This is the coffee of Giacomo, who has been in Brussels the last week and an half while Gala finishes some weeks of rehearsals in a single performance at Ivo’s Volksroom, along with Anuschka von Oppen, who was showing Nearby Buffalo in Brussels after a short season in Berlin.

Gala and Giacomo haven’t been sleeping so much the last week; long nights working on the set, lighting, rehearsing, rewiring, trying ideas and pre-show amendments (a whole scene vanishes, and the sound from a previous one also). Coffee is in abundance, as is beer and cigarettes. A calmness across the days also.

I found myself in the place I am happiest: a theatre, making performance. I do mundane things such as taping things, hanging things, adjusting things. This is not a review, though perhaps can be taken as one.

Throughout is a stillness, waiting attentiveness. For a dancer who has found home in companies where movement is the heart, she makes nothing that could be said to be dancing. Perhaps the floor on which she rehearsed is responsible, but equally, there is no inconsistency between one being a dancer who dances and the same one making performance far removed from this. At the end (less than thirty minutes), had she continued the room would have gone with her.

Rope bondage and suspension. Gala hangs sideways from her waist and abdomen. Giacomo dresses her in a sheet of emergency orange latex. She is in a box inside a room, walls of opaque or transparent plastic, floor reflective Aluminium. Lights stutter and tremble.

Giacomo illuminates the performance with perhaps twelve or so sources, some recognisable as theatre lights, others fluorescent tubes, others common household lamps. At times, a fan pushes the plastic sheeting, undulating and filling the space with sound.

She is naked until the end. This also is a change; before she was naked the whole way through. In the end she is talking, in jeans and a t-shirt. A story, autobiography? A poem. She is swimming, no water, no, definitely water, water goes in, goes out, polluting a little. In ten years, twenty years, only a photograph left. I am paraphrasing here.

Earlier, she is running. On the spot. Endlessly. Throwing dirt or dust or ashes, which haze in the aura of light. Giacomo … his lighting is as music, classical music perhaps. Deeply artistic and romantic, and also precisely technical. Without being obvious, it fills the room, gives not simply form and colour, but emotion, movement, sense, time. He says we should come to the Gorini home, to eat rabbit and drink coffee.

I spend Friday with them watching this, light and performance, trying to find some settings on my camera that will not balk at the conditions. Low light is one concern, and ultimately the difficulty I can’t surmount. The plastic sheeting between Gala and I, the other; the camera resolutely focussing on any light reflecting off the sheet, making her even more unfocussed.

This morning, more coffee. Then a failed trip to the markets for crëpes, arriving too late. Anyway, it was beautiful, poignant. Some photos.

He didn’t quite, of course. Though he might have. I downloaded the a torrent of the film and in the midst of this, became curious about what Parsifal actually says, and even thought perhaps my libretto is a different version, but here Pasifal does say, not “Qual der Liebe!” but “Pein der Liebe!”

It is not the shock of Amfortas – his wound sliced from him, cushioned on black cloth, paraded, and leaking blood like an unholy vagina – that causes him to panic so; rather it’s his sudden violent awakening to suffering. He becomes human as the rest and sees utterly how this weakness, infirmity, poisoned Amfortas, Gurnemanz, and all the Knights, ruined Kundry, Klingsor, and every last person.

Syberberg’s Parsifal rests on this horror-stricken instant, these lines which I heard and did not hear, yet nonetheless it is there.

Roméo Castellucci’s Parsifal was also close during the four hours and fifteen minutes. Partly because this is my first return to Brussels since, also because I watched parts of the second act of the film during rehearsals, noting as well, aspects, stagings, intellectualisms, which came from that into his work. The singular difference though, is Roméo’s Parsifal is that of the titular role, whereas Syberberg’s belongs to Kundry.

I left the theatre exhausted, dry-mouthed, dazed. It is a harrowing four hours without pause, and one of the most transcendent moments of art I’ve ever lived through.

I’ll dispense with some technical notes first. The print was heart-rending. Badly scratched, dirty, especially towards the end of most reels, missing sections, and obviously cut together from more than one copy. Naturally this affected the sound also, at times a mess of noise, at others jumping and skipping, unsyncing itself in jarring cuts, and mostly soft, without detail, and slightly muffled.

It is so distressing that a film of such tremendous power is reduced so, and makes me fear for its future. While DVDs are available from Syberberg’s website, this is in no way comparable to the quality of a film print, especially for a film such as this.

Armin Jordan’s conducting would fit into what I probably erroneously think of as the standard arrangement. Its not quite the dramatic brilliance of Solti, and also I’m spoiled by Hartmut Haenchen, whose ideas on how it should be played to my mind bring forth something unique. I found myself wanting Jordan to go faster in places, to not linger so much, to find a sharper dynamic. Still, it’s beautiful and there is care and attention given throughout.

And this Parsifal is Kundry, as it rightly should be. There are two Kundrys, the voice is Yvonne Minton’s, and who we see perform is Edith Clever. Edith is so convincing I thought she was in fact the singer. She is brilliant. I fell in love with her, completely taken, and it was her performance that left me stripped and emptied.

Three Parsifals. Reiner Goldberg’s voice, first Martin Kutter, then Karin Krick, finally both of them. It was likely this that caused some to walk out during act two.

It begins with photographs under water, dirt-stained and begrimed. The camera circles over, sometimes nearer sometimes pulling away. The Reichstag gutted, the Statue of Liberty toppled and half-buried (I thought, is this from Planet of the Apes?), finding a Swan pierced by an arrow, a fetish object; a prelude, Kundry with a young impetuous boy, playing with his archery set, watched on by child-knights, and on into a puppet world, Bayreuth and the first Parsifal. Wagner is there also, but first we pass again by Kundry, asleep with a book open, an etching of the Knights of the Grail at their round table. She has a crown in her lap. She is in white, inky-blue stars around her waist, or perhaps black holes. Absences.

