Iconoclasts. Women rule breakers at the Biennale Danza

One of the true wonders of La Biennale di Venezia is their incredible Historical Archive – ASAC. Not only is it a treasure trove of captured institutional knowledge and essential artifacts for the most historic festivals in the world, but it is replete with memories, meanings and other stories these documents, films and photographs reveal when we encounter them anew, today. Correspondences from and with the most important artists of their time are stored with those often overlooked in our time and only when we venture back do we uncover the most potent golden thread which connects, distils and dialogues with our most vital cultural capital.

We have, in dance, been notoriously remiss in capturing our form in the moment – often explained away by a medium that celebrates the ephemeral and the transitory, perhaps at the expense of legacy. And yet when we do collect and are able to trace back, when we have the rare opportunity to piece together our danced fragments, placing each in the timeline of experimentation, innovation and evolution we are able to understand, embody and experience the total work afresh. In this way, archives are as much a quest forward, resonating today in a finely retuned sense of wonder as when it was made, invigorating and vibrating – alive – in a necessary contemporary context.

This fragment of our living archive of dance in Venice, ICONOCLASTS connects the female pioneers and adventurers who have shared their radical art with us in the lagoon and in doing so pushed against their times, pushed across boundaries, pushed forward their unique perspectives and pushed us towards the possible. We are standing on the shoulders of giants, some you will be familiar with and others may well be revelatory to you, but each contributes to our palimpsest of global movement geniuses.

Pioneering, adventurous, radical, iconoclastic, determined professionals, women artists conquered and illustrated Venice. Since the early twentieth century female choreographers and dancer-authors, challenging themselves relentlessly on a par with men, colleagues, friends and rivals, have thrown themselves into the fray of the art of the body, defying tradition and conventions. Creation is an essential priority, without fear of the judgement of audiences and critics, male and female. Classical and modern European dance are represented in Venice and at La Biennale first and foremost in the programmes of the International Festival of Contemporary Music, with world-class artists; after World War II, the work of epoch-making choreographers would come from the United States and the entire world to Venice. The new Germany arrived with a portfolio of Stücke by Pina Bausch and her Wuppertal Tanztheater in 1985 at the International Theatre Festival. After the Dance department was established in 1999 with Carolyn Carlson, an incisive succession of programmes was developed punctuated with works created by women, with two choreographers from the New World, Karole Armitage and Marie Chouinard, directing innovative international festivals, and a lengthy series of Golden and Silver Lions awarded to female artists of esteemed value in a kaleidoscopic variety of styles and poetics.