“Dealing with what occupies my body“

Slowly dancer Manon Parent lifts one leg into the vertical position, she stretches her arms and reaches towards the ceiling, cooing and screeching echoes through the Louvre in Paris. The Siberian Crane – a bird species threatened with extinction – is one of the many creatures that cavort in Sergiu Matis' pieces. In recent years, the performance of “The Siberian Crane” has been shown at various European festivals and most recently as part of Jérôme Bel's “Non human dances“. The work of the Romanian-born, Berlin-based choreographer Sergiu Matis is characterised by a preoccupation with humankind's relationship to nature, the ecological crisis of our time and discourses on the Anthropocene between myth and fact. Trained at Liceul de Coregrafie in Cluj-Napoca and Hochschule für Tanz in Mannheim, Sergiu Matis worked as a dancer at Staatstheater in Nuremberg as well as with Sasha Waltz & Guests in Berlin. After completing his Master's degree at the HZT Berlin, he began his career as a choreographer in the Berlin dance scene. In his solo „Nocturne for broken vocal cords“ (2018), he negotiates his personal dance history between invented and found folk dances, queering strategies and algorithms. 

In your solo “Nocturne for broken vocal cords” you are dealing with your personal dance heritage – from your training as well as regarding the heritage of practiced folk dance in the region of Transylvania where you were born and raised. How do these different influences come together in your performance?

I work with the idea of ethnography and auto-ethnography. In my case, there are always some Transylvanian or Romanian influences that are inhabiting my body. So, I am dealing with the ghosts that I carry with me. I learned these dances during my dance training in Cluj. Back then, the folk dance classes were much more fun than ballet classes because you immediately get to tricks and speed and the fun to perform, while with ballet it took months till you leave the barre and go to the center. With folk dance we immediately had a connection to movement that was very dynamic, rhythmical and performative.

Did your family also have a connection to these folk dance traditions?

Yes, my father plays a type of a bastard clarinet, it's called taragot, which got to Transylvania through the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was integrated in the Romanian and Transylvanian folklore. My father plays music with different people, at home, but also in Roma bands. There's also a lot of folk music on TV, my mother sings and my cousin is a quite famous folk singer.

There seems to be a strong tradition in your family. Have you always enjoyed practising folk dances then?

As a dance student in the National ballet school, I was of course snubbing folklore. I was training to become a kind of a Prince on stage, completely disconnected from the sociopolitical realities of Romania in the 1990s. When you are trained to have the National ballet school in the body, and at home it's basically the context of farmers and peasants – the working class – it's quite a distorted combination of input. For many years there was resistance towards folklore in me, but also a kind of attraction to it because it was a part of my family. Later, I think, less than 10 years ago, I started to remember the folk dances that I've learned in school and started to look back into them and appreciate this knowledge. 

What fascinated you most about it?

The intricate rhythmical language of the dances as well as the richness of the traditions that were practiced in my family. First, I’ve felt very distanced from all of it. It took years to accept the folk heritage that I grew up with.

In your “nocturne” solo, you link these memories of folk dance traditions with the ambivalent relationship of Western societies to nature in a complex way – and thus with current issues surrounding the ecological crisis of our time.

Folk dances have always involved an encounter with the environment that surrounds us. My memories of the folk dances for the solo were therefore part of a research for the larger project „Extinction Room (Hopeless)“, in which the focus became extinct and endangered bird species. For this work, we were looking into pastoral poetry and folk dances. That's how folk dances came back to me. l have never forgotten the dances that I’ve learnt in school, but of course, I had to remember them again. And there is a lot stored in the body!

How did you approach these body memories with your dancers?

I was not interested in animating folk dances the way they were or they are. I was working with them as material in my own movement practice: thinking about movement as a search engine and finding artefacts, gestures, positions or even grooves. It’s a bit like finding a shard of a vase, a remaining from which we try to re-construct the whole vase. I call these findings ‘dance objects’ that are then used to speculatively reconstruct an entire folk dance, departing from only this one gesture. It's a method that we worked with and with which we built different research tools, for improvisation and composition basically. These gestures that haunt you and keep appearing, during the process we tend to them and reanimate them until they become an entire – forgotten – dance, speculatively reconstructed.

How you re-embody these dances sounds like an archaeological approach.

