The Austrian interdisciplinary choreographer Willi Dorner is well known for his short films, photo books, and stage dance, but most of all, for his courage to challenge the boundaries of theatrical concert dance. His mastery in the genre of site-specific work is revealed in movement performances in alternative spaces, galleries, and city streets that invite the audience to choose where to look, what to see, and how long to watch. Willi Dorner spoke to ICONS about his ways of "reading" urban space and how to convert it into an imaginative performance place.

Dance ICONS: How did you originally get into dance?

Willi Dorner: It was my teacher in secondary school. He had a good view of what was happening in Vienna at the time, the mid-seventies. I was very attracted to all of the different art that he showed us. Besides painting and art history, he offered an optional afternoon class about video and photography and connected it to dance. I had trained in gymnastics, so in a sense, I was already trained. Then I started taking dance classes, but it was really time-consuming. I took the train for two hours to Vienna to take a dance class and then returned home.

Dance ICONS: Can you tell us specifically about your journey into choreography and directing?

WD: For some years, I worked for Austrian choreographers. I thought I had to make art as a dancer, but I was observing and watching other dance artists: how they choreograph and where they take their inspiration from. Already, I was very much influenced by photography and media. I had a strong idea to combine video and dance. I would see American artists at various festivals whose works incorporated film, spoken word, and dance, so I wanted to make that here on my own.

Dance ICONS: Can you discuss how photography and video are important to your work?

WD: I met and worked with the French choreographer Mark Tompkins. He uses a lot of different types of media. I chose him because I was already inspired by my school teacher, and I found myself very strongly connected to him and to his work. We worked a lot on hand cameras. We did video work where we created one shot, but it is not a few seconds. We created shots that took 3-4 minutes. But then I had to choreograph what happens while the camera is rolling. I liked planning those shots, and through this, I got more into choreographing because I had to choreograph all these people.

Dance ICONS: How would you describe your choreographic viewpoint or what makes your work distinctly yours?

WD: One aspect for sure, as I’ve said, is to include video in the work. My work can be summed up by one of my pieces that goes like this: It has a table, two performers. They write on the table; the table is a blackboard, and there is a camera above the table. The camera records to a closed circuit, so it records what's happening, and you see it on the projection at the same time as the dancers are writing and performing it. But the screen is separate from the live dancers in the same room. The audience has to decide who they are watching; they can sit down like in a cinema and just see a film. But they know at the same time that the film is produced. It's created at the same time, so they have to turn back and forth. That demonstrates my work very well.

Dance ICONS: You've also choreographed for different spaces and site-specific works. What's the difference for you between choreographing for a stage and choreographing for another medium, film, or venue?

WD: Well, conceptually, I don't want to use the outside as a “stage.” If I did, I just could stay on the stage, so I have to deal with what is there. Space is more than that —space has social, economic, and political aspects. Therefore, I wanted to go outside and confront myself with these aspects.

My first big outdoor work was actually in a residential condominium building in Vienna, where they rented out flats. We worked there for two months, and I found it very inspiring and interesting to share information and ideas with artists working in different fields, making installations, sculptures, and, of course, performances in the building and the apartments. The important part is that it deals with the situation. I didn’t go there and show just a dance piece. That’s not the point. I work choreographically with how the space actually presents itself and how movement and dance are situated in it.

Dance ICONS: Can you talk about Bodies and Urban Spaces as a huge performance work, now a book, and all of its iterations?

WD: This is my biggest success—it is known worldwide. I still get offers to present it in different ways, interviews, or commercials for fashion. I developed this idea in the frame of the project I mentioned before. I developed the idea for Bodies during an artistic residency, but the starting point was just a photo project.

I took a series of photos, and two years later, I went to Paris for a meeting with a presenter. She said, “What have you been doing for the last year?” I showed her this series of photos. I developed it during my artistic residency at the University of Architecture in Barcelona. Then, I invited the French presenter to see the final outdoor performance. Five hundred people came to watch, and it was crowded. Then the “dancers” didn’t start to move. They got up and ran away, and then the audience knew that they had to follow the dancers to see all the installations.

Then, by the time we got to the end of the course, there were 30 people left out of 500, but the French presenter was among them. She loved it, and she said, “You have to do it in Paris next year at our festival.” When I went to Paris, it was a big success. And when I did it in Paris, presenters started coming, and the ball started to roll, and now we’ve done it everywhere.

Dance ICONS: What makes this work such a signature for you?

WD: It’s important for me because it raised many questions. When the Ministry of Culture saw it, they said this was not choreography. I lost all my funding because they said I wasn’t doing choreography. It was devastating!

However, my work was about artfully organizing people in time and space, which is the basic definition of choreography. And then, through this work, I discovered much more about the regulations and laws behind what we are allowed to put as the art of dance “on the street.” I realized that it is important to encourage people to walk the cities to understand what's happening in their city. And there was a need for free space in the city because it was at the time of privatization, capitalism, and globalization of the cities. More and more spaces have become “private” and are no longer “public,” including Vienna's.

Bodies in Urban Spaces was the right project at the right time. I led people—performers and audiences—through their city. I was interested in investigating through movement and conceptually the political and economic “hotspots” of the city. What are the posh districts and the places where you would not go? I try to guide a “choreographic walk” through all these urban areas. This particular site-specific work takes about one and a half hours so that there is sufficient time to explore and grasp the diversity of a city.

Dance ICONS: Can you talk about how collaboration is a part of your work?

WD: From collaboration with architects, I have found different formats of presentations. I like to approach my performance and movement presentations more like an exhibition or an art installation. It normally takes about three hours as the audience walks around and observes various solos/videos/sound installations in different spaces.

The dance and movement installation is open for three hours as the dances are looped. The performers repeat dance sections several times because sometimes the audience misses details.

My work also questions the dramaturgical perception and the observational mindset of a conventional theater stage performance. In it, the audience sits at a particular spot and watches the dance on stage. Then, in about 60 minutes, the show is over and the audience leaves the theater. With my installation presentations, the audience can see the dance repeatedly but from multiple angles they choose while enjoying different versions of the dance. The audience members can stay longer or leave soon, as they decide when the dance observation is over for them.

Dance ICONS: What advice would you give your younger self?

WD: I say this sometimes when I teach: Trust in yourself and try to be clear with yourself. Once you start to have success, there are a lot of outside influences. Yes, you need a lot of influence, but you have to stay true to your own voice and be clear about your personal vision. Never lose yourself or try too hard to fit in. Be honest and brave enough to start creating something from nothing.

MORE INFORMATION AND A BIOGRAPHY OF WILLI DORNER:

https://www.willidorner.com/

VIDEO SAMPLE OF WILLI DONNER'S WORK:

PHOTO CREDITS:

Photography © Carolina Frank, Willi Dorner, photo portrait, courtesy of newspaper DiePresse, Vienna, Austria

Photography © Lisa Rastl, choreography and visual art by Willi Dorner

CREATIVE TEAM ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

Interviewer: Charles Scheland

Executive Content Editor: Camilla Acquista

Executive Assistant: Charles Scheland

Executive Director: Vladimir Angelov

Dance ICONS, Inc., January 2024 © All rights reserved.