Behind is Wagner’s visage in profile, a death-mask. Here the action shall take place. Behind that is a dead puppet Wagner and Kundry again, and behind that, draped in a cloth, the world and the world tree – Yggdrasl.

More Wagners. The one pounding his baton into a bleeding ear; the one dressed in women’s pink silk attire, again darkness, this time emerging from a padded smoking jacket, the absent body giving it form, and in the depths, stars and night. A pure geometric solid breaks this. A rhomboid upon which a projection hovers. This all shall return, just as the overture’s leitmotifs are played out.

Even from these few minutes, the bottomless depth of this Parsifal is acute. Back through time and space it goes, trapping as in an autopsy all the parts that make a whole. It is perhaps also a judgement. As Wagner himself turns back towards the Germanic romantic history and its imagined form in millennia prehistory – the well-spring of his opera, Syberberg himself from a hundred years after the prémiere turns those years on Wagner. It is a work of love, yet it is never uncritical.

How do I write about such a piece? How do I remember it? I want to say it was for me as an epiphany. I also want to hold this feeling, to not pass it over for the next stimulation. Perhaps to say it is a meditation, a ritual; to go through those hours.

There are two moments when the theme, what this is about, is impossible to misconstrue. The first where Parsifal falls to Kundry in anguish as she tells of her (his mother’s) broken heart waiting for his return. The second at the end, The two Parsifals, male and female – though both so androgynous – come from within the rent crags of Wagner’s profile, regard each other and embrace. It is love.

It is not the confusion of Wagner’s platonic ideal, with its implicit misogyny and homoeroticism, nor of a christian one, burdened with guilt, obligation, and choking threat of punishment. Whether or not the spear Parsifal(Karin) wields closes the wound is perhaps less important than Kundry then lying beside, her last act one of sacrifice that releases the two Parsifals, closes this existential suffering under which all are enslaved. (The Knights no less for their role in perpetuating it, trapped in an endless deathlessness.)

From this, the two Parsifals freed, are able to meet, to see each other. It would be disingenuous as well as mediocre to read this as simply the reunion of male and female, though what this meeting posits, as well as Syberberg’s intention here is difficult to grasp. Perhaps here, the Buddhism which threads through Wagner’s conception of this opera, and which Syberberg never makes so explicit as he does other themes, comes forth. That Martin Kutter’s Parsifal is a beautiful, long-haired boy, feminine and slender, emotional in thought and expression, and Karin Krick’s is boyish, a Joan of Arc warrior in leather, her face blank of expression and emotions the barest flitting to impassivity, certainly undoes this simplistic reading, as well as any interpretation as Freudian familial drama.

As to why Parsifal changes (after the kiss, after “Wie alles schauert, bebt und zuckt – in sündigem Verlangen!…”) is equally elusive, though the overture hints at some possible readings. Nonetheless, she blames Kundry for this fall from salvation.

And Kundry. In the end, the choir sings, “Höchsten Heiles Wunder! Erlösung dem Erlöser!”, as the Parsifals greet each other, we find her lying, now crowned, next to Amfortas, around which all the Grails as they have been represented are accounted for, the world atop Yggdrasl now open and Theater Bayreuth therein, Wagner also nearby in an open libretto, skeletal corpses of the Knights around. The camera pulls back into darkness, emerges from the eye of the iron skull of a bishop in the same water as the overture, crowned and propped up like a macabre edifice, barring permanently any sentimentalism, romanticism the opera’s resolution so seductively and easily gives, and on out, the theatre coming into focus again, embraced in a glass ball by Kundry. She stares unblinking through the final notes until they pass, her eyes grow heavy. Sleep.

S-Bahn to Köln, another quick change and on to Berlin via Hannover and other interesting places. Only an hour late arriving but the last three nights had been short on sleep, so I proceeded to do just that.

Calixto Bieito is new to me. Andrew Richards told me about him in Brussels and thought I’d love his style of mayhem, and with Andrew being Parsifal in both productions, taking a cheap-ish train to a city I’d never been in for a night of Wagner seemed like a good idea.

Firstly to say that while I made comparisons between the Castellucci and Bieito versions while watching and after, there is also a gulf between them which makes some a matter of aesthetic preference. Nonetheless, even though the two directors are quite distant from each other in both intellectual and aesthetic concerns (as meta-analysis in the role of director as well as in artistic choices within Parsifal), they seem to me to share a commonality I’ll try and elucidate.

The music then. (And the theatre.) I thought the orchestra was smaller than at La Monnaie, though also heard different that it was larger. Stuck in the right crook of the gods for the first act (a not-good location both for acoustics as well as line of sight due to the staging construction), it all felt a little distant. Acts two and three though — we spied a couple of seats, stalls second row far left, empty! (Turns out these were probably the ones reserved for us anyway). A brilliant location, close enough to feel the warmth of the flamethrower!

I can’t compare the conductor here favourably with Hartmut Haenchen. It’s a matter of intensity. Haenchen has spent years immersed in Wagner, his understanding of subtleties is acute, from the phrasing of consonants to the speed in different sections; the build at the beginning of act 2 for example. The audience thought Manfred Honeck did a fine job, but for me I feel a little spoiled after Haenchen.

Two moments underlined this. The first being the shout of the knights at the end of act 3. Heanchen (ok he also had 200 extras adding weight), timed it a little later, just before a melodic change, and also the shout was more of a roar, like the ocean, it had a pronounced, shivering emotion, yet not one specific emotion, somehow this gave a resolution that the roaring in Stuttgart seemed artificial in comparison.

And the ending, “Höchsten Heiles Wunder! Erlösung dem Erlöser!”, the harmonics, this is an earth-shattering moment, it should bring one to tears with its beauty, its finality. But it was lost. Perhaps in part because the knights were all dead, but this still left the female chorus, yet all of this felt truncated and unclear, all the way to the last notes, which sounded unsure and lacking in certainty.

