Tanzquartier Wien

When do preparations end, and when does what has been prepared begin? In after the end, before the beginning, Luca Büchler looks for transitional moments somewhere between light and dark in the “golden hour”. Adam and Amina Seid Tahir interweave preparation and follow-up as a ritual of perpetual searching and arriving in several attempts at braiding my way home.

Both performances initially make the audience wait for the dancing, for large movements and for being drawn into waves of emotions that arise from shared bodily and musical rhythms. Instead, preparations are made in ritualised slowness, even mindfulness: Luca Büchler dresses the performance space in drawn curtains – because the golden light of the various spotlight suns can only appear in the eternal night of the stage space – and Adam Seid Tahir undoes braid after braid conscientiously and then knots them among countless other hairpieces that make up a partially dangling carpet of hair. Only once the hair has been carefully groomed and a durag and a top made of braids have been put on does the music pick up and the movement sequences and light changes increase in tempo and intensity.

While several attempts… exhibits a certain formal austerity that is created by the cold light and the sectioned-off stage area, after the end… is marked by compositional tentativeness and visual warmth. The seating arrangement in Luca Büchler’s piece in particular involves the audience: we, the observers, sit next to each other, with each other, opposite each other; some with our backs to each other, some facing each other. Luca Büchler sits among us and keeps changing his position, taking a seat here and there. He glides through the space, like the light of the “suns” that illuminate us all, while our eyes do their best to catch a glimpse of the one dancing body. In several attempts… on the other hand, Adam Seid Tahir’s room for manoeuvre, clearly marked by a square tarp on the floor, is not our space, and yet it is shared with us. Curious, we face or look sideways at Adam – sitting, braiding, dancing – almost grateful for the intimate insights he provides us. Luca Büchler’s performance takes all of us into account in the sunlight, Adam Seid Tahir’s piece points inward, not outward. Luca Büchler’s dance begins in the middle of the room, amid the crowd, with an extended, slightly trembling hand that points the way for further, small and self-contained movements. The body stretches, wakes, over and over again. First the circulating elbows. Then the lowered shoulders. The wrists, drawing their circles, too. The heaving chest. With each rising or setting sun, the body wakes a little more. At one point, Luca disappears completely from view in the smoke of the fog machine. Luca has risen in the black light of the sun. Darkness releases light. Shadow play, one of the oldest forms of human expression.

With Adam Seid Tahir, it’s not just the body that moves: the dancing movements make the braids of the top flow like jellyfish in the current of the sea, brightly lit in the black light of an ultraviolet water world. Serving as whiskers, similar to those of a walrus,[1] the braids become an extension of the body, a medium of orientation. Moving about, Adam feels his way through the performance space in which notions of belonging and of Adam and Amina Seid Tahir’s Afro-Nordic identity are repeatedly put together and taken apart. Home – a place to live? One’s native country? – cannot be found in a place. Instead, it is created with and through one’s own body – dancing, braiding – and can be found precisely for that reason. Over and over again.

As Adam Seid Tahir puts on the braid top, this marks a clear break with the preparation part of the piece, a definite beginning of something: an ever-expanding sequence of movements. In Luca Büchler’s performance, on the other hand, we observe a repetitive winding inward: a beginning at the end. Luca’s sun goes down repeatedly, in multitudinous variations. Adam Seid Tahir’s dance announces an end that never comes. Both pieces turn out to be preparations that refuse completion and instead linger in a constant flux of searching and finding. Moving towards something, they remain in motion, exploring said movement. There is no end point, only “several attempts”. Luca Büchler and Adam Seid Tahir dance in between spaces and times: between seats, light and shadow, past and future, here and there. After the end is before the beginning. Then it’s “lights on”, “lights off”: at the close, just as things are about to get under way.

[1] Cf. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals, Edinburgh 2020, an inspiration for the piece, as Adam and Amina Seid Tahir told the audience at the afternoon “Hangout”.

Liese Schmidt works as an artist and in the cultural sector at various locations and in various fields. She is currently enrolled in the Critical Studies MA programme at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Following a fundamental interest in communication and miscommunication, she investigates myths, fictions and narratives that define our understanding of the everyday.

Luan (/) Dannerbauer is a writer, illustrator and crafts enthusiast. After studying theatre, film and media studies, Luan is currently enrolled in the Critical Studies MA programme at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and in the Gender Studies MA programme at the University of Vienna. Luan focuses on trans* practices and site-specific art.