DREAM by Alessandro Sciarroni. © Claudia Pajewski

review

Exploring the Tanz im August archipelago

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24 min

DREAM by Alessandro Sciarroni. © Claudia Pajewski

Annette van Zwoll • Emily May • Evgeny Borisenko

12 September 2024

Pick your own route as three writers navigate nine performances from Berlin’s long, wide and varied Tanz im August festival

Introduction
AUSLAND – Jefta van Dinther 
Skatepark – Mette Ingvartsen
BOCA COVA – Michelle Moura
steal you for a moment – Francisco Camacho & Meg Stuart
DREAM – Alessandro Sciarroni
The Voice – Rita Mazza
Mycelium – Lyon Opera Ballet / Christos Papadopoulos
MONT VENTOUX – Kor’sia
BEST REGARDS – Marco D’Agostin

Working in the independent dance field in Berlin provides you with an average gross income of €12,231 per year. With the proposed culture cuts of 50% Germany-wide and 12% in Berlin, the independent dance scene is under serious threat. Annemie Vanackere, director of Hebbel Am Ufer and host of Tanz im August festival, shares her worries about this increasing precariousness of the dance scene during her opening speech of the 36th edition of this prestigious international dance festival. Her urgent call for action to sign the petition and join the demonstrations, is underlined by the QR codes and protest flyers spread across the venue. I can’t help but think how cynical – and mind-blowingly frustrating – it is that these culture cuts (of course, always culture….) co-exist with our tax money going to support Israel’s murderous invasion. Things don’t get that political during the opening though. Ricardo Carmona, artistic director of Tanz im August, explains his activism with softer words. He introduces this year’s programme with an analogy of an archipelago, and invites us to explore the different landscapes, backgrounds, traditions and stories. To follow the different currents that create mutual dependence between the islands.

Vanackere and Carmona propose art as a spur to keep the world moving, to keep us from being lulled to sleep. Dance as an antidote to dehumanisation and as a moral compass towards a world we want to achieve. Three Springback writers took on the invitation, jumped into the waves, followed the currents and visited some Tanz im August islands. —AvZ

AUSLAND – Jefta van Dinther 

17.08.2024, Kraftwerk Berlin

The Swedish, Berlin-based choreographer Jefta van Dinther is a master in the creation of almost sacred worlds that invite audiences to enter stretches of time while remaining outsiders. His latest durational work, the dark, atmospheric AUSLAND, is no exception.

In Kraftwerk Berlin, the former concrete heat and power plant built in the 60s, now a dark, dusty industrial building, the first thing you encounter is a film screening based on Van Dinther’s former duet Dark Field Analysis. We see two naked bodies, facing each other, their feet touching.

‘Did you ever enter the body of somebody else?’
‘Yes’
‘I mean, literally getting under their skin?’

It’s fleshy; their bodies, their touches, their penises, their conversation. At times animalistic even. But always with a veil of robotic automatisation, suggesting avatars rather than humans.

AUSLAND by Jefta van Dinther. © Jubal Battisti

AUSLAND upholds this balancing act throughout its three-hour duration. On stained white mattresses we meet the full cast of nine for the first time, in thick worker outfits. They pull, caress and explore each other’s body parts. Aggressive at times, sexual at others, but always with a strange mix of attentiveness and indifference. The scene evolves while moving light bulbs in the periphery of my eye – small devices like those low robotic land mowers, roaming down the hallway – start demanding attention. Slowly, a bit hesitantly, I relocate myself around this new action. With this overlapping of scenes, Van Dinther guides us back and forth, up and down the cement halls. The baroque-ish soundtrack by Billy Bultheel accompanies us, alternated with the dancers singing. For example an endless repetition of the chorus of Wicked Game (‘I don’t fall in love… with you’).

There are moments of great beauty. I’m up close when one of the performers engages in an unexpectedly tender duet with a sound box. The game-like animation upstairs shows a kid jumping and pushing machinery to escape a continuous production of nothing – which not only criticises capitalism but also brings an ode to human determination. The last scene, of the nine performers fading like zombies in the mist as they shuffle through a corridor formed by the audience, is a poetic work of art. The collective singing in the golden light reminds me of medieval hymns.