Flamethrowers! I’d seen this in the trailer for Die Singende Stadt and thought, who the fuck would put a flamethrower on stage? and how did he get away with it? Especially with Klingsor wielding it like a two-handed battleaxe. And dirt and grime and mess and blood. And testicles. (I thought they were fake, some kind of horrific goiter swimming in blood, as most of the cast were afflicted with ruinous weeping sores on face and head, but it turns out not.) And smoke too.

It’s not until the end of the third act, where Parsifal, now returned as the redeemer, leads the grail ceremony (which is preceded by slaughtering Titural in an iron bathtub with an axe passed around to each knight for a hack or two), and heals Amfortas’ wound by shoving the spear through his ribs, that the sarcasm and blasphemy of Calixto is made unavoidably clear.

This brings up the question of how Calixto engages with Wagner. Visually, he follows the dramatic path and action of the libretto closely, and in one respect there is nothing especially radical about the staging. There is a grail, a spear, the ceremony in the third act, all as Wagner had written. That they are a gang of LSD-fueled apocalypticarians and Parsifal might have more in common Frank from the Wasp Factory, nonetheless doesn’t alter this.

Under this perhaps, lies Calixto’s engagement with Wagner proper, he of the erotic, almost orgiastic on one side, and the one seeking redemption in a chaste religion on the other. Whereas Roméo regarded Wagner from a specifically intellectual perspective here, engaging with Neitzsche, Calixto seems to do similar but almost loutishly mocking him.

As with Roméo, he celebrates the music, but also as with Roméo is not uncritical of whence it springs.Not bothering with obvious philosophical references, he simply piles religious icons one on top of another, pointing to the confusion within the libretto (and in Wagner by adding his bust to the idols hanging from Parsifal’s gown). It was in the third act this mockery became clear, and perhaps if I’d seen the whole work with this in mind from the beginning, I’d think of it differently.

As it was, until the final act, I found at times an incessant busyness, a lack of pause to think upon what was taking place. Whereas Roméo used the profile of Neitzsche and the snake to pass the first act’s overture, before plunging us into darkness, from which emerged a single source of light, Calixto had the desolate highway overpass seething with action even before the first note.

It’s admittedly a difference of aesthetics, and perhaps if I’d seen only this version I wouldn’t be saying this, but even so, I felt the need for a pause at times from this, which didn’t come. And while Roméo’s performers struggled with doing nothing, and the sloughing off of performance artifice this entails, Calixto’s seemed to at times be unaware that performing chaos and mayhem doesn’t always mean chaos and mayhem. Dasniya here remarked that having dancers involved would have helped in providing a corporeal attitude that wasn’t simply one of performing-anarchy.

Which may sound like I didn’t enjoy it all, or thought it was weak. Not So! I feel very fortunate to have seen two exceptional productions in as many months, either of them alone would have given me an inspiration for theatre I’ve been missing. I think it also would have been a remarkable work to have been involved in, one of those where you come away feeling this is what theatre should be.

And to finish with Andrew. From the asceticism of Roméo to Calixto’s bacchanalia, he really belongs in such theatre as this (even when performing the most miraculous undressing in which he reveals absolutely … nothing!). Besides a voice which can drive a nail into the gods, he is believable — all the more terrifying when his face is awash with a mad smile.

Not in any particular order.

It occurred to me now, Einstürzende Neubauten are one of very few groups from my teens that haven’t disappointed me when I’ve seen them years later. Perhaps because they’re not doing reunion tours for the money (though the merchandise sales of the first night of their 30th anniversary tour at Columbiadamm probably paid for half the tour), nor for some asinine ‘love of the music and performing’ vapidity which is either dissembling on the first or an excuse for moronic 12-bar riffing that tries to capture what worked for earlier ‘hits’. Not an exersise in sentimental nostalgia in other words.

The 16 year old punk-goth wannabe Psychik (Temple of ~ Youth) TV-erin would have slid over in uncontrollable rapture; I was thinking, “I’m in Berlin! … At Einstürzende Neubauten!! … With an after-party pass!!!” Had it been when I was 16, I suppose the party would have been slightly less sedentary, home-before-babysitter-charges-for-overtime, but I think much of the audience was experiencing bewilderment at how they came to be almost middle-aged anyway, and how Neubauten went from punk holocaust at the forefront of industrial music to avante-garde chamber orchestra sextet.

I wasn’t quite convinced by the first piece, only three on stage in dark suits, Blixa singing, “You will find me if you want me in the garden … unless it’s pouring down with rain”, looking much like a Vegas crooner, tumbler of something strong and neat in his right hand, (Dy said his glasses) and wow, didn’t he used to be skinny bones in a heroin habit kinda way?, Alexander Hacke in white singlet (the only not in a suit), tattoos and handlebar mustache, possibly Lemmy and Peter Hooke’s lovechild … and then …

Uh! Brilliant! Moments of fucking brilliance. I should have been up the front having my eardrums savaged. I’ve never seen such a carefully orchestrated performance from a group that nominally falls under the experimental music genus outside of classical. So well-rehearsed, and not in a ‘tight’ sense of technical accuracy, though there was that also; rather the sense of timing and coherence present as a sextet is something I’m more used to seeing in chamber music.

Blixa, not so much band leader as principal of the group and all so clearly paying attention to each other even in moments of catastrophic noise; an unconscious familiarity that comes from being together for so long. The control also – this is perhaps what the rawness of thirty years ago was exchanged for: a depth, sophistication and subtlety; understanding the effectiveness of an explosive staccato bar amidst tense restraint. Music that breathes.

The last record I remember having I think was the one with the horse pissing. In the meantime, Blixa (and others) got married and had a child, whom Dy tells me he sings about. Yes, Neubauten on the joys of parenthood. I kept thinking back to the video I saw of them, somehow it made its way from the north to New Zealand, me not really understanding what they were or what Berlin was, them with a Butoh group DaiRakudokan, Halber Mench, … one of my proto-influences in how I thought of making art and performance, and now, unlike most groups they haven’t gone too far into making ‘songs’ with recognisable verse-chorus-bridge structure, melody shortcut to boredom – for that alone, that their attention has stayed so close to what they were doing thirty years ago… I wonder also about seeing Throbbing Gristle, that other monster from my youth, that wave of industrial music which pushed the idea of avante-garde contemporary music so far and which for me is the descendant of Musique Concrète, Ligeti, Stockhausen and the other classical troublemakers.

