Peter Pleyer

Solo Works

Danceplatform Germany Frankfurt / 2016
From the catalogue:

At the time of his birth, Steve Paxton and Robert Rauschenberg were a couple. What if he had been their son? Fantasies like this one, taken from Ponderosa Trilogy (2015), are typical of Peter Pleyer, who is deeply knowledgeable about dance history and the structures of the dance world. The piece is named after the summer retreat of the Berlin dance scene in the Oderbruch region, near the Polish border. Peter Pleyer has had a strong influence on the developments there—developments that have, in turn, significantly shaped the aesthetics of artists working in Berlin—through his teaching and conversational presence.
Until he returned to his own artistic work in 2014, Pleyer was best known as the director of Tanztage Berlin, the annual festival for emerging talent. What remains is his pronounced pedagogical eros, which, with Visible Undercurrent (2014) — an archive in motion and encounter — was successfully elevated to a choreographic principle.
Teaching and artistic practice have been inseparable for Pleyer since his studies in Arnhem, the Netherlands. In alternating roles — that of master and novice alike — he has since explored his extraordinary archive of postmodern dance and its (European) ramifications. Fixed points in his work include the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, contact improvisation, queer theory, and a formal-aesthetic interest in ritual structures.
This combinatorial approach leads Pleyer stylistically toward a blend of lecture performance and freestyle voguing — conceived as an exploratory experiment in community-building dialectics, all gently interwoven with his remarkable crochet artistry.
(Astrid Kaminski)