ALPHABET DANCE

One of the many pleasures working in the gallery is watching the results of collaborative efforts by various artists from different fields. Alphabet Dance was a quintessential collaborative effort. Ann Noël and Stefanie Wietzig formed the core of this project. In her EGB-solo exhibit Four Letter Words, Ann Noël held forth with the alphabet of naked human figures which provided the basis of this event. Stefanie Wietzig provided the original choreography. The ball started rolling when I gave Ann Noël a Berlin newspaper and asked her to find one word for each letter of the alphabet. (“X” and “Q” were, of course, the most difficult challenges.) The newspaper excerpts were then copied and enlarged as small posters. Meanwhile, Stefanie Wietzig went through the effort of developing a dance/body language forming each of the letters of the alphabet through motion. Starting with “A,” during the performance, the Berlin actor, Hans Brückner, read each word from the newspaper as EGB’s own Gritta Ewald held up a sign with the newspaper clipping at the back of the gallery. This was the cue for Stefanie Wietzig, using her dance/body alphabet, to first dance the letter in question then the entire word in front of a projection of Ann Noël’s take on the letter. After we went through the entire alphabet, guests in the gallery were invited to ask Stefanie Wietzig to dance particular words. The entire performance filled the gallery space with a multi-medium, and interdisciplinary mixture of sound, pictures, text and motion. Stefanie Wietzig developed Alphabet Dance as a commission for Emerson Gallery Berlin, and the performance on 08 October 2004 was a world premier of her original choreography.