The lighting – on a different thing now – was beautiful. A flat backdrop tinged with muted secondary and tertiary tones, winter light where the intensity of colour comes from the near-empty palette – how saturated in hue icefields can be be … and cut by stark, hard white spots, shafting across the stage to draw focus, and at times … a half-cut drum full of shining blunt metal tubes. The attention brought to it by removing the light, the backdrop darkly bare until in its absence focus could only accrue there. Then lit by a single source as the metal fell like snow, like hail.

Maybe in the third or fourth piece, a noise, so out of place, cutting through, snagging and tearing as it ascended, losing the ragged mess it dragged until becoming a sharp, hard scream. Blixa. I can’t convey its unhumanness, it should be something that strips flesh and it gives me goosebumps to remember. Like Diamanda Galas and her voice, I think if anything Blixa has gone far beyond what he had thirty years ago.

In their entirety I thought this also. While somewhat subdued – or maybe it’s just a memory of the suffering loudness of so many industrial shams who confused volume with composition, I’ve falsely attached to Neubauten – it’s obvious they’re not simply uncritically trawling through their old stuff. Met with their own artistic growth is that of the technology they’re working with … ah moments of utter, overpowering awe … sublime, intoxicating percussion (and synchronised dancing) … I thought, “If only dance could be this good”.

(I’m not sure if it’s just I’ve ruined my ears, or being far up the back, but the left side sounded a touch murky at times, particularly when the bass melody fell into the same rhythm as the bass percussion, it became difficult to separate the two. But that if it was really there and other mixing issues will probably have been sorted out by the second show.)

Anyway … Disobey Disobey Disobey It’s the Law (I heard ‘Break the Law”, Dy heard, ‘Discipline’.)

They enter, there are ten of them altogether, well-dressed. The beginnings of movement, and I have this small thrill that perhaps I’m going to see something I really want to be in. She begins talking, into a microphone, “…das war so anstrengt… das ist alles meine…”, stutters often, repeatedly, “…das tut mir leid…”. She dances, a loose, boney, unravelling movement, both acutely technical and yet half-thought, growing from the ordinary. “…die Geschichte deine Korper… I wouldn’t change anything…”, phrases of doing and their opposite, finally come to, “yeah, I can’t trust you.”

I should also say there was much talking in this, many monologues of some length, and much repetitive phrases, reminiscent of Barbara Kruger. And almost all in German. So firstly my comprehension was not always great, and secondly because of that, I indulge in a degree of interpretation. Perhaps I write about a piece that wasn’t performed. Contra that, what I did understand and those sections that were in english corresponded closely enough for me to not feel that it is too likely I am inventing a work that didn’t happen.

Somehow it comes across as very straight. The couples are all heterosexual. Some short moments of two men together, falling into each other, being thrown flying onto the sofa, but the reading of this is not homo. It seems to exist as notable (by me) with all the male-female arrangements, but in itself means nothing. After a time, they all come to the sofa, writhing in dim light, not sex though. A guitar drones and crackles.

One falls, another reacts to save them. Too late. It evolves into three pairs all doing this, the movement itself is graceful in its catastrophe, but the metaphor placed on it in this context is something I’ve seen before. There is a desolation here that could attract me were it not for both the exclusionary narrative and the uncritical use of stock tanztheater devices.

In white open-neck shirt and black suit, he begins a monologue that builds into an hysterical, sharp, witty tirade, the kind of raconteurship that is brilliant just for its seemingly inevitable flow. One of three long texts, the second as irritating as this one was clever and ended both fittingly and unamusingly with her being buried in a packing crate, because that’s what men do with a woman who won’t shut up. The third darker, in Shanghai on the 27th floor, a tint of numerous pre-apocalyptic writers, the anaesthetised nihilism of Bret Easton Ellis, the techno-cool of William Gibson, the claustrophobia of Ballard.

After two hours, I was numb, I wanted it to stop long before, and unlike say, Nature Theatre of Oklahoma’s No Dice, which ran for four hours of which the second two were largely a repeat of the first, TRUST did not have enough to sustain itself for this duration. Most of the climax, the arguing in the upstairs room could have been cut with little effect on the piece. Indeed the typical narrative arc building to a climax could have been more successfully tampered with in the context of such a nihilistic work by leaving out precisely this crescendo.

Towards the end, she, now not wearing my Christmas lunch black sequined halter-neck top talks of two children, the stress of the day, each a repetition of the previous, how she goes through the routine and has to come up with something amazing, unique, profound, completely from her, yet universal, accessible, and maybe, as she writes the next funding application which is due and has to be equally all this, maybe she wonders what she’s got herself into. But she wanted children and all this, and I’m sitting there thinking, “Oh who cares? So what? With two billion people living in squalor, if the hardest thing in her life is that she has to stage another well-funded performance, then it’s no wonder Berlinerinnen have a habit of burning their autos.” But perhaps that was the point.

The difficulty in such a performance, the mechanics of creation in tanztheater make it complicated separating the performer from their role, especially when individuality and subjectivity are so prized. So I find myself loathing both Anouk and the other performers as well as the characters they embody. They are inseparable, and the mediocrity of the characters’ lives, writ large by their inherent privilege and centrality in western cultural imagination becomes the real identity of the performers themselves.

Performing such stereotypes, however grounded in the real they may be, begs a criticism then of how much they reify those roles, make them normal and perpetuate them. If however, these roles are just the product of the imagination of theatremakers, then why do they strive to portray what would obviously be fantastical as real? And what does the audience get from this? At best a sleek satisfaction knowing that however flawed they may be, they are not as bad as that, not as unhappy as that?

