“Contemporary dance is too free” − said a high school-aged audience member after the dance performance of Milan Tomášik called Treatise at the Maribor High School in the framework of the Drugajanje Festival. In my opinion, though, this performance was anything but free. On the other hand, it was indeed an advocate of the freedom of the interpretation of dance as an art form. And the freedom of interpretation itself. But how valid and alive can an almost entirely fix-choreographed, pure dance performance based on a visual score from the 1960s be today? To get closer to the answer, I rewatched the piece at the Sissi Autumn Dance Week in Budapest.
The term "pure dance" was first used to describe the choreographies of Merce Cunningham, the innovator of modern dance, who, in his independent creative work from the 1950s onwards, attempted to abandon the subject expression through dance that characterised early modern choreographers and to transpose avant-garde aspirations into the art of dance. Cunningham's constructivist creative mechanisms, such as improvisation, chance, indeterminacy, and the incorporation of the every day, also contributed to the abolition of the personal in dance. He was looking for how the accidental juxtaposition (both in dramaturgy, spatial structuring and music-dance correlation), the spontaneous decisions, the infiltration of everyday life can function as a new kind of editing principle, creating surprise and unpredictability, without compromising the precise execution of the movements. As the performance theorist Bojana Cvejić puts it, dance thus became objectified and "reduced to a physical articulation of movement whose meaning is tautologically inherent in itself" [1]. The body is no longer a subject but is in its flesh and blood reality the performer of movement, the instrument of dance.
In good cases, this flow of movement − often truly fluid, energetic, explosive and virtuosic, without prolonged stasis −, coupled with the stage presence of the performers, draws the spectator into the joy of watching beautifully moving bodies, offering a real (even bodily, kinesthetic) dance experience, without the need for cognitive decipherment, without the search for symbols in the movements, gestures, characters in the performers. In general, it is not easy to write about this experience, to put into words the "pure dance", and not just describing what exactly happened on stage.
Treatise, the largest graphic music score ever written is inseparable from the era in which it was created, and to understand its significance it is essential to place it in its art historical context. The work is one of the best-known works of the English experimental composer (and graphic artist) Cornelius Cardew, a collection of 193 sheets of visual musical notation from the 1960s. Cardew grew up under the wing of some of the best-known avant-garde composers: he worked as an assistant to Stockhausen and did much to promote the work of the American composer John Cage in the UK, who was known to have been a regular collaborator with the leading figure of avant-garde "pure dance”, the aforementioned Cunningham. Its title and the development of its material were inspired by Wittgenstein's philosophical work on language, Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Its unusual graphic form serves as a concept for promoting artistic (and social) change[2], it is a conceptual meta-artwork of the language of music, a musical concept art.
Cardew was not only a composer, but also an activist: he saw music-making as a politically influential activity and was a committed advocate of the democratisation of music and improvisation, and a great believer in the power of art to bring about change. His scores, created with visual semiotics also helped to achieve these goals (in parallel with the aspirations of the avant-garde), as they are equally open to all and can be interpreted freely, without temporal or musical language constraints, which also rearranges the roles assigned in the orchestra and gives space to chance and the everyday. For his treatment of the Treatise, he simply wrote instructions like to approach it with “precision of judgement”', to “work actively” and to take an improvisatory approach (“an improvisatory character is essential to the piece”). Sufficient freedom was thus given to those who touched it, and the possibility of free interpretation inspired choreographer Milan Tomášik − though in my view more in terms of sheer form than in the philosophical, political or historical context outlined above. But let's talk about this later.
Now let's go back to that particular high school in Maribor, where before entering the stage area, you are greeted by a sign on the wall that reads something like this: Take care, what energy you bring into this space... I ponder the importance of this phrase, from the point of view of performer, spectator and critic alike, as I take my seat, while dancers dressed in black and white make practised movements, drawing morse code-like lines with black electrical tape at the very front of the white stage. The students chirp, and the unrolled tape whirrs.
Milan Tomášik is a Slovak-born choreographer and dancer who, after studying at PARTS, became one of the founding members of the quintet of the Brussels-based collective Les Slovaks. I've seen several works by Anton Lachky, another member of Les Slovaks, and I discovered several similarities in their movement material and structuring, especially in the middle part of the performance (quick turns, sharp stops, entrances, off-balance situations, sudden landings and stand-ups, "out of breath" non-stoppings, starting from a run to a spinning combo, breaking out of the line, common marching, forming tableaux with posing), although Tomášik seems to be a more analytical, structuralist, restrained artist. His concept was selected at an open call by the Beyond Front@ project, to which he was assigned five − rather younger-looking − dancers from the Krakow Dance Theatre. Age is only relevant in this case because during a highly physical 70-minute fixed pure dance performance, the tiny mislandings and extra movements (usually when stopping, caused by too big energy) can be noticed, as if the result of youthful fervour and rapture. Interestingly, these were more noticeable in the first performance in Maribor than they were in Budapest, where the younger dancers seemed more relaxed. Only Agnieszka Bednarz-Tyran seemed to be a few years older, and this could be seen in her more liberated, more thoughtful performance style, reliable precision and energy management (she really puts as much energy into a movement as is necessary) too in both performances. It is important to stress that it is not a question of physical ability or technical proficiency, each dancer is acrobatic, soft, supple, virtuosic and can explode when needed.
