Tanzquartier Wien

“I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.”
― Octavia E. Butler

This is exactly the feeling that YES YES by BamBam Frost and take me to my house by Camilla Schielin have triggered in me!
No walls! No human condition that would stop you!
But: First you have to tear them down.
And that is exactly what both performers do in these works. What a trip.

Frost and Schielin play with non-visible materiality and take me along to fictional spheres.

YES, YES! Take me to my house!

In both their pieces, BamBam Frost and Camilla Schielin deal with the burden of the past we all know so well, that we have to bear because it’s our responsibility to bear it. Both are concerned with coming to terms with an inevitable personal and political history that does, after all, define us too, that we cannot ignore, even if the temptation to disregard it is great.

“Your silence will not protect you.” (Audre Lorde)

Memory, whether unconscious or conscious, is staged as a grotesque character in its own right in both works. In the form of BamBam Frost’s savage, bizarre, almost humorous grimaces, in flickering, cracking, counter-dynamic movements by Camilla Schielin.

Schielin’s piece opens with a pure white, immaculately clean room that is blank in the truest sense of the word and therefore as free of burden as possible. She lets this take effect and then immediately breaks the visual calm as she enters. By pushing an oversized pile of clothes in front of her, she makes quite clear from the start with this fictional fantastic figure what the piece is all about. So, here it is: the past.

BamBam Frost opens her performance with an oversized textile as well. An infinitely long blue plush fabric slides down the steps of a stand like a waterfall, skilfully transforming materiality in the process. This metamorphosis of plush into water has a similarly pleasant effect on the observing eye as Camilla Schielin’s white room.

Cut: BamBam Frost poses with one leg on a chair in denim and chaps in front of the blue plush cascade. An outfit that reflects colonial appropriations of clothing and introduces the effect of a break with the initial calm to the performance.

Meanwhile, Camilla Schielin negotiates the relationship between herself and the mountain of clothes, begins to detach herself from it like a rubber band, but without being able to completely disentangle herself from its tentacles. She circles her performance partner, moves away from it but comes back over and over again of her own accord and even imitates it. In doing so, Schielin doesn’t provide a clear answer but rather defines an area of ambivalences.

Both solo performances also converge in terms of their choreographic elements and shake hands repeatedly.

BamBam Frost falls slowly and therefore gracefully, in a movingly dramatic way down the plush, soft stairs. Yet another ambivalence that makes this image of falling so much more significant. The use of her play with facial expressions is precise and makes the laughter die on the spectator’s lips.

And Camilla Schielin drops sluggishly to the floor several times, too, at first – as a result of self-determinedly, voluntarily imitating the monster pile.

Both artists deal with the past that is burdened with content in different ways, and, consequently, with the moment of falling and being dragged down and breaking free from it. Their movements shift in constant ambivalence, faltering, pulling, cracking, drifting, exploding and travelling between the past and the present. Their choreographic elements have a powerful aesthetic, are extremely touching, searching, graceful and erotic in an aloof way all at the same time. The performers move themselves, move us and are moved (from the outside) by the weight of their content. They fall and get back up again, and then they take off. The scenic transitions and performative progressions are always surprising without losing the audience’s attention along the way. Without words, they speak volumes through their movements, tell stories of violence and power relations. Through fiction and phantasms, both performers create a distance from our reality, only to bring us back, thereby making the impossible possible. What empowerment and what strength – that always remain ambivalent and expose the implications of violence and discrimination.

BamBam Frost works with a constant counter-dynamic that is doubled through repetition and creates incredible tension. YES, YES! It’s a dance piece, and yet her physicality still amazes! There is even room in this work for a short pas de deux with two cuddly-toy hand puppets, synchronised in waves, representing yet another level of violent content in sheep’s clothing.

Camilla Schielin also makes it clear that there is no escape from any kind of legacy, the connection persists even in an effort at negation. Despite its energy, there are tragic overtones to her attempt at breaking free at the end, in front of a golden tinsel curtain, when Camilla Schielin sings in the song ‘Euphoria’: “We are here, we’re all alone in our own universe, we are free.”

THANK YOU, BamBam Frost and Camilla Schielin, for such generous, rich and skilful performances! I’m already looking forward to more to come.

Stefanie Sourial, born in 1981, works as a performance artist and teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. A graduate of the International Theatre School Jacques Lecoq in Paris, she conducted theatre workshops with homeless youths in Cairo and has created her own solo projects, including FREAK (2014/15), the performance trilogy Colonial Cocktail (2019) and her latest production City of Diaspora (2021) in a co-production with brut Wien. Sourial has been working with the award-winning company Theater Ad Infinitum in the United Kingdom since 2012. She has been collaborating regularly with performance artists living in Vienna such as the first Viennese queer-feminist burlesque collective Club Burlesque Brutal (2009-2015) and has performed regularly at the PCCC* – Politically Correct Comedy Club since 2009. Her performances are anti-racist, queer and critical of society, and they combine two narrative styles: the historical and the personal – always with a focus on the political.