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Exhibition

Bewegte Blätter. Tanz im Plakat

by Katrin Bettina Müller

The eye is busy. How many hands, arms, and legs, bent and intertwined, can it capture in the poster that Elżbieta Chojna designed for the dance evening Tango in 2008? An attractive work of art has emerged, cut out of red and black paper with rough contours and collaged together, enticing you to contemplate for a while. You can already hear the tango beat.

What can a poster say about dance and movement? How does it convey more than a frozen moment? This can be wonderfully studied in the exhibition Bewegte Blätter. Tanz im Plakat at Dieselkraft Cottbus, featuring works by 70 designers since the 1960s. Poster art has been collected at Brandenburgisches Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst since the 1970s, because in the GDR, applied art was meant to be on an equal footing with the fine arts. Documenting the history of graphic design as well as the history of dance, this exhibition benefits from this. It tells its story through individual posters as well as series that stretch up to the ceiling in a high-ceilinged space. The design agency cyan studio, for example, has created an entire block of posters for cie. toula limnaios, an independent group from Berlin. They are based on photographs of dynamic moments in the choreographies, whose energy is further enhanced by the visual treatment and poetically exaggerated with blurred gray tones. Another series comes from the Viennese design and branding agency studio VIE, promoting the Tanzquartier Wien with a surreal, mysterious visual rhetoric. Magnificently shimmering, amorphous forms reminiscent of shells, corals, and butterflies overgrow fragments of faces and bodies on these posters. Here, dance is embedded in the organic processes of all living things; it is less about promoting a specific event than about an institution that reflects on it.

With various posters for the ballet Coppélia, the exhibition demonstrates how diverse the paths of translating dance art into the graphic arts can be. In 1993, Kathrin Kegler designed a poster for the Komische Oper Berlin that uses expressively painted figures to tell a story: blood is flowing, a woman is being picked up, and disaster is in the air. Holger Matthies on the other hand used a photographic nude of a woman from behind, into which he incorporated a small flap: it opens a view into a machine.

Posters are intended for public spaces and face fierce competition in the battle for attention. As a visual event, they are intended to arouse curiosity even before one knows what they are about, but then they must convey their information concisely. To achieve this, designers repeatedly choose reduction and work with forms of abstract art — for a ballet evening at the Zurich Opera House by Uwe Scholz and John Clifford, Karl Domenic Geissbühler designed a poster with four irregular colored fields in 1990. A small orange square stands in the large red field, while blue slides past the green block. Thus, the colored areas convey how spaces can be created with tension through movement. Opposite hangs a poster designed by Reinhard Braun in 1990 for a dance evening by Berlin choreographer Riki von Falken: here, the letters of her initials structure the space.

This, too, is a special feature of this exhibition: protagonists of the independent dance scene stand alongside major ballet companies and institutions, subculture mixes in, and sometimes the popular genre of the revue. Legs fly up and form lines into which the writing flies, as seen on a 1984 poster for the Gera City Theaters — dance as lighthearted pleasure and entertainment. This, too, is not neglected here.

Dieselkraftwerk Cottbus, until 27 April; www.blmk.de