Raimond Hoghe at the Walker Art Center, Sept. 19 2009

Hoghe stands at the back of the theatre, just out of the reach of the lights, absorbed into the murk of the dark curtains. He is about to perform a very peculiar kind of 21st century magic in this space.

He is transfixed in the shadows, a dim moon of a face. We take our seats in the small theater, and notice him noticing the audience. For minutes he stands motionless. There is no transition when the performance begins, he steps out from his camouflage of shadow, and begins a procession around the perimeter of the lighted area of the stage. His slow, almost cartoon-like motion snaps a taut line from top of head to back of extended heel on a diagonal of intent, slackens it and reverses it from left to right foot, toward some unreachable goal. The audience's sense of time is stolen from all distractions, carved out with an Xacto blade.

The angle of his body expresses longing clamped into a discipline. A face gives away nothing of use as you try to decipher the ritual. You feel he is holding your head under water, until you exhale, and release your own tension and expectation. He has taken over your prerogatives of time and patience from his first gestures. Soon you will surrender your expectations of entertainment, meaning, and the very centrality of the body to identity. Not a bad agenda for a dance.

Most of the music selections are in "quotations". The taped broadcasts of the Olympic competition are intended to be jarring and ordinary at the same time. The montage of quotations sustain an ironic level of perception of the Bolero. Once or twice you can just listen to the music. Often you are hearing representations of other people's musical experience, while watching the dancer's represent Hoghe's highly processed experience of the reverie, pathos, "duende" and geometry of the Bolero....something our stereotypes of physicality and body image would seem to deny him.

His quotation, inversion of distance and closeness, intensification of marginal aspects, and ease with form, allows him to reclaim something we, or someone who resembles us, had taken away from him. It is a retaking, done with wit and discipline. It is too gentle and architectural to be felt as a rebuke. More like a gift of correction.

At one point, after his attractive and able dancers have inflected the entire lighted field of the stage with their step and gesture, Hoghe emerges with an aerosol spray bottle. He stands still, then deftly conjures an angelic fog with a spray. The fog has a life and a heart. It caresses the back of his head as he strides away from his translucent, weightless progeny. It billows slowly, and writhes, attenuates, the body of an idea teasing the spotlights, and then vanishes into the interstices of the of the air.


Hoghe is a charming teacher and fierce interlocutor, drawing us into the labyrinth of our prejudice, and meeting us in the center. Not with a monstrosity, no Minotaur, but with a vulnerability; an image of him lying on his side, shirtless, dozing, exposed, and at peace with the moment. The moment is poignant and makes it easy to forgive his occasional lapse into a mannered minimalism.

I have attended performances at the Walker for over 40 years, and this was one of the most satisfying, and challenging. Hoghe is an arts journalist who decided to challenge conventional ideals of physical beauty and dance performance with his own presence on stage. His scoliosis of the spine is pronounced enough that it cannot be ignored, but not enough to prevent him from performing at a compelling level.

In the space between mere habits of perception and the sense of wonder, Hoghe shares with us a dance. It is a tai chi of quoted gestures and a mixtape of greatly various musics barely contained by the label "Bolero." In the end, it is an invitation to notice, then look again, and finally feel something unique, the transformation of anonymous time into shared time, that transcends attention itself at the insistence of a caring spirit.

You can't ask much more than that.