Tanzperformance in der Schweiz – Solotanz und Performance (Kunst) überkreuzt

published in Floating Gaps, Performance Chronik Basel (1968–1986), editors, Sabine Gebhart Fink, Muda Mathis, Margarit von Büren, diaphanes, Zürich 2011, ISBN 978-3-03734-172-8, pages 209–219

the publication «Floating Gaps» (is in German)

How can performance art be remembered? And how can performance art be adequately communicated? The Performance Chronicle Basel, entitled "Floating Gaps", documents performative works via hitherto largely unpublished photographs, numerous interviews with contemporary witnesses and video stills, before the onset of the "Floating Gap" - the collective memory gap. In a narrowly defined and exemplary field, information on exemplary performative practices from 1968 to the mid-1980s is thus processed and reflected upon.

With text contributions by Sigrid Adorf, Sabine Gebhardt Fink, Ruth Lang, Muda Mathis, Dorothea Rust, Sigrid Schade and Silke Wenk, Anna Schürch and Margarit von Büren. Interviews with Jean-Christophe Ammann, the «Lady Goddesses» (Monika Dillier and Lisa Stärkle), Jochen Gerz, Edu Haubensak, Valerian Maly, Reinhard Manz, Franz Mäder, Wolf D. Prix (Coop Himmelblau), René Pulver, Alex Silber and Gilli & Diego Stampa.

The publication is supported by the Institute for Cultural Studies of the ZHdK, the Lottery Fund Basel Stadt, the Department of Cultural Affairs of the Canton of Basellandschaft, the Ernst Göhner Foundation in Zug and pro helvetia.

text contribution by Dorothea Rust (is in German)

«Tanzperformance in der Schweiz. Solotanz und Performance (Kunst) überkreuzt»
(dance performance in switzerland. solo dance and performance (art) crossed)
(The text was written in 2009)

Solo dance and performance (art) crossed over
When the concept of dance performance emerged, it also marked an awakening in dance in Switzerland in the 1980s: a lively independent dance scene developed and more subsidies were made available for its activities. This development took place in the wake of demands for cultural freedom, some of which were fought out violently (youth riots in Zurich, Bern, Basel and Lausanne in the 1980s). If postmodern dance and performance art were the artistically pioneering media in North America and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, then it was dance in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s.

The emergence of a heterogeneous term
The term dance performance became topical when dancers left the stage and moved into the space of museums, art halls (Christine Brodbeck's performance at the Kunsthalle in the early 1980s) and onto the street (street dance actions, e.g. by Geneviève Fallet). Dance performance emerges on the demarcation line between solo dance, which is situated in art spaces, and dance theatre with its hierarchically structured dance companies, which takes place on theatre stages. ...

full text in German on Performance Chronik Basel
full text from the publication