The constant moving sometimes makes it hard to sink in, and the numbness of the dancers creates a distance that I don’t seem to overcome. I indeed wished for it to get deeper under my skin. But AUSLAND is an impressive tour de force, and the commitment of the dancers enforces nothing but respect. —AvZ

Skatepark – Mette Ingvartsen

17.08.2024, Haus der Berliner Festspiele

From a wide array of buoyant and ovation-ensuring urban dance practices, skateboarding – with its catalogue of virtuoso tricks and manoeuvres – was probably the last one to find its way on the dance stage. With Mette Ingvartsen’s surprisingly shallow although undoubtedly lively Skatepark, it’s job done. A titular skatepark is in fact set on stage: wooden ramps, pedestals and rails line the perimeter, leaving its centre to a crowd of locally recruited young (roller)skaters and street artists. A series of street culture references complement the set: corrugated tin panels, grid fencing topped by neon tubes, hoodies and masks, graffiti and electric guitars. Skaters start their jolts, twists and tricks before the lights go out and continue their parkour unabated for a major part of the showtime. Their jumps and swirls do channel the expected ‘wow’ effect and draw intermittent applause (the longest provoked by a simple handstand), but too many tricks end on the ground: the stage is simply too narrow for the skaters to gain enough speed and traction to execute anything other than a series of pops, ollies and flips. Except for a few circle-arounds, jumping contests and group scenes, the skaters resemble untied balloons swirling around the stage until they suddenly come to a restful halt atop a ramp.

Skatepark by Mette Ingvartsen. © Bea Borgers

Skatepark at times cautiously ventures out of the scope of mere (re)presentation when hoodied performers deliver hotblooded rap sequences, lurch and stagger with their boards aloft in an improvised punk gig that morphs into a bulging group scene generously served by strobing lights and bouncy soundtrack. Ingvartsen is well aware of the immediacy of joy delivered by these scenes that she seems to indulgently observe rather than direct; and it’s all the more startling that she does not even feign taking this show any further down the road. Performers come off as enthusiastic and masterful, but they too seem to lack guidance when the show repeatedly requires them to execute the same jumps and tricks over and again.

Inasmuch as Ingvartsen does not offer any context or critical inquiry into this arresting mix of sport and social practice, I leave the theatre puzzled: why bother bringing a skatepark to a theatre, and not the theatre public to a real skatepark? This undoubtedly spirited and sparkly show looks cramped even on the huge stage of Berliner Festspiele, and would have shone differently in its natural element, albeit at the expense of audience comfort. —EB

BOCA COVA – Michelle Moura

20.08.2024, Sophiensaele Berlin

From the start of BOCA COVA, it’s clear that the mouth plays an essential part. We’re seated on tribunes on four sides of the stage, and through a gap between two of them, three women enter the stage. Their mouths open and close rhythmically, steering the beat of their feet. Their loud breaths follow the gesture of the mouths. Inhale…. Exhale… Microphones on their foreheads pick up, transform and send the sound to speakers high up in the middle of the ceiling. The breath echoes back, as voices from above. They are their own goddesses.

Boca Cova by Michelle Moura. © Mayra Wallraff

They disappear but come back with a fourth woman this time, one from each corner. The constant pace, the vanishing and reappearing, and the production of sounds form the backbone of the performance. After a while, the lack of change in the dynamics starts to take its toll and some audience members leave. After a while, the lack of dynamic change starts to take its toll and some audience members leave – hard to do subtly in this square square setting, and disturbing the rest of us (read the room, please!). The expressive performers, and often humorous choreographic choices make up for these setbacks though. They create a circle, they spread their arms to the side (on the beat of course) and fold them back in front of their mouths. Do they want to silent themselves, do they keep something in? The answer comes quickly: on the next release of their mouths, out come splashes of saliva. It lands from four sides in the middle of the circle. Needless to say, the spit comes with a forceful sound.

In an accompanying podcast, Michelle Moura explains that boca cova means ‘grave mouth’. She drew inspiration from our insatiable human mouths, that eat eat eat, but hardly ever take responsibility for its destructive greed. With this work, she aims to transcend this exploitative, capitalist function of the mouth to a more sustainable, reciprocal one, in which we eat, but are food for other species as well. Literally becoming a vessel of food for another human by breastfeeding, made that unexpectedly tangible for her. And so made motherhood its way in her performance. The women moo like cows, the word transforming into a shouty MORE. Later, three create a tunnel, trying to push the fourth out of their collective birth canal.

An audience member starts breastfeeding the baby that she brought – and when one of the microphones accidentally picks up the sounds of the baby, we all of a sudden hear its cute gibberish beamed in from above. It’s a reciprocity that Moura could have only dreamt of. —AvZ

steal you for a moment – Francisco Camacho & Meg Stuart

23.08.2024, Radialsystem Berlin

At the end of steal you for a moment, Meg Stuart and Francisco Camacho lie on the floor, heads towards the audience. They talk casually. About how Meg has mispronounced Francisco’s name for over 30 years (luckily, he finds that cute and funny), how Francisco is obsessed with having identical stuff and clothes in both his houses on Sardinia and in Lisbon, and how Meg turns out to be more of a cat person than she thought.

They are friends, and have been collaborators on more than one occasion. It’s the first time in 30 years that they are on stage together, and this work gives some insight into their friendship. She seems to incite the action, and he follows her lead. So she puts on goggles with two light bulbs first, and then they both start exploring the space. She puts the long feathers in his hand, before they both start waving them. When she discovers their shadows on the walls, she loses interest in the plume, and they both start playing with the distance and proximity of the shadows.

