stuart has concentrated on several larger-scale works that, according to Helm, simply would not fit in the spaces available to the Wexner Center.

"In addition to the pieces that Meg made on the stage," Helm said, "she was also organizing these large, interdisciplinary improvisational forms, called Crash Landing, around Europe, where she'd bring together all these people — musicians, designers, choreographers, theater people."

Stuart's current collaborator, Gehmacher, "definitely felt the impact of all that," Helm said. About a decade younger than Stuart, Gehmacher almost represents a next generation of choreographers. He takes what Helm calls Stuart's "vocabulary of inversion" to the extreme.

Gehmacher met Stuart in 1996 when he took a workshop of hers in Vienna. His style has been described by the Belgian dance writer Pieter T'Jonck as "silent, self-absorbed, almost autistic images." That's a sharp contrast to the generally active, often agitated vocabulary of Stuart.

But as Gehmacher said in an interview with T'Jonck, "We don't try to stick together two kinds of dance. We are looking for new aesthetics, something that goes beyond the sensitivities of the two separate bodies of work."

Also prominently in the mix are songs performed live by Niko Hafkenscheid, a member of the Brussels-based electronic rock group aMute. He gives what Helm calls "this kind of romantic singer-songwriter feel to the piece."

If Stuart, Gehmacher and Hafkenscheid feel comfortable enough visiting Columbus, maybe it won't be another forever before Stuart returns the next time.

January 24, 2008

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