Changes (concept and choreography: Nikolina Pristaš) is a hard piece. And with those horrible chairs in the front row of Sophiensaele it is double so. It took a little while for me to get anything out of it. In fact it took until the Q&A aferwards. I didn’t so much listen to the talk then used this time to think about what I had just seen.

The performance starts with a short lament on how sound and music have become so ubiquitous to turn them meaningless. Throughout the piece a narrator reads texts, sometimes live, sometimes recorded documents such as a documentary about ants or pieces from the BBC airing of John Cage’s 4’33”.

In fact the narrator (Goran Sergej Pristaš) can be seen lying on a pillow in the back of the stage, while five women (Sandra Banić, Ana Kreitmeyer, Nikolina Pristaš, Zrinka Šimicˇić, Zrinka Užbinec) perform a dance that evokes the idea of remote control or robots. It’s not that the dancers don’t dance with each other but each seems very distancend. Throughout the dance what looks like little missteps keep the performance off-balance, which prevents it to ever create the notion of anonoymous bodies on stage and reconfirms the idea that these movements might not be voluntary. In short, the choreography creates a space that does not seem purposeful, but neither empty.

Meanwhile the narrator reads a fable about a grashopper and some ants thus introducing the main topic of the piece: the notion of work and it’s relation to living a life. In the fable the grashopper stands for a hedonistic approach, while the approach of the ants more closely resembles that of the everyday drudgery of modern (and not so much contemporary) life. From the fable the text moves on to speak about the need for ‘laziness’ in art. Next in line is John Cage’s “4’33”“. The fable is then revisited and here – the only time in the piece – one dancer speaks in the first person as one of the ants. Her speech is Marxist-Leninist in discourse but dystopian in content: work will always be there and it will always be a burden.

This little description hopefully gives an idea on how much is going on. And how incompatible it seems. The piece lasts a bit more than an hour and my first impression was: this is too much. Too many different things mashed together. The dance does not seem to reflect the words, merely using the drowning speech as soundtracks for inexplicable movements. The texts itself don’t lend themselves easily for a combined reading. A fable, documentaries, marxist discourse simply don’t mix. All this creates an excessive demand on the audience. In fact so excessive that some of them left the piece. (As an aside: I thought it was hilarious that BADco managed to re-stage Cage and illicit some of the same reactions from the audience as when it was first performed by musicians: disbelieve and anger.)

But the piece exposes its qualities afterwards. The discordances of its building blocks is stark enough to prevent easy consumption while still retaining enough congruence to make for food for thought. The biggest problem I had with it was that it seemed to talk less about contemporary conditions but somehow about times past. Not that there was any nostalgia for the good old days. Instead it didn’t seem to address the present. My life certainly has it’s moments of ant-like drudgery but it certainly seems vastly different from the sterotypical life of the semi-automatons of the industrial age.

‘Changes’ is the first piece of a trilogy, so maybe my concerns will be addressed in one of the later pieces.

Update:
If you are interested in reading a follow-up to the discussion below, please read this three-part series by Maria Technosux on Damoclash.

You show a work to the people you would like to impersonate you (people you would like to expand notions of your work). You can show it live or on video, but it should be a presentation of the work itself. After the showing you set up an after talk where you, the person who made the work is the interviewer, interviewing at least 3 persons who try to impersonate you.

I saw a version of it at Tanz im August. The performance being talked about was ‘Work in Progress’ by Janek Jansa. I hadn’t seen it, so to me the conversation was twice removed: People were talking about a piece that they didn’t create as if they had created it and I listened as if I had seen it.

So to me the actual performance was not so much of interest, but rather how the format played out.

The Impersonation Game is obviously very dependent on who is playing it. Will they stick to the rules? Will they stick to their roles?

In the version I saw the make-believe authors struggled a little bit to create their collective pronoun. Especially in the beginning the make-believe authors oscillated between ‘we as authors’ and ‘you as author’. This and the difficulty of holding the balance between role-playing and engaged conversation created some blurring effects (almost like ‘audio dropouts’ in a digital recordings) that hampered understanding both about what ‘actually’ happened at the performance and what discourse the make-believe authors would like to persue.

