Reviews IM (GOLDENEN) SCHNITT I Strictly speaking, almost nothing happens: a man in a midnight-blue suit and coat, a tidy, self-controlled figure, paces out the room diagonally, measuring the distances in alternating series of steps and turns. But Vera Röhm's spatial installation places him on oddly ambiguous terrain: eight solid broken posts stand in an exact row on the apron of the stage, and one corresponding to them at backstage right. Their upper ends have been extended with plexiglas; the points of intersection shimmer golden in the precise spotlights. The place resembles an abandoned warehouse or a ritual site bordered by totem poles. Here the lone man carries out his sober researches, assuring himself of his body step by step, deliberately placing himself in relation to the objects which set the proportions. "In the (Golden) Section I -- Through the Room, Through the Body", a work by the Berlin choreographer Gerhard Bohner, who died in 1992, is not simply an investigation of ideal proportions. Far from being a tribute to aesthetic harmony, this late solo of 1989 is a radical reconstruction of the human body that examines step by step the elemental possibilities of movement, wandering from head to shoulders, arms, hands, legs, hips, knees and feet. A precise minimalism captures the space; proceeding from anatomy the choreography explores an open field in which the most diverse emotions can take their places. The man stands suddenly for a long fugue from Bach's "Well-tempered Clavichord", which is his congenial partner, buttoned up, shivering and leaning on a stick: a figure like a character from Fernando Pessoa, a lone wolf who is not lonely, but simply within himself, at ease in his own body, proceeding from it. In this sober state of being in and at one with himself, which resists all emotional, interpretative gestures, Gerhard Bohner's choreographic work represented the great and most important antipode to the emotionally powerful Dance Theater produced by women. A master of reduction, in his late works in particular he followed the inner meridians of physical energy, composing out of them fascinatingly simply choreographic didactic forms. It may be that only now, after the furious efforts of dance theater have assumed their place in dance history, that the significance of this extraordinary oeuvre can come fully into its own. Thus the Berlin Akademie der Künste is coming at just the right moment with its reconstruction. While the market is increasingly being flooded with choreographic mediocrities, this production gives modern dance a solid point of orientation once again. In the Catalan Cesc Gelabert the Akademie has also found the ideal interpreter for this difficult undertaking. He seeks not to imitate, but rather steers steadily towards the intellectual point of departure of Bohner's work, recreating it in his own language. Confidently, and without a trace of vanity, Gelabert follows Bohner's traces and creates once again that magical space that only a mature dancer, pared down to his essence, can achieve. Thus one may reckon this reconstruction one of the rare fortunate cases in which a younger artist does not mistakenly slave away at external forms, but rather steers unerringly towards the intellectual sources of a work. When at the end, with arm-swinging steps to a slow fugue, Gelabert returns to the shadowy forest, in which only the gold in the fiberglass shimmers, he is standing at the end of Bohner's life, but at the beginning of his oeuvre. The image reverberates for a long time.   Norbert Servos in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich), 23 October 1996 DDER TAGESSPIEGEL/ 30/10/99 KULTUR However Bohner did not present the results of his choreographic studies as mere exercises. He always invested them with a figure having a striking stage presence, generally dressed in black, graceful, reigning supreme. What you discover is that a person can be alone, but without necessarily having to feel alone. What you see is a man who establishes a relationship with his own body and with the space around him. In "Im (Goldenen) Schnitt I y II" the plastic artists, Vera Röhm and Robert Schad, gave him a concentrated opportunity to do this. Their spatial installations require great presence and great sincerity of the dancer. Only then does the space open up. Bohner dominated this art, all vanity aside, as no-one else. He achieved the prodigious feat of making a place speak through a person. And the more he retreated into the background, the greater was the spectators’ power of imagination to penetrate into the places animated as if by magic. By 1996 the Akademie der Künste had reconstructed the first part of "Im (Goldenen) Schnitt", and had found, in the Spaniard Cesc Gelabert, the ideal dancer. There is no doubt that in his current performance of the reconstruction of the second part, together with the first, he will revive, on this occasion too, an important part of the history of dance. Sure of himself, but without a trace of vanity, Gelabert has about him that unpretentious presence that meant so much to Bohner. The dancer as the medium, not the message. In this, Jutta Hell and Dieter Baumann are experts too for whom Bohner – also in 1989 – created the duet “SOS”. Only through performers with such an approach can dance show what it is capable of: turning the magic of a place into reality and making us dream. Norbert Servos Journalist and dance critic