Diana Szeinblum's Expedition into the Dark Spaces of Memory

Diana Szeinblum's "Alaska", featuring Lucas Condró, Leticia Mazur, Alejandra Ferreyra Ortíz, and Pablo Lugones. Photo by Jazmin Tesone.

The people at On the Boards are usually enthusiastic about the shows they bring to Seattle, but there's a special vibe coming from the Behnke Center down at First & Roy this week. They're serious when they say they've been working to try to bring the Argentine choreographer Diana Szeinblum to town for six years, and the sense of pride and excitement in Alaska, which runs tonight through Sunday (Nov. 5-8, tickets $24), is palpable.

Tuesday afternoon, I sat down with Szeinblum as her crew of dancers worked out, for a brief conversation about her work. A former student and dancer for the legendary choreographer Pina Bausch, Szeinblum first drew substantial notice in the U.S. in 2002, with Secreto y Malibu. Last year, she returned with Alaska, first at the Dance Theatre Workshop in New York, and then at REDCAT in LA, where the show earned stunning reviews.

The first thing that pretty much anyone, I imagine, asks Szeinblum is about her experience with Bausch, who died a couple months ago. Bausch was a lion in the dance world, a pioneer of German tanztheater whose work stood in marked contrast to even the work of other Moderns like Martha Graham.

"I saw her when she came to Argentina in the Eighties, I was fifteen, and I saw her work and felt really very touched," Szeinblum said. "And after this, I said, 'Okay, this is what I want!'"

At the age of 26, Szeinblum received a scholarship to study with Bausch at the Folkwang Tanz Shule in Essen, Germany, and after a year-and-a-half joined the company at the Tazstudio. Founded in 1930 by Kurt Jooss, FTS played a seminal role in the development of tanztheater, a form of German Expressionist movement that was defined by Bausch after the Second World War. Szeinblum's work shares many qualities with Bausch's tanztheater, particularly in its tendency to reject the formalism and elegance of dance for loose, un-postured movements.

The ability to lose posture, to abandon technique, is one of the things that Szeinblum works out in the creative process with her dancers.

"I worry," she told me, "because I want [the audience] to see people, not dancers. And for me, it's a good de-evolution. First I try to really work with something very personal. I say to my students, 'You have to study a technique, and then you have to forget what you study.' If you really work with something personal, nothing comes together with technique. It's something personal you have. So if you wrap yourself in these personal things, the technique can go away..."

Compared to much dance-theatre, Alaska is rather minimal, performed on an almost empty stage, with few props. The concept behind the piece, as Szeinblum told me, is "the things that your body didn't say when you had a strong experience."

"You know, when you have a strong experience, maybe you can talk, maybe you can cry, maybe you can laugh," she said, "but your body always stays in the same place. And what we worked on was, in this occasion, what your body didn't say, that we'll say now."

One of the most frequently commented segments of the piece involves a dancer who begins to pull his pants up. A woman rushes him from behind, throwing herself onto his back. They scuffle, and he throws her down, she pulls his pants back down. The process repeats itself over and over, until both of them have most of their clothing torn off. (Follow this link for a video montage of Alaska; this particular moment occurs at 0:55.)

Despite the potential for a sexual interpretation, Szeinblum rejected it completely. "Nothing to do with sex!" she said, laughing sardonically at my (admittedly based on only a couple seconds of video) interpretation.

"This moment...is a memory of Lucas [Condró, the male dancer]," she explained. "And we are in this remembrance, and then this is over. He pulls up his pants again, and something, like a memory, comes and brings him to this place again."

The work is a sort of spelunking expedition into memory, dredging up intense emotional experiences from the dancers and realizing them through movement. The actions are frequently repetitive, but lack the mechanical, precise repetition of ballet. The actions frequently become more wild, more intense as the process unfolds.

"The piece is about a place inside us that's...oneiric?" Szeinblum asked me, searching for the right word. Rather foolishly, I forgot my own language and left her trying to think of the right English term. "Like a fantasy? It's like a place that everybody has, but we are not used to going there, or that we are not used to knowing this place exists."

The title makes an oblique reference to this sort of desolate space of memory. "Alaska, we thought, is this place that everyone in the world knows where it is, but no one goes," Szeinblum said. "It's a long way away, but it's not Tanzania that many people don't know. Everybody knows Alaska."

Ironically, that's how I've always thought of Tierra del Fuego.