Friedemann Vogel: Homo versus machina

Heinrich von Kleist, Frankfurt-based playwright and poet, stands out among the founding thinkers of a renewed theater of the body, for his Über das Marionettentheater, an essay where, in the form of a dialogue with a dancer he met in the park, he addresses the theme of "grace," defending the superiority of the puppet over the dancer, in that it is not anchored to the ground or gravity; it therefore has no technical limitations, unlike the human being, endowed with a soul.

Text by Elisa Guzzo Vaccarino

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The wise dancer - according to Kleist - enlightened the writer, on the dynamics of movement induced by the strings, explaining "that every time you move the center of gravity in a straight line, the limbs have already described curves; and that often, shaken in a purely accidental way, the whole turns into a kind of rhythmic movement similar to a dance."
The puppet and the dancer are both moved from who designs gestures, movements, choreography, narratives for them; the dancer: trained body, special body, but natural; the puppet: artificial, constructed, "superior" body. Can the artificial body become natural? Is a trained, special human body in any way artificial?

Friedemann Vogel is a preluded artist of the body, a thinker of the flesh, an absolute leading figure at the top of the glorious Stuttgarter Ballett, the classical company that under the creative leadership of John Cranko, a South African of English school, realigned Germany with the West after World War II in distancing itself from Ausdruckstanz, expressive modern dance, which had become politically uncomfortable in the West.

In his 40s - he was born to Stuttgart in 1979 - with a boyish face and meticulously sculpted Caravaggesque musculature, Friedemann Vogel, reserved, hard-working, completely dedicated to dance, is one of the leading international dancers of his generation, a first-class performer, awarded the supreme honor of Kammartänzer; winner of the Prix de Lausanne, the Erik Bruhn Prize and the Prix Maya, as well as prized guest at La Scala in Milan as at the Bolshoi in Moscow as to Tokyo. He was chosen, in 2021, to launch the official message of International Dance Day: "We dancers are often celebrated for physical prowess, while in fact we are much more supported by mental strength. I believe it is this unique combination of physical and psychological agility that helps us to surpass ourselves, to reivent ourselves to continue to dancing, continue to inspiring."

Now, at the pinnacle of a global career, Vogel launches a new challenge to himself, in coming up with works of his own, with the complicity of the multifaceted Thomas Lempertz, "visual artist, whose practice is strongly based in dance"-that's how he identifies himself-, fashion designer and costume designer, former soloist to Stuttgart, and then choreographer, who has proved a partner of choice in his friend Friedemann's personal projects; now precisely on the man-mare relationship treading in Von Kleist's footsteps.
"A new challenge faced together, after the precedent of Not in my Hands, a solo overflowing with emotions, between fear and courage, prison and freedom, loss and hope, ebb and flow," - comments Vogel - "born from the painful feelings of a dancer in the dramatic moment of the theaters closed for the pandemic, and acted on Mozart's fatal Requiem." "From the restrictions comes a certain freedom, and in the isolation, in the abundance of physical space, a new space is created, for reflection and creation" - declared the dancer in 2021 for Not in my hands - "If everything seems impossible, everything becomes possible," dropping all illusions of power, surrendering to the waves of fate, but using obstacles as a propellant of energy, struggling to move forward anyway.

In 2024 Vogel, again with Lempertz, tried his hand at choreography a new "dance performance" to Full evening: Die Seele am Faden/ Soul Threads, or The Threads of the Soul in English or The Soul on the Wire in German, a title that reveals in every language the mood of this intriguing adventure, created in collaboration with the Kleist Museum.
The music is by Alisa Scetinina, originally from Riga, also a dancer to Stuttgart – from the same artistic family, therefore – which after six years of work as a dancer, has passed to she studied Fine Arts and devoted herself to music, a terrain on which she had already measured herself in her Latvia, to the piano and violin; The multifaceted artist has also put herself to the test by singing and acting and, as a self-taught, applying herself to the guitar; She is also active as a producer with a passion for analog equipment and old-school instruments, which she uses in her live sets. Scetinina also loves digital photography and video. Composer, director and performer, she moves nimbly between choreography and improvisation. Vogel's team also includes digital artist Timo Kreitz, a specialist in motion design and spatial and immersive experiences, and light designer Fabiana Piccioli, from Rome, with a degree in philosophy, with training in dance, collaborator of Akram Khan, Romeo Castellucci, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, of the English National Ballet, of the Ballets de Montecarlo, also engaged on the front of theopera at La Scala in Milan, winner of two Knight of Illuminations Awards for Dance and one forOpera.

Die Seele am Faden/Soul Threads is on stage, in the rich program of the Spoleto Festival, to San Simone, a former church, where the ideal climate is created for this intense and cultured solo. Friedemann Vogel, an excellent partner of bow dancers in the world, has the temperament and maturity to apply himself to practice and theory, as he demonstrated in the performance Écorché-Anatomie des Tanzes, and in the panel on the subject, last March at the University of Tübingen in the Andere Ästetik program. He is the actor-subject of works of video art, such as Cadavre Exquis by Damiano Pettenella & Roman Novitzky and the protagonist of the documentary to all-round Verkörperung des Tanzes direct from Katja Trautwein.

In the highly demanding art of dance, which asks the body for every care, every attention, every breath, in search of perfect control, accepting to put itself in the hands of others, preparing every sinew and every neuron to correspond to the image from return, in the face to a pandemic stop or confrontation with the heterodirected body of the puppet, absolute dedication is required. A talent that to Vogel certainly does not lack.
Homoversus machina: Die Seele am Faden/Soul Threads picks up the thread of a long-standing discourse on the presence, physicality, and efficacy of the dancer; who is the better? The puppet without consciousness or the human being? Will technique, agility, discipline, harmony, authenticity, soul, give the palm to the dancer?
"My body is the instrument of my soul," says Friedemann Vogel, for whom dancing is communicating, with feeling. "It is not the beautiful to to be desirable, but rather the real"-he says, since the artist depends on his or her body; "this is the common thread to to which all dancers cling."
And it should come as no surprise that a great dancer-interpreter, who knows himself in every detail, who is strong from a lived experience at the pinnacles of ballet in the temples of the body in performance, wants to take over the investigation of the meaning that his own daily, diuturnal and determined actions project into his intimate life and in the eyes of the audience: almost a meditation, a spiritual exercise, a book of 'at written with skin, bones, tendons, nerves, brain, heart.