‘An uncontrollable passion that I can only imagine,” says contemporary dancer Heidi Strauss of her muses Joan (of Arc) and Emma (an autistic schoolmate from her youth). “What does it mean to have an involuntary life and believe in it so whole-bodily?”

Strauss finds parallels in these characters through the possession of “something they cannot control. They’re given something and they deal with it in a way that’s doubtless.” She says of Joan, “We don’t have these kinds of heroes today.” Arguably because we have ways of identifying and moderating them before their “passion” gets out of control, I counter. “Too bad,” she says ruefully.
Strauss is remounting her acclaimed solo Das Martyrium in conjunction with a new one called Ohne. (Ohne means “without” in German; Strauss feels some words “just work more perfectly in different languages.”) The two pieces, together called Adelheid (“exalted nature”) solos, make an ideal pairing. The first explores a hero who, like many saints, has acquired exalted status through collective retrospection and revisionism and the second looks at how personal memory both functions and fails — in both, Strauss is possessed by something she cannot control.

In Das Martyrium, Strauss’ movement concentrates on the hands and gut and is often vertical — heaven- and hell-bound rather than earthly. “I grew up Catholic and you don’t see a lot of physicality from priests and nuns,” she says, explaining the focused hand gestures. As for the gut, “The more core work came from Emma but also what it really is to desire something. Your spine automatically gets involved in that kind of feeling. In children it’s really obvious, but in some ways it also has a sexual reference, that sense of giving.”

In Ohne, Strauss references a classic symbol of anxiety: the losing of keys. In rehearsal, she was both tragic and comical in this piece and the choreography gives it the poignant appeal of a Chaplin sketch. We talk about this luminous performer who for so long avoided the talkies to maintain his universal audience, and how contemporary dance so often remains overlooked, perhaps due to the fear of “not getting it,” Strauss speculates. “People want answers, they don’t want to live in a state of question,” she says. She herself excels in this space, creating a mesmeric piece about the ambiguity of automatism and the uncertainty of recollection.