January 20: Dance, Poetry, and Historical Memory in New Works by Monnier, Forsythe, Charmatz, Hoghe, Mantero

The date January 20 serves as a conceptual anchor for a series of dance works premiering in early 2003, linking the opening of Büchner's Lenz ('Lenz departed for the mountains') to the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, where the Holocaust was planned. Paul Celan transformed this date into a poetic cipher for historical subjectivity. Mathilde Monnier's Déroutes, created after dissolving her company, features poet Stéphane Bouquet walking on stage. William Forsythe's Kamer Kamer hides Frankfurt Ballet dancers behind screens, showing only plasma screens. Boris Charmatz's Théâtre-Télévision presents a 'pseudo-spectacle for one spectator' with dancers displaced into a television screen, following his earlier work Con forts fleuve where dancers' heads were tied in trousers. Raimund Hoghe, former dramaturge for Pina Bausch, uses twelve non-dancer adolescents in Young People, Old Voices. Vera Mantero's untitled piece (a phonetic Portuguese phrase from a poem by Mário Cesariny) features tired superheroes in green-grey capes. The works collectively explore disappearance, documentary bodies, and poetry's return to the stage, with bodies that are 'elsewhere' but not eliminated. Charmatz emphasizes oral poetry by John Giorno as a way to bring body back through voice rather than movement. The article frames these as responses to a 'January 20' imperative: to write from historical trauma.