Tanzquartier Wien

Joyfully awkward! Liberating and leaping back!

An off-kilter diamond-like quadrate is taped on the floor. At the back of the stage is a tower of speakers, with a record player on top. “We need silence for the piece” is projected above and a record and two bottles of water lie by its side to the left. On the right is a lamp. We wait. There are two other writers in the audience and I’m painfully aware of the three of us posed with pens and paper for the performance to begin.

Katerina Andreou enters BSTRD hair wet. This jolted me into a memory of her solo “A Kind of Fierce” where she dances hard and her quasi Valley Girl hair flips become a signature move. Immediately BSTRD seems to grow from where “A Kind of Fierce” left off.

Full disclosure: Katerina is a friend and one of the hardest workers I know. Years back we danced together with DD Dorvillier. She has a very exacting eye, approaches problems with a poetics, and is really caring.

Katerina walks to the tower and places the record on the turntable from which an insistent powerful drumming begins. Simultaneously, she’s stepped into the center of the quadrate with her back to the audience where she enters full throttle into a stepping, jumping, intricate footwork that accentuates and plays off of the sound. The complexity of her steps increases in stages. The energy is explosive.

From the TQW website I understand that the catalyst for BSTRD is both her enjoyment in practicing and alienation from the dancing and culture of House. Right away there is a dissonance between the record and what I know of House. It’s harder, less bouncy. I try to place it but I can’t. It’s not the classic Chicago House expected. (Katerina worked together with Eric Yvelin on the sound design.)

Gradually she shifts and begins to use more and more of the space. Opening up so that we see the side of her, leaving the confines of the diamond-shaped quadrate, wetting her hair with one of the bottles of water. There are associations of ballets’ petit allegro, in the complexity and quickness of the steps, and of the Detroit Hustle, in the use of facing, but quickly I quit trying to identify what forms she’s working with. Resistant and Resilient keep flashing as energetic identifiers. The complexity and precision don’t stay in her feet. With her whole body she plays with and accentuates the rhythm of the intense drumming, droning record which is now playing longer than expected. A stand-out moment is a joyfully awkward shimming of her chest while midair in a jump.

The idea of resistance keeps coming up but this doesn’t feel like a fight. Resilience, with its quality of shining through difficulty, seems more apt as it’s a continual open. Later at home I look up the etymology of resilient and find it dates back to the 1640s and means “springing back”, from Latin resilientem (“inclined to leap or spring back”).

….as much as the jumping conjures an energetic vibe of resilience, I drift into thinking about how ableist this association is….

At the moment she comes downstage facing us, time folds and I see Katerina again at our first rehearsal after a hurricane hit NYC. She’s describing how her flat close to the water had shook through the night. Time folds back to the present and she seems to be tumbling in a big wave at the ocean’s edge. The “jacking” rippling through her body and the intensity of the step work evokes the loss of orientation and enjoyment of giving over to a force greater than yourself. Water suddenly seems to be everywhere: in her hair, spilled on the floor, in her movement and in my memory of the hurricane. She seems to either be inside or creating a gigantic washing machine that is washing clean the stage. Every part of her is in motion.

Her pleasure in dancing is palatable and infectious. Midway through the piece I catch the eyes of two fellow dancers in the audience. They both have the very awake, alive eyes that sometimes come through the kinesthetic experience of watching another dance with abandonment. She keeps going, removing layers of white T-shirts. I feel such a relief that the water and stripping of the T-shirts isn’t a moment of a wet T-shirt contest and am painfully aware that anytime a woman is pouring water on herself while wearing and removing a white T-shirt, the contest is a specter in the air. A voice on the record calls “Go!” several times. This “Go!” seems to propel her harder, it’s a revving up.

The record ends. Silence.

She flips the record over and begins again. This restart is not a recharge or renewal. It’s still strong but another energy is at play. She sits down, back to us, in a moment that the drone has intensified. It’s inward and odd and she’s up and dancing again but now with red lipstick and hair pulled back in a bun that is eerily out of place. It’s become more gendered, there is something lost in the eyes, another T-shirt comes off, and another. Timings are becoming stranger. She picks up a T-shirt close to the speaker tower, throwing it down in the moment the sound cuts to a more melodic piano piece. A cloud of white powder expands in the air. She walks out. We are left with the aftereffect of her steps and a cloud of dust. It’s glorious but also evokes the shadows of Hiroshima. The cloud grows and grows, dust particles expanding and illuminated by the light, before slowly dissipating into a memory.

Elizabeth Ward is a dancer, choreographer and performer currently living in Vienna. Her work references ballet without being ballet. Currently she is developing a practice called An End to Apocalyptic Thinking and is living her teenage dream of playing bass in an anarcho-punk band with Ausländer. Upcoming projects include replaying All Together by Michikazu Matsune, developed as a trio with Frans Poelstra and herself, in addition to dancing with Frédéric Gies in his new production Queen of the Fauns.

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