Paul Hermant
LETTER FROM PAUL HERMANT TO OLGA DE SOTO
Dear Olga de Soto, what news from the front? What news from dance? And what news from memory? And then, what news from the gaze? I ask you that because we are starting to understand what you are engaging with in your work (engaging, I said engaging, I said it on purpose). We are starting in fact to understand that it isn’t enough for you to watch something or even to create something but that, like Blaise Pascal, you cannot understand the whole if you don’t know the parts and that you can’t know the parts if you don’t know the whole…
This Green Table, for example, you literally wanted to put it on the table. Like a centrepiece you would have to cut out, a body you would auscultate, as if you had undertaken to see how things become what they are. It is not enough for you to know that this work by Kurt Jooss is doubtless central to the origin of political dance – you would say socio-political – it is not so much this History which seems to matter to you, but all the others: those which lead to it and those which flow from it. At the heart of your work, we find the word “process” which is to say progression. And it’s very useful because we seriously lack people who are interested in pivotal moments. At what precise moment things change, how a movement, a change, an upheaval, a disaster takes shape and how it gains strength…
Here, a friend said to me: “The fall of the Wall, 1989, the Oslo Accords, 1991, the end of apartheid 1991. We thought the old business was done with. Can you explain to me why the Gulf War 1990, Yugoslavia 1992, Rwanda 1994?” Where were we looking, indeed, dear Olga de Soto, that we didn’t see? What is the exact moment that the ratchet effect engages? And how, after, we try to deal with this, with what we have and what we lack.
For example, this Green Table created in 1932 in a sort of anticipation which serves as a warning and where we see all sorts of ridiculous diplomats exclaiming that, yes, war is pretty, this Green Table wasn’t rejected outright at the time by the Nazis for whom no doubt the expressionism recalled something of the German spirit… But the choreographer, he chose nevertheless to expatriate himself with his troupe and with those homosexuals and that Jewish musician which they asked him to rid his show of. His art wasn’t seen as degenerate, but his partners, dancers and musicians were. And that was enough for exile. Because, even if you can’t burn a ballet in the public square the way you can books, at a certain moment you understand precisely that the process is underway… From which we understand as well that your research and your work don’t have so much to do with the past as the present…
When he was asked why he wrote this ballet, Kurt Jooss answered: “It had to be done because it had to happen”.
Chronicle of November 10, 2012, Musiq3, RTBF / Belgian National Radio
Translation: Tadzio Koelb