I read the programme notes…

[The ensemble] explore the shaky foundations and mechanisms of human bonds against the background of current crises. Relationships build up and break down in ever shorter time-scales; they become a resource in an increasingly intense competition. Binding, seperating. Buying, selling. A picture is presented of human beings who, over the years, have radically intensified modern individuality and celebrated independence as an ideal.

TRUST is a group of whiney, grown-up children of the baby-boom generation; spoilt middle class heterosexual wankers. I found it oppressive, and not in the way I suspect was intended. Which is to say, I suspect there is an implied sympathy to be felt towards these fraught people, who are snared and drowning in an ecology not fit for survival, that I should look for some intrinsic goodness that redeems their actions. Perhaps I am uncharitable in finding them wanting in this regard, that their selfish individualism is not deserving of sympathy. Which makes TRUST like a movie where you don’t care for any of the leading actors.

I struggle wanting to level the queer, feminist, cultural theory, identity politics big guns against a piece so evidently far from those (my) thoughts. A work that despite its darkness (metaphoric and literal) exists in a safe, small bubble, never too far from the normal, never too alien. Yes, dark. But recognisably so. Not the darkness of the radically other alterity, but that of the post-nuclear family relationships; small and familiar. I thought of American Psycho, prestige measured in g/m² and fonts.

A question then, on the intended audience. Is it possible to say anything (of consequence) about a performance in which you are not the intended audience? In the same way watching a ballet of Giselle requires a different aesthetic, critical language and perspective that watching Forsythe, in part due to the temporal separation of the two works and the milieu from which they derive, I wonder if a performance in one theatre with one imagined, intended audience compared to a performance in another would also require these differences.

I cannot understand such a work because I am not the intended audience (irrespective of language difficulties). What might it say to those who exist within this sphere of intelligibility. What am I meant to draw from a performance that comes to no obvious conclusions, yet is weighted with implicit ‘truths’, a performance that exhibits an idea of western european materialism I am likely never to partake it, more likely to be ground up by and for if not completely ignored, that makes concrete and substantial such an idea of culture and relationships?

I shall say some other things. The performers were in their various ways beautiful. I could have watched the movement evolve for hours, and the first monologue, shot square at the audience is virtuoso in its own right. Carefully rehearsed also, the detail and internalised timing (I’m thinking of the sofa scene with one in red boxer shorts and a bald ape/monster mask where they all become afflicted by an irruption, a spasm of fear or revulsion which eventually hurls them across the room), the looping and snatches of text phrases and paragraphs, the lighting and exceptional timing of snap changes all I found much to keep entranced by. It’s simply that I didn’t believe the piece, and despite all this accomplishment of staging, I was bored.

Three chairs, a table, another small cabinet with champagne and glasses, a square burgundy, parquetry floor. Four visitors, perhaps at a party. The first in large fur coat, he wears black patent shoes, beige trousers, a red shirt and black tie. Then, a smaller woman in black perhaps tulle dress, black fur bolero jacket, gold tiara and ballet slippers, a taller lanky man, moustache, black leggings with white panels down the outside, also a bolero jacket but longer red top, and lastly she wearing white chiffon dress, sequined jacket, heels. All have perfectly groomed hair.

Somehow I find myself being more critical of this piece the longer I think about it. In contrast to HAUS, it was easy, light, engaging, entertaining, which does not automatically preclude it from being liked or loved despite my predilection for darkness. Perhaps to take a line or rather a word from both the german and english programme notes: autistischem, autistic.

After heterosexual love stories, the second most pervasive narrative in contemporary dance is madness or mental imbalance in all its forms. I was deeply critical of this in Tanja Liedtke’s 12th Floor, especially the rape scene which I found simply offensive rather than dark or challenging, and so to casually throw such a word as autistic into programme notes begs a very good reason to do so. Whether this can used in good faith with a subsequent word, ‘multitasking’ also is something troubling.

Perhaps I read too much into it. The four are awkward in silence once the music stops. They try and sit down. Not enough chairs. Things aren’t going swimmingly until someone pours some champagne. Despite being alcohol-free, the placebo effect loosens them all up. They begin to dance and undress, ah only their coats though, and prepare a picnic.

Obsessive hair grooming from black dress is met with constant bouncing or shaking from white chiffon. Things start to move, the repose of the picnic broken by the two men moving individually all the cutlery and crockery off the picnic rug, into an accumulation and then around the room. Things get rather energetic.

Something I noticed in almost every performance in Tanztage was an identical dynamic progression, kind of like this arrow if it were more slanted: ↷. Things start off, established, made clear. After a time someone will behave a little more sharply, abrupt, staccato, a hint of frenzy. And this builds up until it becomes this, very ordered and choreographed but frenetic. It reaches a climax of sorts and then comes to a fairly swift finish. Perhaps they look around slightly embarrassed as if coming to their senses, or drift on into the next section.

For me, and especially in this piece which was one of the more accomplished pieces I wonder why this has to be done. Why bother? Does it add something to the piece, is it trying to say something, how is it necessary to slavishly follow this dynamic path while dressing it in various accoutrements? I feel like an anthropologist uncomprehendingly observing a native tribe’s rituals in deepest Guinea, and of course I am going to load my own interpretations on top. I would like to be given no option to do so.

This was especially the case during two scenes, or perhaps one longer rambling one. They all join in stomping, until hair becomes disheveled, faces flushed and all a bit sweaty. In a circle making claws and faces at each other. One ends stops and sits down, the others swagger around, they begin to lead, whoever is front makes the movements, the others follow. Later, arms around each other they stagger run fall across the parquet, back and forth, up and down, then only holding hands. A pile fallen over trying to help each other up but only bringing themselves down, making it worse maybe.

Was there enough in this to make it mean something? If I say, “Yes, it is like that”, is it the same as, in agreement with, the identical utterance from who sits beside me? It reminded me of hours-long group tasks with Wendy Houston, which are interesting enough in themselves, if for nothing else simply as play, yet do not necessarily say anything. They are tools and methods with which to make context perhaps but on their own produce the semblance of meaning, a simulacra. Perhaps to say a more rigorous opposition to relativism within such intangible choreographic methods is necessary.

