Raimund hogue pina bausch biography
Twelve dancers around twenty years of age, amateur or professional, facing Raimund Hogue, who speaks to them, watches them, accompanies them; by way of musical counterpoint, voices from the past, those of Jacques Brel, Bette Davis, Léo Ferré and Dean Martin, whose emotion haunts this variation on Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”. “Young People, Old Voices” is a minimalist piece, abstract and finely-honed, where formal research is reinforced by an engagement with history, which explores the collective memory, prompted by popular songs. It is also a political engagement which rejects the aesthetically-standardised body, preferring it without artifice. Whether plunged into water or aligned, pressed up against one another, whether allied or divided, the bodies produce their own language, which is up to each member of the audience to interpret.
“The subjects that inspire me are the reality which surrounds me, the age in which I live, my memory of history, people, images, sensations, the power and beauty of music as well as confrontation with the body – which, in my case, does not correspond to conventional ideals of beauty. Seeing bodies on stage which depart from the norm is important – not only from the historical point of view, but also from the perspective of the current trend which tends to reduce the status of mankind to that of artefacts or designer objects.”
After writing for the German weekly Die Zeit for some years, Raimund Hoghe was Pina Bausch’s dramatist at Tanztheatre Wuppertal from 1980 to 1990. In 1989 he began writing his own pieces and, from 1994, took part on stage as an actor in his own works.
Source: Festival d’Automne à Paris
Artistic advice / Dramaturgy
Luca Giacomo Schulte
Lights
Raimund Hoghe, Amaury Seval
Music
Leo Ferré, Pablo Casals, Judy Garland, Dean Martin, Bobby Solo, Peggy Lee, Pat Boone, Patsy Cline, Leonard Berns
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The Pit, Barbican Theatre, London
April 12, 2022
Raimund Hoghe started his working life in Wuppertal as a writer. Also a choreographer and performer, a profile of Pina Bausch in the late 1970s led to him becoming her dramaturg before eventually setting up his own company. Known as someone of resilience, grace, generosity of spirit, and an acute observer of the complexities of the human condition, he passed away in 2021.
I was unfamiliar with his work although has been lauded internationally. Perhaps live, it may have piqued my interest. Perhaps it was the mode of presentation and delivery. Probably it was both. But endless short films comprising Hoghe and sometimes other dancers mostly walking and bending down to a variety of dramatic music, interspersed with the editor of his biography Mary Kate Connolly (writer, researcher and lecturer in dance and performance studies) reading interminable eulogies, made for an unfortunately dull evening.
I have never liked being told what to think about a work, and little that Connolly evidently sees in Hoghe’s work resonates with me. We all bring our own experiences to art and this is the problem with the dead end that so much dance has trundled into: it is too often a blank canvas that can be anything but ends up being nothing.
This is far from the works of German expressionism, modernism and the alienation of Brecht. A plié has no inherent meaning, but placed in context to can mesmerise, be harrowing, funny and, goodness only knows, actually beautiful.
Hoghe cites Maria Callas inciting masterclass attendees to focus on the importance of meaning in their work in opposition to using ‘fireworks’ to court easy applause. I couldn’t agree more. But this is precisely what I did see: the easy applause of an audience pleased with itself that it can laud a person with disability on a stage (Hoghe was born with severe curvature of the spine) full of other bodies that are honed to a concept of perfection. Hoghe dons German choreographer and dancer (1949–2021) Raimund Hoghe (12 May 1949 – 14 May 2021) was a German choreographer, dancer, film maker, journalist, and author. Because he was born with scoliosis, his early efforts were focused on journalism. His writings explored the human condition; a documentation series won him an award by the age of 24. For the weekly Die Zeit, he portrayed personalities, the well-to-do, the less fortunate, and those shunned by society. After meeting Pina Bausch while profiling her, he served as dramaturge and chronicler of her Tanztheater from 1980 to 1990. He made his choreographic debut in 1989, then worked independently. His first solo production, Meinwärts in 1994, was about the Jewish tenor and actor Josef Schmidt, but also Hoghe's nonormative body. He was awarded the Deutscher Tanzpreis in 2020, and is regarded as "one of the protagonists of German contemporary dance theatre". Hoghe was born and raised in Wuppertal, the son of a single mother. He was born with severe scoliosis. He dreamed of performing in theatre, but thought that performing would not be possible for him because of his physical limitations. He worked as a journalist, and was awarded the Theodor Wolff Prize for a documentary series about Bethel written when he was age 24. He was a freelance writer for the weekly Die Zeit profiling prominent performers like Bruno Ganz, Rex Gildo, and Freddy Quinn, as well as lesser-known persons such as the photographer Helga Paris and Adam Soboczynski [de], and social outsiders such as cleaners, AIDS patients, and sex workers. His profiles were also published in several books. When Hoghe profiled Pina Bausch in the late 1970s, she liked his article and engaged him to write program notes for a production of her dance company Raimund Hoghe
Life