I often muse on how dance takes me into peculiar, old, strange, uninhabited, alien places. Old cities are amassed with such edifices, fenced off usually, or only indirectly accessible, perhaps better to say neither a public space and so restricted, nor a private space and so open to whoever crosses the boundary.
These kind of places suffer eventually two fates, that of gentrification, and so excluding and pushing out whatever made them seductive in the first place, or demolished, and so remaining only in memory, or perhaps an unremarkable plaque. I do like that my life affords me the pleasure of trespassing upon their grounds, and maybe even playing there a little.
I’ve been taking class at Sasha Waltz the last couple of days, in a factory that has been re-imagined as a performance space. Across the Spree are several Fabriks, the one bordered by Schwarzer Kanal, others stretching the length of the river, as yet unclaimed except by punk squatters I can see from the fifth floor while warming up, their two dogs running in a joyous morning exuberance, them sitting in the shade of a large tree. I wonder how to find a way in to these buildings with their monstrous brick chimneys and air of immanent collapse.
I walked from there to Marameo, finding Daniel, Clint, then later we went north on the S-bahn to Pankow, and along Hadlichstaße, the empty remains of an industrial baron’s cigarette factory that may become the second home of Dock11. We enter from the side, and waiting for Paea, I go for a walk. I should have gone further, because each new corner, like cresting a hill or ridge takes me further into an unknown world. Instead I learn some movement of Daniel for a piece he’s making for Paea and Clint. Dance. Daniel’s dance.