I was also thinking about Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others around this scene, which I wrote about in HAUS. Though whereas Jana’s choreographic attention is paid to an almost excruciating technical attitude to dance and dancers, Hermann’s shows an aesthetic which is aligned closely with Sontag’s ideas of the role of perceived amateurism in the creation of the authentic. While seemingly opposed, Jana’s and Hermann’s works do exactly tangle with questions of what constitutes dance, dancers and performance, the display of technique or absence of, questions of authenticity. What I questioned in Jana’s, that of the aesthetic milieu of conceptual minimalism in dance, equally applied to Hermann’s. To make such a piece relying on recognisable staging, parquetry flooring, old semi-retro chairs and furnishings and similar clothing is to play quite safely within the bounds of the particular form.

Coming to an end, all the furniture, bits and pieces are stacked together, a castle or bulwark. Still in the white chiffon dress though hair much messier, she swings the rug overhead round and round until draping it over the pile, hiding behind or in also. Music again. They roll out, pouring drink, toasting each other to a finish. I was thinking of John Jasperse during this, not so much the movement but the sensibility, it was something intangible, a sense of human intimacy.

The Sophiensaele Festsaal is in itself a beautiful decrepit venue, high ceiling with peeling paint and rust-tainted girders, vast windows along both sides and the circle above, stripped for the most part of its floor retains only the metal and rivet skeleton of the balcony railings and arches behind. Quite a perfect setting for one of the most minimal, intellectual and considered performances I’ve seen.

Yes, I though HAUS was brilliant, even with its flaws, and had some debate afterwards with Jakob, wanting entertainment and Dy, who I think was nearly as taken as I. As with Clint’s Get a Leg Up, Jana has compiled this piece chronologically from three previous works. She quotes Walter Benjamin in the programme notes:

„Die Geschichte stammt aus China und erzählt von einem alten Maler, der den Freunden sein neuestes Bild zu sehen gab. Ein Park war darauf dargestellt, ein schmaler Weg am Wasser und durch einen Baumschlag hin, der lief vor einer kleinen Tür aus, die hinten in ein Häuschen Einlass bot. Wie sich die Freunde aber nach dem Maler umsahen, war der fort und in dem Bild. Da wandelte er auf dem schmalen Weg zur Tür, stand vor ihr still, kehrte sich um, lächelte und verschwand im Spalt.“

Walter Benjamin

A first sign of conceptual minimalism on arriving, the seven (and then later I discover an eighth) dancers in muted clothes, almost could be rehearsal gear, but with enough attention to detail to obviously not be thrown together, some standing, some sitting, by the walls on either side, or closer in, at the back. They wait, very still and patient. Silence.

For the fifty minutes not a sound of music. Once, one of the dancers makes a sound twice, like, “Uh”. I think. It could have been from elsewhere. Much later, almost at the end, another sound, like someone rattling chopsticks in a large glass of water. Maybe it wasn’t there. In-between only the sound of dancers, their clothes, their bodies moving on the floor, walking, occasionally louder in the rare moments of momentum, and because of the state of dance reduced to first instances, beginnings and then finishing, the silence was enormous.

(I am sorely tempted to unleash a diatribe against those in the audience who could not refrain from coughing, hacking, shuffling and otherwise showing their inability to remain attentive for a mere fifty minutes, as well as damaged the opening minutes, instead I will suggest that using a handkerchief or the crook of your elbow (“Dracula Sneeze” did win ‘Most Creative’ word for 2009), does muffle and render far less audible your tuberculotic outbursts.)

This is not a performance that lends itself to a linear, temporal description. Nothing much happened, yet it happened so fast and continuously that I felt I missed half the work every time I looked down to scribble another note. After the microscopic beginning, fingers and wrists twitching, puzzled looks (or perhaps exceedingly concentrated directing of gaze), a leg is thrown. On the left side of the stage one stands, another sits for perhaps half the performance, not once moving. The same over the other side.

Three walk in a circle, jump a little, two arrange one so they can be lifted onto one of their shoulders, a moment of classic contact improvisation. That’s all. It stops. No continuity. Not contact impro. They look at each other. Some laughter from the audience. I wonder if this is nervousness rather than appreciation of perceived comic value. One staggers around, falls to the floor, inelegance and undancerly, yet also becoming of that of a dancer, beautiful.

With the other four performances I’ve seen in the last two days, this one for me will remain special. In the discussion after, a woman asks of Jana and Hermann Heisig, why do they refuse to dance? Jana answers that she sees her work absolutely as dance, and this is rather a question of the definition of dance and the location of its frontiers.

I have been reading Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others whenever I find myself staying with Gala. She discusses the nature of photography in depicting atrocity. What is important in this is the veracity, naturalness and unartificiality that the camera confers upon that which it documents. In this, she describes how the fascination with these qualities affords an amateurism unavailable in other artistic mediums. Paraphrasing, she says unlike becoming a painter or musician, which takes years of training, anyone can pick up a camera and become an artist, a photographer with their first shot, that this apparent guilelessness of the genuine causes professionalism, training and artistry in the medium to be denigrated.

Thinking upon this in regard to bodies in dance performing, there are, I would suggest, similar tendencies. One is away from or antipathy towards technique and training, that the over-trained body is held in lower esteem than that of the ‘natural’, non-dancer. Another is a choreography consciously distancing itself from technique, again with attention paid to similar qualities. (Still another might be regarding the relationship of dancers with a high level of proficiency and training to the idea of ‘genuine’ movement as it might emanate from a specific, individual body.) That both of these might combine into dance that may seem to be made from people coming from any discipline but dance is perhaps of less importance than the often overly self-conscious avoidance of considering what more might be done in dance while pointedly coming from within the history of the artform.

Or perhaps to say what I find quite entrancing in HAUS was this extremely considered attention to dance and choreography in and of itself.

