Tanzquartier Wien

The performance, revolving around the two characters Consul and Meshie, is dangerously beautiful. The audience feel safe in the contemporary understanding of connections between a criticism of Western cultural awareness, anti-colonial self-positioning and an appreciation of the self-empowerment of subjects and objects. In everyday life as well as in art. The three artists deftly string their invitation on a thread that runs through the entire piece. Using a quote by Donna Haraway, they invite the public to think of apes as inhabitants of border zones between nature and culture in the Western sense: “In the border zones, love and knowledge are richly ambiguous and productive of meanings.”[1] And so is the performance, too.

The two primates, Consul and Meshie, disassemble the interior of a luxury limousine in a playful manner. The treasures and set pieces they unearth from the furry secret compartments are true treasure troves of cultural education. They start with a game of memory and attempt to discover the meaning of the male-dominated philosophy of modernism and the present day. Sounds of pleasure and disappointment while looking at pictures of Deleuze and Lyotard. The game is played on a map of Europe, determining the outlines of the cultural region. Afterwards, they get tangled up in gestures: between the ape house in a zoological garden and feminist self-representation as well as an opposition to male voyeurism in art. The poses represent the paintings “Gabrielle d’Estrées and one of her sisters” and Manet’s “The Luncheon on the Grass”.

The roles performers Antonia Baehr and Latifa Laâbissi play refer to the two chimpanzees Consul and Meshie. In the early 20th century and independently of one another, the two of them were brought up by humans to act like humans, which deprived them of their apeness. The fact that the chimpanzees in the performance seem like a blend of pop-cultural set pieces (“Planet of the Apes”) and Hanuman langurs opens up more possibilities of crossing the border between pleasure and cultural knowledge. Probably more so than the re-representation in a chimpanzee costume would allow. Bored, the apes embroider a feminist banner using the colonial knot while talking about their origin and its insignificance. The two phrases they embroider are “Jungle” and “Woman” – two images that delineate a boundary between gender, pleasure and knowledge. Just as “Ariadne’s Thread” by Sarat Maharaj[2] previously described textile crafts as a weapon against sexism and colonialism, here, too, embroidery becomes a weapon, and the subaltern empower themselves in writing and through images.

The link to non-European history is established by an ancient subaltern and his outward appearance: Hanuman. In Indian mythology, the god of the wind turned a beautiful female ape into a woman to create the superhero demigod Hanuman with her. His descendants still inhabit the vast expanses of South Asia. The mythical ape peoples were the indigenous peoples on the South Asian subcontinent. They preserved knowledge that existed independent of the systematic records kept by the Brahmin caste of teachers, scholars and priests. The beauty of the thought-provoking performance opens up similar possibilities.

The two wise apes take their glasses out of the cases and present their play faces to the audience. They hiss and sneer. Just like the audience, who smile knowingly. And, once again, one is moved by the beauty of the two performers. So tall and so beautiful. Trapped in the ultimate manifestation of a frenzied culture: the interior of a limousine. They recite our knowledge, thereby taking it away from us. Painting portraits of each other and humming catchy tunes that make us linger in the room, empty and happy. Aesthetically practiced unlearning. Count me in.

At the end, the audience get the opportunity to transform into companion species: Consul and Meshie feed hand-picked and wildly scattered peanuts in the performance space. Accepted gratefully as an afterthought by the attending public.

[1] Donna Haraway, Primate Visions. Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science, New York 1989
[2] Sarat Maharaj, Arachne’s Genre: Towards Inter-Cultural Studies in Textiles, in Journal of Design History Vol. 4, No. 2, Oxford 1991

Ruby Sircar has a doctorate in postcolonial studies, was a research fellow at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht and currently holds a teaching post at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She deals with feminisms and anti-colonialism in her work.

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