feminine delight
by Frans Poelstra, Robert Steijn en Martin Siewert

The Dance of the Ovaries
by Helmut Ploebst

At the close of the steirischer herbst festival (Stiermarken Autumn Festival) – with almost 45,000 people visiting the events this year – the performers Frans Poelstra and Robert Steijn have focused on the Grand Old Lady of American expressive dance, Martha Graham.

Graz – ‘Hello’, says the muse, ‘this here is paradise.’ Her paradise is a stage on which we see a big paper bag with a life-size ballerina painted on it. In a virile voice, the muse claims that the bag is empty and that it is therefore full of possibilities. That, however, is a lie. All this happens at the beginning of the dance performance feminine delight, which choreographer Frans Poelstra and dramaturge Robert Steijn have consummately developed for the weekend in which the end of steirischer herbst is celebrated.

What this bag of tricks does in fact contain is the icon of American expressive dance, to wit Martha Graham – in the figure of Robert Steijn, who penetratingly renders the diva, miming her in black veils before a wall of mirrors. Steijn celebrates this icon to the accompaniment of the devout muse’s panegyrics (a delightful Poelstra) while Graham is in the process of giving birth to a new dance idiom: ‘She is transforming the essence of dance. She believes that when she dances, she touches the other side’ – of the mirror, that is. In other words: the Beyond.

With dignified grace and sustained by Martin Siewert’s superior musicality, the two performers (based in both the Netherlands and Vienna) manage a delicate task at the festival centre. While exposing the masturbatory essentialism of modern-dance celebrities, as fervently embodied in Martha Graham, they also collaterally hit the grandiloquent tone of voice, the authoritarian affectation and modernism’s cult of the genius in general.

‘Dance is a woman’ is what the muse has her Martha Graham eulogize. ‘It gives a voice to the vagina.’ And thus one hears reverberating: ‘Oh, vagina, teach me how to dance!’ Poelstra and Steijn then go on to rehearse the vagina dance. However, the female artist’s aura is shattered, and what remains at the end is an incontinent wreck. At the end Martha dies – and is resurrected again.

The reference to the servile mentality and vanity, as widespread within the context of the arts as anywhere else, is a political layer in feminine delight. And another one is the reference to the dubiousness of paternalism, patricide and matricide in the successive art generations. And a third is the self-disintegration of both the heroes at the end of feminine delight. Poelstra and Steijn manage to achieve their characters’ disintegration with empathy, maintaining a detachedness in their highly personal embrace of this theme.

On Sunday, the 40st herbst will end with a last brunch and the dismantling of Thomas Jelinek’s State of Sabotage on the Karmeliterplatz in Graz. The festival has had on balance a house filled for more than 91 percent and almost 45,000 people visiting its approximately 270 events. At the final press conference on Friday, Veronica Kaup-Hasler, herbst’s manager, was also happy about the positive international reactions and the audience’s rejuvenation.

the photograph’s caption:
A rather camp performance: Robert Steijn embodies Martha Graham in feminine delight. Photo steirischer herbst

Der Standard 13/14 October 2007