ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Arendell brings Bausch back to her roots with Kurt Jooss, who equated dance with theater. He felt that his dances were just like plays but performed with movement rather than words. Both Jooss and Bausch ran a gamut of gesture: functionally pedestrian to metaphorically filled with heavy cultural meanings. Jooss referred to himself as a playwright of movement. His movement style tended toward a more materialist notion of social reality that sought to steep audiences in the actual rather than lift them transcendentally to higher plains of artistic existence. Arendell explains that the development of contemporary Tanztheater owes itself to Jooss's legacy. For Jooss, content is always more important than form, which may explain why Bausch spent more time building content than detailed technical movement. As with Bausch, Jooss's choreographic process to externalize these inner states depended on collaborative, or co-operative, physicalization. Using this particular method, what the dancer gives expression to becomes more important than how this message is expressed. Arendell explains that not only does all theater rely on movement; it is movement itself that best portrays meaning. Hence, the importance of action “blocking” in any theatrical production: to find the place where words fail.
