Tanzquartier Wien

The premiere of Everybody’s Fantasy, that was planned for 19 March 2021, had to be postponed due to the lockdown imposed by the Austrian Federal Government to combat the Covid-19 pandemic. Nevertheless Jen Rosenblit and her team were able to conduct an intensive final rehearsal phase at Tanzquartier Wien/Hall G. Flora Löffelmann witnessed the exclusive video shoot.

Everybody’s Fantasy by Jen Rosenblit is a piece that subtly deals with erotic fantasies, breaking with existing gaze regimes in a sensitive, vulnerable and self-determined manner. Gertrude Stein’s “Everybody’s Autobiography” (1937), the continuation of her autobiography from the perspective of her partner, Alice B. Toklas, serves as the thematic framework for this examination of norms and their prior social construction. Stein, who subverted the prevailing ideas of femininity in her time through her famous Paris salons and her lesbian relationship, becomes the model for a new way of looking at naturalised orders, and a trailblazer for a way of thinking that, ahead of its time, postulated the normality of what was to find social acceptance only much later.

Rosenblit sets the epistemic norm of the “male gaze” – striving to classify that which is present in an appropriating manner and subordinating it to its wishes – against the phenomenal experiencing of various artifacts and the conditions that arise when coming into contact with them. Even though they look convincingly ordinary, the objects used are not conceived as entities that passively await their interpretation, brought to life only by requests directed at them, but as independent interlocutors hiding certain aspects from sight at all times despite their glamorous presentation. Only by interacting do they reveal their range of meanings, which, however, could never be regarded as complete, given that these meanings are always present as fundamentally determined by the physicality, the perspective and the desire of those who come into contact with them.

Rosenblit is an exemplary case of a body entering this contact zone, yet she refrains from creating hierarchies with her practice that others would have to plough through: using various gestures and her inviting presence to persistently challenge the boundaries between spectator and performer, she creates a safe space and encourages the audience to establish contact in an imaginative way. Incidentally, the form this may take is not predetermined by Rosenblit’s example. Beyond hegemonic norms of interpretation, that which – classified as “kink” – would already have connotations of aberration or deviation, is assigned the status of normality. Rosenblit sets crude ideas of eroticism, which would be geared towards serving pre-structured potential meanings, against individual experience and renegotiation, playful discovery and “rehearsing for paradise”, where everybody is free to explore their own desires beyond social norms.

The dynamic electroacoustic stage design by Li Tavor and Gérald Kurdian, and the way in which they are included as bodies in the performance, contribute to the denaturalisation of yet another epistemic norm – that of binary gender. Together, Rosenblit, Kurdian and Tavor illustrate that the renegotiation of established gender norms should include a break with traditional modes of interpretation but must not stop at this point: Rosenblit’s interaction with the two of them is marked by the same curiosity and determination she shows towards the artifacts that form the framework for her examination, challenging the boundary frequently established between human and non-human participants in erotic fantasies.

Flora Löffelmann currently writes her doctoral thesis at the University of Vienna’s Department of Philosophy and is a founding member of the event and performance collective Philosophy Unbound.