TRUUS BRONKHORST

Truus Bronkhorst once called herself a "dancer by origin and with passion". This was no exaggeration, because she has now been describing feelings and thoughts with grand gestures and serene dance steps for twenty years. She continues in the tradition of the great modern dance expressionists in her own contemporary way, and it has to be said that she started at a time, in the heyday of post-modern dance, when expressionism was taboo in dance. She immediately showed that she was very much at home with rebellion and individuality. This image as a dance nonconformist fits her no less now.

It was early on that Bronkhorst came into contact with a form of modern dance that appealed to her. She learnt from Koert Stuyf how to seek the essence in movement, and from Edinoff the magic of performance. It was then at Dansproductie that she learnt the crafts of dancing and choreography. In the early eighties she operated in squatters' art circles and the underground nightlife that Joost Zwagerman described in his novel GIMMICK. She swapped her contrary performances for appearances at the Shaffy Theatre. The director Rob Malasch pointed her in the direction of solo performances. She created an outstanding series of them herself: after TRUUS BRONKHORST IN CONCERT and TRUUS BRONKHORST DANST BRONKHORST TRUUS, she made her breakthrough with LOOD, followed by GOUD and BLOED(Lead, Gold and Blood). In these pieces she appeared as mysterious mystic and oriental geisha, queen and heroine, whore, knight and jester. She used simple props that became a permanent ingredient of her visual language: a black balloon as a symbol of the weight of existence, which nevertheless defies gravity, a gun as an instrument of machismo, peacock feathers for the art of female seduction, a mirror as a ballet prop and symbol of introspection. Together with these symbols there were the colours black, red and white and the poses of Christ on the Cross, the descent from the Cross and the Pieta.

These solos were about love, suffering, unfulfilled desires, solitude and death. And although these themes were created explicitly on the basis of her own female view, she was able to raise them to a universal level. In her vital and deadly serious questions she only just avoided pathos, but was able to rein it in with irony: she allowed space for humour alongside deep emotion. The grand melodramatic gesture and provocation became her trade marks.

Her strength lay originally in her own performances. Their intensity enabled her to draw the audience along with her. The restrained classical dance movements -repetitive and clearly marked- also gave her work an aura of pure beauty. To this was added rigid timing with digitally precise transitions. Her choreographic talents were expressed more clearly in her group pieces, in which Marien Jongewaard was increasingly involved. His influence was already evident in ZWARTE BLOESEM (Black Blossom), in which the then forty- year- old dancer surrounded herself with three young black men. With this trio she danced a bold game of black versus white, old versus young, woman versus man. The sexual undertone was subtle, while the political comment, with the bluster of Mussolini and Archie Shepp's jazz pamphlet MAMA ROSE, was explicit. This protest against the inequality of men and women, rich and poor, black and white, and against the superficiality and superiority of Western society played an even more important part in the group pieces she made later, with Jongewaard as co-creator and dramaturge. WONDERFUL WORLD, GOODBYE BODY and TRUUS BRONKHORST, MARIEN JONGEWAARD… AND FRIENDS were cynical in tone and raw in form. They were confrontational, as a result of their emphasis on the physical violence between men, as for example expressed in the duet of hitting and hitting back by Jean- Louis Barning and Jakob Nissen. Looking back, this trilogy, together with the all- male piece 1,1,1-,2-,3-,4-, formed the transition to THE FALL, SOUL and MONGOOLSE DANSEN (Mongolian dances).

In these last group pieces Bronkhorst and Jongewaard rediscovered the balance between beauty and drama. They zoomed in on male behaviour, with all its bravura , vulnerability, vanity and tenderness, in which a touch of homo -eroticism also played a part. They equally reflected their rage about the world's trouble spots. They contained a remarkably large proportion of pure dance. The longer passages drew their strength from the repetition of very meticulous patterns and formations of movement whose classical lucidity was reminiscent of Hans van Manen.

Simplicity of design remained an essential characteristic of all her work, as did the thematically selected music. In the latter case she displayed from the very beginning the taste of a true eclectic: choosing music by the chansonnier Jacques Brel and the soul queen Nina Simone, by the medieval Hildegard von Bingen and the experimental Olga Gubaidulina, by the avant-garde rock musician Jimi Hendrix and his post-modern successor Prince, by Arvo Part and Erik Satie and even Mozart's entire REQUIEM in each case setting the right tone for her dance.

Truus Bronkhorst no longer dances herself, but she has succeeded in transferring her expressive and yet succinct idiom, surprisingly enough, to men, including not only the masculine Barning and Nissen but also the feminine Marc van Loon. Three black dancers, the powerful Ian Butler, the slight Percy Kruythoff and the muscled Jacques Laurent Madiba have recently given a dark import to this expressiveness.

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