The Treatise performance can be roughly divided into three major units. In the first, the music rumbles or beeps, reinforcing a less predictable effect of what comes next. It is followed by duets, trios, quads, quintets, unisons, and then splits between dancers in white shirts and black trousers, with a more relaxed tone, interspersed with subtle glances at each other. Tomašík often draws on the canon as a choreographic form, and it is already apparent that the score may have provided inspiration not only for the movements but also for the walks and positions in space. Then the second unit starts: the stage darkens and rougher techno beats tear through the space, bringing with them more dynamic and faster movements, dancing towards the audience, showing off, piercing outward gazes, jumps, pulls, posed tableaux, all now in all-black costumes. In the third, longer chapter, solos emerge from the “crowd”, and further drawings inspired by the Treatise scores are applied to the ground with the tape. Making these requires at least as much precision as the dense movement material, but the dancers are skilled at “drawing” in both cases.
Black and white. These two colours dominate the visuality of the performance in scenery and costume. In the light design, too, only the white colour appears, a little too clearly concentrating on the action in progress, sometimes opening up the whole space, sometimes highlighting the front, back or middle, while the dark (and the silence) seem to signal the beginning of new chapters. The colours are a clear reference to Cardew's drawings, turning the dancers' bodies into drawing tools, with which the choreographer's eye draws dots and lines in the vast whiteness. They draw their endless figures with impassive faces and a so-called "suggestive dancer's gaze". But while Cardew's activity was both a formal and political act, Tomášik's Treatise remains somewhat one-dimensional. Black and white, if you like. I miss the message, the commitment, the purpose. Why is it important and necessary to deal with these avant-garde figures today? And is it enough to create a work from an exciting source of visual inspiration, without additional thought to it?
The choreography does not in any way reflect the game-changing aspects of the score in terms of music and art history, the avant-garde aspirations of Cardew and his contemporaries (including Cunningham), which have shaken up concepts such as musical/theatrical timing, the function of the musician/choreographer, the role of the performer and the audience. They believed that incorporating improvisation would make the performance alive, creating a new language, a new notation, a new semantics. Their aim was to break with tradition, but Tomášik rather used already well known, one could say ”traditional” choreographic tools, performance style and audience role, leaving no space for experimentation with chance or spontaneous decisions on any level during execution.
Perhaps it is this bare and strict formality, the fixed movement flow − that does not intend to reflect on the present or the past −, the rather stiff presence of the dancers, the "traditional" pure dancing makes the young audience in Maribor talk through the performance, and on the way out they judge what they have seen as "too free", giving little clue as to where to place it. The Budapest audience, largely professional, is more absorbed by the precise structure and execution, but the post-performance audience meeting brings up the issue of a rigid performer's gaze and formality that distances the audience from what they have seen.
At the same time, we must not lose sight of the complexity of the choreographic material of the 70 minutes which is decorated with fine details. On second viewing, one really notices the changes from point to flex (in one of the canon lines), the hands clenching into fists and unclenching, the little shoulder shrugs, the foot touch at the end of a tour, and the energy shifts. These small gestural embellishments and the fragmentedness of the whole piece are the performance's greatest strengths. Tomášik throws up one scene and then abruptly leaves it there in time and space, at other times he lets the materials overlap with each other, layered on top of each other. He does not want to round every scene down, to create a beginning and an end, to frame. The lines of movement are laid down on the paper with a definite line, they stand there in black and white, it's up to us what we do with them, because their inherent meaning is movement itself, form, circles and lines. The same is reinforced by the play of the choreography with the musical matrix. It doesn't sit lazily on the electronic “sound carpet” − which is noisy, buzzing, scratchy, sometimes more rhythmic, or tending towards experimental film music −, but rather runs alongside it on a parallel path, or in some cases works directly against it. In the silence, the movement speeds up, in the noise it stops, and sometimes just goes with it. The performance benefits from this kind of unpredictability: even on a second viewing, a shift can be surprising. I love the unexpected squeak of snickers and tape in the silence as the dancers work feverishly on the set.
The freedom of interpretation − which is just as much the essence of Treatise's visual score − and especially the freedom to interpret the language of dance, is what the performance proclaims. At the same time, the dancers seem to follow clear, strict and fixed instructions throughout (even if they improvised in the creation process), so the piece loses something from that vitality, openness and spontaneity Cardew so encouraged and welcomed in his original work.
[1] Bojana Cvejic, Choreographic problems: expressive concepts in European contemporary dance, 2013, 22., available on Cevejić-B.pdf, accessed in Jan 2025
[2] Later, in the 1970s, he disowned almost all his works, criticised his masters as Marxists, and condemned avant-garde music, saying it was only for a narrow elite and did not serve the interests of the working class.
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Emese Kovács is a dancer, choreographer and journalist. She is based in Budapest, Hungary. In November 2024 she participated in the Critic's Residency organized by Bunker in Celje, in the frame of the international project Beyond Front@: Bridging Periphery and the 23rd Drugajanje Festival. The article was produced as a part of the Critic's Residency program.
Beyond Front@: Bridging Periphery is a Creative Europe project (2023-2026) created by Central Europe Dance Theatre – CEDT (Hungary), Bunker (Slovenia), Hrvatski institut za pokret i ples - HIPP (Croatia), Krakow Dance Theatre (Poland), M Studio (Romania) and Vitlycke – CPA (Sweden) to foster local development of the contemporary dance fields. The project is co-funded by the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union.
