Tanzquartier Wien

Oddly precisely because this piece and the artist talk with Elisabeth Clarke, Joana Tischkau and Eike Wittrock moved me so deeply, (that even weeks later it all still continues to work within me), writing this text took some tedious doing.

Are you familiar with this situation?  Something moves you so profoundly that it makes it so difficult for you to find words that you feel like bursting? This wordfinding and thought gathering process “no be small thing o.”[1] At the same time, however, I also wouldn’t want to miss this profound process. I want to use the opportunity to express my heartfelt gratitude to Christina Gillinger for her patience and commendation, Mariama Diagne for encouraging me to dare and Elisabeth Clarke for her brilliant, text title inspiring question: “Is there something like a script?” (posed at the artist talk)

The following quotes by Nia Love, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, May Ayim a little further down by Robin D. G. Kelley and last but not least by Yelvilaa Bodomo aka YIELU have supported the detangling process of my “thought knots”.

“I am interested in the ‘performativity’ of memory. I am thinking about the quotidian of trauma alongside the restoration and Magic of water cycles, partnering with my meditation on healing, dance, and media as a physical tap into embodying memory.”[2]

“Creative imagination is one of the greatest of re-membering practices […].”[3]

“ich werde
noch einen schritt weitergehen und
noch einen schritt
weiter
und wiederkehren
wann
ich will
wenn
ich will
grenzenlos und unverschämt
bleiben”[4]

As a remembering time traveller, (who, after living in the USA for more than ten years is now on her way to a deeper understanding of the Austrian present-s) I experienced Joana Tischkau’s Ich nehm dir alles weg. Ein Schlagerballett as a brazenly poetic, “memory horizon” expansion.

Inspired by May Ayims borderless and brazen. a poem against German “u-not-y”, I understand “brazen” as unapologetic. And poetic in the sense of Audre Lorde’s and June Jordan’s understanding of poetry. I. e. not as a luxury but as a resistant necessity to liberate our imaginations continuously. A worldmaking, transformative poetry that creates unlikely spaces for what is unnameable, has been suppressed and made insignificant. In the words of Robin D. G. Kelley:

“In the poetics of struggle and lived experience […] we discover the many different cognitive maps of the future, of the world not yet born.”[5]

Joana Tischkau’s Schlagerballett brings nothing less than this multilayered poetry, remixing fluidly between the times to mind. The ensemble, consisting of Dayron Dominguez Piedra, Sidney Kwadjo, Moses Leo, Deborah Macauley, Carlos Daniel Valladares Carvajal and Sophie Yukiko, perform nuanced counter histories that flip the intact “Heimat”[6] script of the Schlager world in multifaceted ways. Tischkau succeeds in putting a current, performative status quo critical remembrance intervention on stage.

In doing so, she grabbles with the “invisiblized” everydayness of racist (hetero)sexist ascriptions. The positively painted, associated dimensions of violence, in the face of which Black German Schlager stars must assert themselves (also) in the power landscape of the Schlager music industry. She counters Germany’s racism amnesia[7] (also applicable to Austria) with a subtly remixed soundtrack of Black German Schlager stars such as Marie Nejar, Roberto Blanco and Ramona, and an interwoven repertoire of self-assertive embodiments.

Which unmattered stories live in the German and Austrian archives for Black entertainment and Black Music[8]? Is there such a thing as a self-assertive tradition of Black German Schlagerstars? A tradition that also leaves room for inconsolabilities? How are these counter stories and their inconsolabilities embodied?

What are the effects of the white, German (Austrian) extremely “visibilizing” visual traditions? How does this majority society’s demand, to embody these exoticizing visual traditions “authentically” (on the stages of everyday life and of Schlager), affect Black people? How do those who are requested to embody the script of these racist (hetero)sexist visual traditions “authentically”, flip this very script?

Tischkau’s Ich nehm dir alles weg has moved the horizon of my imagination in May Ayim’s sense unapologetically brazen…It has changed the way I can now see, hear and feel songs like Mach nicht so traurige Augen and the Rubberdab Dance (sung by the siblings Judi and Nicola Hauenstein under the band name Cracy Coconuts when they were children). And it has changed which future paths of remembering these Schlager and hits invite me to walk today…

“Mirror mirror me
a little too used to being
invisible or hyper-visible
yet rarely ever seen
[…]
To be seen is to be loved
We’re in the past, present, future
in the ground and in the skies
worldwide baby
haven’t you heard? we up in space
holding space in the complexity”[9]

[1] This mainly Nigerian Pidgin English expression (which could be translated to something being no mean feat) is my attempt to translate one of my favorite Viennese expressions namely: “Des is ka Lercherl(schass)” referred to in the German original text.
[2] Nia Love, g1(host):UNDERcurrents, nia-love.com/g1-host-undercurrents (accessed: 4 March 2025).
[3] Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance, New York 2009, p. 39.
[4] May Ayim, grenzenlos und unverschämt. ein gedicht gegen die deutsche sch-einheit, in: May Ayim, blues in schwarz weiss, Berlin 1996, p. 61.

i will go
yet another step further and another step and
will return
when i want
if i want
and remain
borderless and brazen
(Translation from the German by May Ayim)

[5] Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Boston 2002, p. 10.
[6] The complex German concept Heimat often translated as homeland carries such a multilayered weight of racialized, nationalist connotations that it seems untranslatable.
[7] Fatima El-Tayeb, Undeutsch. Die Konstruktion des Anderen in der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft, Bielefeld 2016.
[8] Joana Tischkau is a co-initiator of Österreichisches Museum für Schwarze Unterhaltung und Black Music.
[9] Yelvilaa Bodomo aka YIELU, To See Is An Act of Love, written and performed in 2024, audio, 3:06 min. The entire poem was featured in the exhibition Amoako Boafo. Proper Love at Unteres Belvedere, Vienna, 25 October 2024 to 12 January 2025. The exhibition’s title, Proper Love, is a quote from the poem. @yielu_

Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur is a transdisciplinary artistic culture and memory worker, time traveller, scholar, curator, lecturer, (un)learner and researcher. She was a co-founder of and activist with PAMOJA – Bewegung der jungen afrikanischen Diaspora in Österreich (Movement of the Young African Diaspora in Austria), the Network of African Communities (against institutional racism) and Recherchegruppe zu Schwarzer österreichischer Geschichte (Research Group of Black Austrian History). She has taught at the historically Black Howard University in Washington D.C., studied Black Politics and History of the African Diaspora, and wrote her PhD thesis on Unokanma Okonjo’s pan-African, non-aligned critique of racism and the Pan-African Students Union of Austria in post-Nazi Austria of the early 1960s. Together with Jelena Micić, she is currently the artistic co-director of WIENWOCHE 2025 – Festival for Art and Activism and a member of the directorial collective of MUSMIG (Museum der Migration), a museum that still struggles to exist, while simultaneously addressing the foundational violence of museums in Europe.