Two dancers with legs spread hang over, fingers on the floor propping them up and when released their torsos make small oscillations, bouncing with an uncanny precision and unity. Later all eight break the rhythm walking across the stage, rearranging themselves, at times I think of Trisha Brown. Often I find it mesmerising. It seems to be the beginnings of movement, though not an itinerary or listing of movements, but rather the set from which all possible movements can be extrapolated. Jana says later that it starts out with a lot of material, trying different relations, but then crystalises very fast. She also says it concentrates on working in the present tense, watching people watching you. And the rehearsal is as devoid of music as the performance.

Dy says perhaps it is painful, to rehearse, to perform, to watch, occasionally boring also, though possibly to venture into such territory is the point. Forsythe describes watching rain hit a window, it is something fascinating and either you get it or you don’t. I wonder about the unconsidered aspects of such a work, that it comes from its own particular milieu and within that what is taken for granted. What, for example, might the work look like if performed in the costumes of Hermann’s Themselves Already Hop!, yet pointedly without making the clothing mean something, as the neutrality of their dress infers? Dy asks her if she would exchange costuming, Jana laughs and says yes.

Making events, movement and gestures visible lies at the core of my work as a choreographer. I observe, look and sketch like a painter paints scenes; then I work on these first drafts, to hone, add detail and paint over anything that seems irrelevant. The appearance and disappearance of the perceptible and visible is held together by a thought in movement. It is a thought in movement that comes from me and is therefore unique and subjective. And at the same time, it operates on the level of the disappearance of that individual view. This is because I move in a similar way to the way described in the text by Walter Benjamin in my piece, like the painter who strolls “along the narrow path to towards the door” to disappear through its crack.

Jana Unmüßig

It took some scruffing around on Clint’s website to find out this piece is a combination of two older works, Side of Splendour and the duet Get a Leg Up, and that it muses on the Bazar de la Charité fire in Paris, 1897 which left some 120 women dead, though only a few men; “‘Le reste détala, non seulement ne sauvant personne, mais encore se frayant un passage dans la chair féminine, à coups de pieds, à coups de poings, à coups de talons, à coups de canne’ (‘The rest ran away, not only not saving anybody, but also pushing their way past female flesh, kicking, punching, pushing with their heels and sticks’)”.

Knowing this now, perhaps I can view the pile of black-clad bodies at the beginning in a different light, and the whole work itself. Last night though, with the unceasing cascade of bodies flung through the air, spinning and sliding across the floor accompanied by the electronic score of Patrick Blasa, I was reminded strongly of the hyper-kinetic ADT in Adelaide.

While much of the aerial and tumbling movement, often carried out in masses, pairs, trios and occasionally all nine dancers, bears a resemblance to the aesthetics of that company, other solos and duos had an uncannily Melbourne Chunky Move and Lucy Guerin feeling, collapsing body parts and joints, staccato shifts of weight and momentum, arms and hands slashing and shunting legs or the whole body against the floor, bodies and their articulations disjointed from thought or agency, almost disconcerting to see the movement culture I passed through in a city about as far from Berlin as possible make an eerie return in Dock 11.

Perhaps most impressive is this full-evening piece was slung together in a mere three weeks, and the often physically and mentally demanding choreography, allowing scant room for mistakes at the likely cost of a foot or limb in the face largely showed up as very well-rehearsed. Towards the end there was some signs of tiring, though equally the end, as in Suites with Rosalind Goldberg came to an almost trance-like state of intensity.

Of the nine, only Clint and Bérengère Valour are not costumed in black, and for much of the work remain together in a duo first begun as dragging each other diagonally across the stage from the upstage wall of lights. For much of the work also, they cling to the walls, climb into the high window frames and avoid the panic and frenzy below.

Below begins with one black-clad wraith wringing her arms and legs from their sockets. coming from the pile of bodies (burnt black? ghosts and the dead? I can only read this into it now, and without programme notes found much of the narrative content of the performance obtuse to the point of frustrating), to be joined by more in duos and singles as arms and legs rise vertically from the heap.

One with orange bob begins screeching, “Don’t touch me!” while the others glide into couples, looking pointedly at her while they do so, until her cries become, “Touch me!”, and she is met by one who gags her with her hand, restrains her and drags her off.

Again, with hindsight of reading the short notes, I look at some of this differently now, but discussed last night with Dy the particular heterosexuality of this scene and of Clint with Bérengère, wondering what I was supposed to infer by this. And even if it is a performance revolving around a historic catastrophe, besides the pertinent question of why choose this incident as the core of a piece, which I feel is not addressed, I wonder about the simplicity of displaying the obvious male-female coupling and its place in such a piece. I also wonder about displaying the tropes of BDSM, gagging, restraint, breath control, dominance and rough scenes, within such a context. What can appear when removed from its context as sexual violation could be exactly how she wished to be touched.

With this, often the movement felt similarly without self-awareness. At times gestures and movements seemed to come from the depths of Modern dance and Martha Graham, the transferral of psychoanalysis and the psyche onto bodily activity, then flitting into aerial and post-post-modern thrash, and in this work not finding in or giving to the means of communication a commensurate attention. As with ADT, the spectacle of the bodies and their capabilities becomes lost in the presentation of the performance.

I often though with ADT, particularly Held and Devolution, they were far more suited to being performed in the studio in rehearsal clothes, where the individuals could be clearly identified and weren’t lost beneath the behemoth of staging, that there was something intriguing and attractive in these works as investigations of pure movement. This applies for me also in Get a Leg Up in that I struggled to work out what it was about, obviously more than just pure movement, yet exactly what I wasn’t able to say. How would it look stripped of costume and taken to where the individuality of each performer is both taken to the fore and subordinated to more involved sense of performed character?

Dragged out through the back doors, bare windows to the outside letting in light and shadows, they gather at this periphery to watch, mute, not intervening. Later a return, into the most physically brutal spinning in the air and headlong across the floor, or equally intense in deep lunges, bodies torqued as if about to launch themselves, the tension and power in their bodies so focussed as if they could by strength of will alone bend themselves endlessly further. The dragging from the corner returns, now a memory also of one stumbling at speed while helplessly looking back, across the floor to collapse in a slide, and the pile of bodies also, into darkness and finishing.