Yes, and in a second step, I applied similar strategies to the folk dances and their rhythms – let’s call it the solid folk objects that were transmitted in school to me – to investigate how they were conserved. In the 1990’s, when I've learned these dances, they've already been through the socialist regime and were instrumentalized to build the idea of a nation state. So, they were already altered versions of traditions and specific for every region.

Romania has a strong folk dance tradition. The dancer Vera Proca Ciortea recorded around 6000 Romanian folk dances in a specially developed notation system and was the founder of choreology in your country. Have you also studied these dance-historical contexts?

No, it's all speculative. In my process for this solo I am going a step back and try to imagine how these steps and rhythms of the dances came to life and what kind of influences they are affected by or from which situation they have emerged: How would these dances have looked like and been performed before socialism? How did the environment of that specific region of Transylvania – the inclination of the mountain – influence the specific steps and rhythms in the dances? How were the people who have lived there in the Carpathians influenced by the nature that surrounded them? How did the people find pleasure and community in the dances? And then I invented my own narratives, like the authority of an old ethnographical text that describes dances, for instance – but it is just me trying to speculatively understand an earlier phase of the dances.

During your solo you are unfolding different historical, sociopolitical and cultural layers of the dances – with your embodiment, but also with a performative text in which your audience can follow your lines of thought. What was important for you in this intertwining of histories?

I think it is just a very personal revisitation of childhood memories: dealing with what occupies my body. As a child, you learn this highly ideological socialist poetry and you just give your voice and enthusiasm without really knowing what you're saying. You’re driven by the recitation of the words and almost enjoy the power of performing them. So, my solo is also a dealing with childhood traumas and, mainly the traumas of my parents.

To do this, you span the historical arc in your performance from the Russian Revolution of 1917 to the context of your current reflection.

Yes, I started to work on this topic 2017, 100 years after the revolution, examining the celebration of an alternative present, a celebration of reaching communist utopia, but then realising that it failed. I wanted to look through my parents’ and through my personal experiences of that time, especially the 1990’s when I was a teenager, trying to understand what happened by seeing an entire country in transition from one ideology to another.

Did you have certain artistic strategies to undermine those ideologies? How did you deal with that to unwrap these sociopolitical complexities?

Especially in Transylvanian folk dances, there's such a mixture between Hungarian and Romanian, Germanic, Slavic, Jewish and Roma influences that formed the folklore there. You can't say this is Romanian and this is Hungarian – it would be ridiculous because it's so intertwined. So, for me it was important to find strategies how to show these connections between the people that live in that territory.

In the second part of your solo, the folk dances you perform become fragmented. Suddenly your voice falters, your movements are more on the floor, your body moves away from certain staging norms.

With my practice, I want to undermine certain contexts of the folk dances, like gender roles. For that, I am queering folklore, which is so gendered usually, trying to destabilize myself and the notion of ‘this is how our Romanian folk dances are performed’. My parents haven't seen this solo yet ... it would feel like a drag queen performing in front of their parents. So, I'm curious what they would think about it.

Another of your strategies is the performative text that you recite during your solo. Generated on the basis of algorithms, this text on one hand is a strategy to depict the traces in your body and on the other to increasingly relinquish control over your own memories in the course of the performance.

In this solo there are three different types of texts, one of them being written in collaboration with a simple AI writing assistant that suggests words and phrases. The resulting mind-twisters and seemingly meaningless phrases have a certain lightness about them, but also this precious noise allows for poetry to happen and even a certain depth to appear or making space for reflections and confessions. I think it operates a bit like a fog machine ... making things disappear, but also creating an atmosphere that takes the performance beyond its content. With this text I access references from pop culture, which are the new folklore; there are political statements in it as well and I get to mention my mother and what connects me deeply with her. It all seems random, but it’s full of personal details, plus it’s fun to perform it, relating most of the words to gestures, moves and grooves, and it’s hopefully fun to watch as well. It’s destabilising me and the spectator, in order to re-set our minds in different registers of thinking, of watching and feeling. It helps me stir through different types of motion archives that my body contains — a bit like a stream of consciousness or daydreaming. It’s definitely a queering practice and in a way a critique to language and technology that attempt to frame the body, to tame it, to inscribe it, control it.

Sergiu Matis‘ „The Siberian Crane” ist im Rahmen der „Non human dances“ von Jérôme Bel wieder bei Impulstanz in Wien am 9. August 2024 sowie bei Tanz im August in Berlin am 22. und 24. August 2024 zu sehen.