ABSTRACT
“Visible Undercurrent” traces the post-Judson avant-garde –New York choreographers of the late 1980s and early 1990s – and their influence on actual German dance developments. Queer discourse and the problem of AIDS were staged with a specific kind of theatricality. Strategies of composition and improvisation as well as specific movement techniques are also closely linked to this era. In their various transformations, these aspects and procedures are still recognizable in actual productions of contemporary dance. In a written dialogue, we get closer to specific practices of intermediation and transference, which contributed to the development of the project. Relying on specific ways of transmitting knowledge that run beyond a specific canon of well-known choreographies but are based on teaching and exchange, Pleyer’s format draws on a model of oral history connecting dance and its discourses – in dialogue with dancers of a younger generation – for an ongoing negotiation with dance history, mediated in minor narratives and anecdotes.