The cowboy lies asleep as cowboys do, legs out, boots crossed, hat tipped down to chin, pushed up to reclining by the saddle on which he leans. Bales of hay line half the front, a low white wall behind. wind blows through the fields of wheat stalks projected over this, mournful, vast and lonely. I think I hear cattle lowing in the distance. If I could see his face, there would be stubble lining his chin. The dim light makes his white shirt look as though there is the curve of a breast. His shadow, a dark, timeless silhouette lines large the wall behind.

For a long time nothing happens.

He rises. Into the saddle, face occluded by the brim of his hat, boots into stirrups, a slow-motion bronco ride, circling the saddle, one arm flung behind, the other hanging onto the pommel, arms swapping as he is thrown wildly.

Is this imagination? Who is this cowboy and what is she doing riding this saddle? Is this real, perhaps, and I should assume an equine presence beneath, with all the associated visceral components, hooves, teeth, mane, shit and smell? Perhaps it is a wish?

The cowboy removes chaps, white shirt, hat. A tall, lanky, androgynous, bow-legged cowboy with a mop of short hair, the crotch cut of his jeans make him look like he’s packing. He saunters off upstage.

For a while, I’m not sure what I’m watching. Far too much going on to be Viennese conceptual (un-)dance, and far too little at the same time. I decide then, or it becomes obvious, I am in a gallery and this is performance art. Or, as Ivo was saying of Paris, it is something in a museum, to look at, but she can’t be too close to her performance. There is some distance as well, that is perhaps self-consciousness, an awareness of what is being done, and that while becoming cowboy, the moment of arrival is endlessly deferred. So it is an installation, or performance art, in a theatre, in a dance festival.

Of the three performances I saw on Friday night, intellectually this one gave the most to think about, conceptually also, in the staging and progression, even though as my friend said, it was obvious what would come next. But taking on gender or identity politics in performance for me is like blood to a vampire, and so I think about chewing some meat.

An describes the saddle as “prosthesis and connector, contrasting, blending and overlapping the organic and inorganic”, much in the same way a strap-on functions. It becomes physically real through imagination, or perhaps completion. A cowboy is not complete without his saddle, and neither is a drag king without his cock.

The question though of a cowboy as a choice of subject matter, especially within the context of queer drag is a loaded one. Parenthetically, which “quasi-archetypal, white, male heterosexual hero” cowboy are we regarding here? John Wayne is an obvious choice, though we would find ourselves in two different discussions if An’s cowboy was Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars, (I’m hoping he is Franco Nero in Django).

Am I to look at this exposition of frivolous masculinity in the same way that drag going the other way was regarded by a certain polemical and less than sympathetic strand of feminism? Or, rather to say, what is the fascination with such extreme forms of gender representation coming both from the (non-drag) gay scene and its romance with ‘straight-acting’, and the dyke scene with a swathe of heteronormative drag-kinging? If the performance was, say, of Marisol from A Fistful of Dollars, embodying the opposite role within the milieu of cowboys and westerns, what would it take to not be seen as frivolous femininity?

An becomes horse, panting and snorting, jumping, trying to throw off an invisible rider. A silent video of rodeo riding behind, while cowboy at sunset leans on the white fence. An is to my uncultured ear a pointedly androgynous name. Not quite Anne or maybe the first third only of Anthony. If An is female, what are the limits of remaining so when venturing to this realm of hyper-masculinised identity in the guise of a man? And if An is male, does that make this still drag, or a longing for something he’s not?

I was thinking about Julia Serrano in Whipping Girl during some of the performance. in particular where she writes upon the status of femininity in the queer scene. My dissatisfaction with Save a Horse Ride a Cowboy stems largely from this, that while the critical attention has been paid to hetero masculine archetypes and roles, the location of An within a culture that tends towards expressions or explorations of such roles under the broad and elusive label of queer did not offer a corresponding analysis of that culture’s very tendencies in this direction. Of course it is also possible An made a performance about longing to be a cowboy.

Not to worry, I saw not much in 2009, but luckily it was almost easily split between “ow! that hurts” awful and “uuuhh…” sliding off the chair with joy. Only two pieces don’t quite make it into either absolutist subset, and one of those, Jan Fabre’s Orgy of Tolerance wouldn’t have been mentioned at all if it weren’t for my thinking about the other, quite close to brilliant but also somewhat flawed No Dice from Nature Theater of Oklahoma – also the longest show I saw, at four hours. Both were exceptional pieces of theatre, and despite whatever qualifications I have about them, that I still think over what I saw gives them a place here.

Dasniya Sommer started off the year with MA√ 15 { IDIOSYNCRASY } || SIN X = LY – FX²¯, which I didn’t see. Strange it made it to the list then. Well, through my involvement with Dasniya on several projects revolving around her website I got to see this piece in many guises and as with many pieces that made this list, if I liked them enough to want to be in it, of course it should be here.

SOIT and Hans van den Broek were worth traveling to Brussels for, to see We Was Them. Of course again I am biased, having played in the Viennese Settlement with them in summer, 2008. Still, who cares? Astute and memorable theatre from someone who should be seen more.

Two from Ivo Dimchev, then. What does it say that most of the performances I found beguiling this year are from friends? Michael said, quoting Tilda, that you should make performance with your friends, because they’re the ones who have the biggest influence on you, who you hold in highest esteem, who have the closest affinity to you.

Lili Handel is an old piece, performed now some 200 times, and that many times Ivo has sold his blood. beautiful, dark, deranged theatre. The other, and last for they year, made by Ivo for Christian Bakalov whom I saw in Orgy of Tolerance is Paris.

All these I works I adore, and when I have my own festival shall make them first on the programme.

[Edit]

Cycling home in -5º or so on a rather broken bike, I remembered another piece I didn’t see but saw video of and was rather taken by. Yes, it is a festival of my friends. Daniel Jaber’s WG Spiel deserves a mention here also.