But a little bit into the game the interviewer faded into the background before the role-playing of the three make-believe authors. The game gained some tension through exchanges between the three actors. And it slowed down after a while when the conversation shifted from simple observations about the piece to more complex assessments. It seemed as if the translation and the necessity to think through talking created excessive demands on the participants. Last thing to notice would be that this game as much as any interview with artists is a plattform that lends itself to shameless plugs about other works by any of the participants.

The game was held in the foyer of Podewil which meant there was quite some background noise. Because of bad accustics and accents of the speakers it was difficult to follow some of the opinions expressed.

While I find it difficult to assess how much this game proved helpful to the ‘real’ authors, I thought that it was not so helpful for me. An engaged conversation that is not hampered by translation and transpostion problems would probably have revealed more topics of interest. But this is not to say that the game itself is lacking. I think that it is crucial that the participants stick to the rules. Maybe this requires some kind of referee who intercedes when necessary.

Once the game is more the focus then the topics being talked about effects like ‘audio dropouts’, the dynamics among the make-believe authors or the balancing act between interest in the topic and the assumed roles could create a performance in its own rights.

‘Album’ ist ein Solo. Das Stück erinnert im Aufbau an ein Konzert oder vielleicht eher noch an ein Musik-Album (hence the name). Frédéric Gies tanzt 6 verschiedene kürzere Tänze, die durch das Album-Prinzip und ein gemeinsames Konzept zusammengehalten werden: Ein tänzerisches Konzept-Album also.

Optisch – die Bühne ist sehr hell weiss ausgeleuchtet und Fred tritt in modischen Turnhosen und T-Shirt auf – habe ich mich an ein Aerobic-Studio oder gar an ‘Medizin nach Noten’ erinnert gefühlt. Fast steht – dem Tanz zum Trotz – Sport im Vordergrund der Performance. Fred betritt die Bühne mit einer Sporttasche und schon nach dem ersten Tanz läuft der Schweiss in Strömen, um dann später in der Geste eines Boxers mit einem weissen Handtuch getrocknet zu werden. Die Wasserflasche steht auch bereit, um zwischen den Tänzen kurz zu trinken.

Zu Beginn und auch zwischen den einzelnen Teilen mutiert der Tänzer zum Entertainer. Witzige Ansprachen und Bonmots fürs Publikum; selbst das Klischee vom Musiker, der ein paar Worte in der Sprache seines Publikums spricht, wird zititert. Die Zwischenszenen sind kurz, aber wichtig, da sie die einzelnen Tänze voneinander trennen.

Die Tänze selbst sind sehr unterschiedlich, alle nur wenige Minuten lang. Sie zitieren ausgiebig verschiedene Tanzstile (Ausdruckstanz, Ballett, Disko) und schaffen es in kurzer Zeit, aus und mit den Zitaten einen eigenen, recht obsukuren Ausdruck zu entwickeln. Es geht um Repräsentation von Emotionalität, wobei aber diese Repräsentation sich sowohl auf Tanztraditionen als auch auf Popmusiktraditionen stützt.

In der Auseinandersetzung mit Tanzstilen ist ‘Album’ eine Weiterentwicklung des letzten Solos von Frédéric Gies, ‘Dance’. Dort ist die Logik der Verwendung solcher Bewegungszitate aber introvertierter als bei ‘Album’. Popmusiker müssen nun mal Rampensäue sein.

Aus den verschiedenen Ebenen: Tanz, Sport und Musik entsteht auf der Bühne ein Humor, der manchmal auch sehr ironisch wird. Trotzdem wird nicht Tanz oder Pop oder Sport durch den Kakao gezogen, sondern eher eine augenzwinkernde Distanz zur anstrengenden Arbeit ‘Bühnenperformance’ erzeugt. Ich habe jedenfalls fröhlich gelacht und hatte nie das Gefühl, zum Komplizen in einer sarkastischen Vivisektion unmoderner Tanzformen gemacht zu werden.

Schade vielleicht, dass der Humor zu schnell dominiert hat. Die Verunsicherung, die der erste Tanz erzeugt hat, als ein Sportler, merkwürdige Bewegungen und merkwürdige Musik sich trafen, hätte länger dauern oder doch zumindest häufiger auftauchen können. Es wäre zu wenig, wenn ‘Album’ zu sehr amüsiert und nicht genug verunsichert.

Im Oktober tritt Frédéric Gies mit der Gruppenversion von ‘Dance’ in den Sophiensaelen auf.