- The Expressive Body—
- The Listening Eye
The Expressive Body I An Interview with Fabián Barba
Fabián Barba is an Ecuadorian dancer and choreographer who came to my attention through his restaging of the dances of Mary Wigman, one of the pioneers of Ausdruckstanz. Wigman was born in 1886 in Germany and was an early student of Rudolf Laban. She established schools in Berlin, Dresden and Leipzig, bringing existential movement to the stage.
I became aware of her during my residency in Leipzig in 2009 and felt she belonged to the suite of Certain Women who make occasional appearances in my work. In a Mary Wigman Dance Evening, Barba reconstructs her work not as an interpretation, but as a restaging of the movement. The leading of the body by emotion is categorized as a movement within this, enabling expression to become objective in itself: a choreographic tool rather than an acted conceit.
Here follows a short extract from the interview. A full version will be published at a later date.
Hannah Murgatroyd: When you are dancing the Wigman pieces, are you tapping into the pathos of her work or that are you reaching into the pathos that exists in you?
Fabián Barba: That is not something I do in my broader dance practice, but I do it for this show. I work with this strong subjective experience as if it were actually a technical tool. It is not so much about getting drawn by emotions or by any kind of state but is something I can produce rather easily. It’s not performed as a theatrical exercise, it’s not faking it, nor is it acting. It’s a very complicated thing because it is based in the way you use your body or learn to use your body, to produce this sensation of something like pathos.
HM: Do you have to think about a very different relationship between your limbs and movement when you are making the Wigman dances?
FB: Every dance has distinct movement from each other. different rhythms, different gestures. Some are more round, some are angular, some are flowing, some are very staccato and percussive. The way the breathing goes, in some it goes much faster, in others the breathing goes in calmer arches. There are all these little details. If the eyes are half closed, if they are fully open, if I look down or look up. These little details take a lot of work but describe and produce the movement. There’s a lot of repetition. In the rehearsals of the dance I had to find the movements of her feet and repeat them over and over again. They then get this consistency that makes them what they are now. Each time I dance it, the piece goes with a logic of its own.
HM: We’re looking in some sense at the same thing. The attention to detail reminds me of what I notice when I’m looking at a painting, say, a portrait by Rembrandt. Not only the direction of the eye, but the specific direction of the eye. How far that eye is open or closed and where the head is turning, what depth does it look toward. Is the tension held in the neck, or in the shoulder, what are the hands doing, how do the hands relate to the knee, or the wrist? And crucially, how does the intention of this body affect my reading of it? With the painting of a figure I am viewing a flat surface but I am thinking about the interiority of that represented body. This seems key to looking at the expressive body in art, the relationship between what we are seeing and the physical, lived sensation this image engenders within us.