The eternal recurrence of the same, the other and the crack
Philip 19:07 OMG, it’ll last 3 hours 😵💫
Sarah 19:07 Yeah, 🤦♀️ I just had a little extra nap
Sarah 19:10 Already here :)
Philip 19:13 Me too in a bit)
Are there more ways to dance than three: for yourself, for one another, for an audience? And where do the sound person (Dionne Warwick, Janet Jackson, free jazz, dog barking, hardcore punk, wind chimes, meditative soundscapes) and the light person (mainly blue and white and dark) position themselves in this dance?
Each repetition of the song “What the World Needs Now Is Love” translates into increasingly enthusiastic agreement in the movements of the two dancers. We are like passers-by watching a demonstration from the roadside. The demand: LOVE FOR ALL.
How many times does something need to be repeated for an audience to notice even the smallest variations? Ten times? For half an hour? Two times half an hour? How many times can something be repeated before it loses its appeal? And how many times does it have to be repeated after that so as to become interesting again? After countless repetitions of “What the World Needs Now Is Love”, it seems that there actually is enough love for everyone, for a little while, at least.
Just as the song and dance are about to lose their appeal, dog barking begins to sound. We remember VALIE EXPORT’s installation “I (beat (it)) II” (1980), in which German shepherds bark at a female body in a supine position from four screens. VALIE EXPORT succumbs to the exhaustion caused by constant alarm.
Unlike VALIE EXPORT’s installation, nothing is static in Ewa Dziarnowska’s piece, not even the audience arrangement: the space is in motion, the dancers, the seats, the spectators, the light. As is well known, charm has something to do with enchantment. How does a dancer make us leave our seats voluntarily so she can put them somewhere else?
After the barking: weird techno and hardcore punk. Does this loosen us up or make us even more tense? Somehow both, as the dancing goes on and the pressure builds. Simultaneity and the parallel existence of opposing states appear to be a theme here. Half covered by a cap, the pressure is clearly visible in Ewa Dziarnowska’s face. Her body continues to dance with great ease.
What do you call the mood when Leah Marojević first kicks in a closed door, then attempts to move a wall, dropping dramatically to the floor in between?
Passages of tranquillity go hand in hand with the mobility and changeability. The pace here: slow and focused. Dziarnowska and Marojević are gentle and touching between their outbursts – literally: sometimes one leans against a pair of legs, sometimes the other puts her head on a stranger’s lap. The air in the room transforms, it feels like an inhalable manifestation of the dancers’ body awareness.
“Rhythm Is a Dancer” in Polish is certainly a banger, at any rate. The dancers’ bodies shake off the tension during the song. Immediately afterwards, trumpets, fanfare blasts and insects sound. A military parade during a plague of locusts? Is this food for thought on issues such as post-Eastern identity, current wars and crises? How to deal with them collectively instead of individually, emotionally instead of intellectually?
Hand on heart. Is it pain that causes Ewa Dziarnowska to want to rip it out or is she trying to stop a bleeding? Bit by bit, the simultaneity of extreme contrasts becomes normal, particularly so as she screams fervently to Janet Jackson’s “Pleasure Principle” over and over again.
Does a three-hour dance in front of an audience require a reference point from which cracks can occur and to which one can return? Can a three-hour programme be made up entirely of cracks?
Last act, “What the World Needs Now Is Love” is played in a loop again. This time, there are two circles of seats, the dancers are facing each other, a special intimacy arises because now they are both wearing the blue dress with which Leah Marojević started the dance two and a half hours ago. Hours go by, thousands of things are happening at once, it’s Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence” of the same, and sometimes there’s nothing we can do about it. Our contemporary experience of the world creates voids in people. Perhaps Dziarnowska provides us with tools to deal with that, e.g. by standing up and changing places. Or, with reference to the title: by resting and practising patience.
Sarah Rogner is an activist and multidisciplinary artist working on theories and practices of social-ecological transformation and part of a queer & feminist farming collective as well as a bike collective. Currently moving between the veggiefield and Critical Studies at the academy of fine arts vienna, applying the ambivalence of a trans-class perspective.
Philip Neuberger ( – | he | she ) works at the intersection of theatre, dance, performance and artistic research. As part of her studies at the Bern University of the Arts, she increasingly turned her focus on gender as performance and collective forms of work. In addition to his artistic work, both as a solo artist and with his group finsterbusch collective, Neuberger is the operational manager of Brücki 235, the “uncurated space for dance + theatre” of the City of Zurich. He is also part of the curatorial team of Designathon and currently enrolled in the Critical Studies MA programme at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.