"And yet they, who are long gone, are in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our destiny, as blood that pulsates, and as gesture that rises up out of the depths of time." — Rainer Maria Rilke 'Letters to a Young Poet' (1934).
Gertrud is an imagined and performed conversation through time between the Austrian expressionist choreographer Gertrud Bodenwieser (1890–1959) and myself (1968–): a solo performer-choreographer. It is a meditation on the nature of solitude, both on-stage and in the wider world.
In the Guardian newspaper on Saturday 8th April 2008, Sean O’Brien wrote of the “loss of liberty” experienced when the past is closed down, and how “the present becomes the measure of all things”. In contemporary consumer capitalism, there is no history; it is a culture of forgetting.
How might Bodenwieser (through imagined words) be brought back to life in Gertrud to reveal the impact of this extraordinary forgetting? A remembering of her might underline by stark contrast a choreographic world in which my performed physical and psychological state is as restless and alone as can be imagined within a culture without a past