Bodies of Crisis: The German 'Wende' remembered |
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The episode is based on interview material discussing self-reinvention with regard to the changes of 1989 and the pervasive cultural stereotyping at the time. An interviewee recounted being frequently confronted with images of the Easterner and feeling forced to react on them. In both avoiding being identified as Easterner, but also having to assimilate into a Western model, she opted for a third way in developing a tourist appearance. This creative strategy to consciously address and subvert the stereotyping was taken up to explore, in nonverbal performance, the quality of somatic precursors to change and examine possibilites of translating individual agency transculturally.
David Bennett, a dancer engaged with research on documenting processes of artistic creation, worked on the notion of Berlin in 1989-90 as a confined zone of self-experimentation, providing space for multiple subcultural projects to emerge, thrive, and develop alternative realities. In performance, the material was translated through a broader take on notions of living in zones as experiences of comfort and discrimination, aligning practices for conforming to and subverting cultural and political rules. The tacit knowledge that forms the basis of shared memory repositories based on experiences of discrimination and stereotyping as 'the other' proved crucial for this exercise. |
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The episode is based on interview material discussing somatic symbolism with regard to the changes of 1989: "You know, pretty soon after the fall of the wall, the shops started selling Western goods. We had never seen anything like this. See, I went to the supermarket and there were these apples. They were beautiful and shiny, really not like ours. I craved these apples, so I bought one. But biting into it, I thought: This is not an apple! It did not taste at all like a real apple. If you ask me about my Wende experience, this is symbolic of it." (Minka) This sensory disillusionment was taken up to explore the quality of somatic precursors to change and examine possibilites of translating individual agency in nonverbal performance.
Based on the interview account, this episode was developed using durational performance practice. Maiada Aboud (Salfiti) has long worked as an endurance artist and currently completed a practice-based PhD at the University of Sheffield. Performances involving apples have been important to her. For this episode, we worked with the notion of puppets tied to their mechanism by invisible strings to encapsulate the strength of the everyday as a machine for producing reality. Simultaneously, the action of the live puppet (eating the apples on the strings) translates the action into the system which in turn appears precarious and dependent on the individual for its survival – and collapse. The resulting precarious dance between individual agency and material groundedness of everyday reality was encapsulated in a performance episode that continued beyond the few moments the lights (history and discourse) put it centre-stage. |
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The performance sequence was developed on the basis of fourteen interview accounts dealing with personal hygiene and living circumstances in 1989. Scores were generated for a re-construction of these practices in live, durational performance and restaged for video. The resulting discussion centred on the necessity for documentaries to appear interesting or exotic; conventions for the authentification of documents; and the evaluation of their historicity. The notion of all experience as embodied and mediated, and specifically Walter Benjamin's insight of historical experience as only congnisable through the lens of present concerns were taken as a starting point for the design of a performance sequence on historicised personal hygiene. In this third sequence of the performance model, the Washing videos served as a digital wallpaper to a communal washing in space enacted by the performers who also appeared on the video. By doubling up actions on screen and in space; by performers blocking spectators' view of the screen; and by mingling select sounds from the washing happening on video and in space, the sequence questioned any neat narrative of a historical past that appears flawless and contingent. Instead, the experience of different temporalities and the re-actualisation of past experience in present practice as, for example, restored behaviour (Schechner), was made explicit.
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Part of the Washing Videos reconstructing historical everyday somatic practices, this episode recounts experiences of a young woman about sharing a bath with her family members on Fridays. The child on screen was seen to incorporate a specific somatic routine long before it had started to embrace speech. With time and repetition, this routine will create a lasting memory repository in the body that is based on everyday practice. Images such as these emphasised the embodiment of a tradition as powerful and undermining a notion of historical conscience as mainly a matter of cognitive and verbal processes. |
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This fourth and last sequence of the performance approaches the potentials and limits to documenting self-reinvention somatically. It addresses the labour of performing change on a day-to-day basis. It questions the historical narratives that frame and freeze embodied experience into cultural topoi and somatic stereotypes. Vis-a-vis more or less well-known images from discourses on 1989, the performers labour to convey change and escape being consumed by established narratives as well as stereotyping on the level of somatic practice.
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