Not a Pillar, Not a Pile (Dance for Dore Hoyer)

Katarina Zdjelar’s work Not A Pillar Not A Pile (Dance for Dore Hoyer) is inspired by archival documents from a women’s dance studio. The documents were found in 1945 in post-war Dresden by Dore Hoyer, a choreographer and expressionist dancer, whose choreographies took the graphic works of artist Käthe Kollwitz as starting point.

Zdjelar’s installation departs from the artistic meeting between Kollwitz and Hoyer as a manifestation of shared affinities with feminist pacifism, solidarity and collective transformation across the barriers of time, class and social difference. Drawing the past into the present, Zdjelar gathered an international group of dancers and activists to create her work Not A Pillar Not A Pile (Dance for Dore Hoyer).

The backdrop and the costumes of the dancers show a pattern created by women workers of the Pausa textile factory in Germany, whose anti-fascist resistance resonates with that of Hoyer and of Kollwitz, whose graphics are in turn echoed in the wood cut floor panels.

In Not A Pillar Not A Pile (Dance for Dore Hoyer) one body encounters another as a site of resistance and possibility, pointing to the fragile agency of collective
action in the present.