Jean-Georges Noverre introduced his concept of the tableau vivant into choreography by the end of the 18th century. He did so in order to thwart an idea of dance which had fixed it as a series of already coded and composed step patterns and poses since the installation of Pierre Beauchamp´s and Raoul-Auger Feuillet´s notation system at the Académie Royale de Danse in Paris. In contrast to that Noverre in his Letters on Dancing and Ballets predicted that in the future everything would equally speak and everything would equally be expressive. In doing so he perforated a line that had separated choreography from its outside and dance from non-dance previously. We even might assume that thereby he initiated what centuries later, when the various members of Judson Church Theatre started to experiment with ordinary qualities and pedestrian movements in New York during the 1960s, would turn into the choreographic problem of the ready-made.

“Is not everything different? Has not everything in the universe a different shape and colour? Does a tree put fourth two exactly similar leaves, or flowers, or fruits? Undouptely the variations of nature´s productions are infinite; their variety is immense and incomprehensible,“ Noverre notes. In his eyes choreographers are painters, whilst the stage is a canvas, and what is staged are colours in a painting. His concept of the tableau vivant is quite paradoxical and in many regards creates productive tensions: On the one hand it frames and therefore separates certain actions from other activities, on the other hand every activity can potentially become an action in a specific constellation. On one side it provokes ‘small dances‘ (André Lepecki) as still images and interrupts a continuous flow of movement, on the other side there are still a lot of very complex intensive movements (Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari) going on. Movement then is found within stasis, and stasis is within movement. Everything can be a tableau vivant´s sujet: Noverre does not propose any kind of Poetics of dance, and his idea of choreography includes all kinds of activities and contents. In his letters the very relation between choreography as a form and dance as an action is radically opened towards all kinds of constituents (Jacques Rancière).

The scenic workshop >Contemporary Dance and its tableaux vivants< is planned to get started with a short introduction into the topic by Stefan Apostolou-Hölscher on Friday, May, 23rd at 16:00. Besides working on the stage we will watch video recordings of contemporary dance productions which are connected to tableaux vivants in different ways. The course will end with a public presentation and discussion on Monday, May, 26th at 10:00.

Please register via mail: stefan.hoelscher1@web.de.

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