Claudia Pajes you for a moment… Meg Stuart and Francisco Camacho

When he takes initiative and offers her a wooden triangle with a feather in it, she accepts it but only with a disdainful glance at the audience. Nevertheless, there is an implicit understanding between the two, a lightness, warmth and humour that is engaging. Their relationship and their exploratory natures seep through this otherwise quite puzzling performance.

According to the publicity text, the work is inspired by the Nuragic ruins of Sardinia, but that content, and what it actually entails, hardly reveals itself. It’s quite randomly referred to in the heaps of sand and the wooden pyramids scattered on the contrasting sterile and white floor. Camacho and Stuart enter carefully, as uninvited guests, scanning the surroundings with diagonal stretches of arms and legs. As time passes, they get more comfortable in colonising the space. They stamp on the sand – Stuart even pulls down her pants to seemingly pee on a heap – and dismantle the pyramids to create an armour for their own protection.

Despite this latter boldness, and musical relief – from PJ Harvey among others – their bodies stay restrained, their actions seemingly arbitrary. There is an unfulfilled desire for the performance to fly. But maybe that is the frustrating point of their exploration: digging in just doesn’t lead to breakouts. —AvZ

DREAM – Alessandro Sciarroni

24.08.2024, St. Elisabeth-Kirche

The first work I saw by Alessandro Sciarroni, Save the Last Dance for Me (2019), took place in a church. A high-octane duet inspired by the Bolognese folk dance Polka Chinata, it was perfectly suited to its setting in the oratory of Villa Cà Erizzo in Bassano del Grappa. The classical architecture resonated with the work’s preoccupation with history and tradition, and the small space heightened the sense of danger as the performers whipped around it at speed.

For Tanz im August 2024, Sciarroni’s DREAM (2022) is also staged in a former house of worship – Berlin’s St Elisabeth-Kirche. Yet the experience of viewing it couldn’t be further from the thrilling intensity of the Italian choreographer’s earlier work.

Alessandro Sciarroni, DREAM

Throughout DREAM’s five-hour duration, six dancers slowly morph between a series of poses, many of which seem to loosely reference positions from classical ballet and sculpture – a relaxed ‘fourth position’ of the arms here, a loose fist reminiscent of Rodin’s The Thinker there. Their metamorphosis is accompanied by a sparse soundscape of gentle piano compositions that, played by a live pianist, emerge and dissolve into silence like half-remembered melodies.

Sciarroni’s performers seem to be consumed in their own internal dream worlds, rarely interacting with each other or the audience. When they do, it’s merely to bring their limbs into closer proximity, their gazes remaining vacant and smiles lethargic, as if they’re not perceiving anything beyond their own corporeal experiences. It’s undeniably beautiful to witness people so tuned into their bodies, yet DREAM fails to transport the viewer into a similarly transcendent state. Instead, we remain firmly rooted in our Berlin reality: the sound of a nearby tram and the intense August sunshine bleeding through St. Elisabeth-Kirche’s open door and glass roof, the latter rendering Valeria Forti’s overhead lighting design redundant.

Despite a member of the artist team whispering to audience members that we’re supposed to wander and visit the dancers like artworks in a museum, most of us stick to the sides of the performance space. Why move when the church’s open-plan layout makes it possible to see all of the action from one fixed viewing point? Or when our footsteps risk disturbing DREAM’s tranquil atmosphere?

The lack of dynamic variation in DREAM means I’m ready to leave after about an hour. Upon exiting, I’m handed a 100-page novel by Sciarroni, also titled DREAM, about a society that decides ‘the voluntary peaceful extinction of humankind is the only possible alternative to the disappearance of thousands of plant and animal species’. It’s an engaging, timely concept, but its connection to what I’ve just seen feels as elusive as a forgotten dream. —EM

The Voice – Rita Mazza

28.08.2024, Sophiensaele

This short and sharp solo starts with an odd scene. Seated back towards the audience, Rita Mazza starts bubbling through a straw into a half-full glass of water. Amplified and cut with Mazza’s whistling breathing, the bubbly eructations take hold of the space while Mazza, still carrying the glass, slowly bends and warps their torso, organising their motion around contracting bellows of their ribcage. Their movements are limited to a small square at the centre of the stage flanked by a vertical black mirror. In parallel, the over-the-stage screen tells the story of Mazza’s recent quest to discover their voice. Deaf and a native signer, they have been taking speech therapy sessions ‘that don’t help them any more’. Mazza wonders ‘what does my voice look like’ and whether they would ‘find new hearing friends, or just get my coffee quicker’. Glass of water set aside, Mazza unravels a growingly anxious and physical solo accompanied by a startling exploration of their breathing and nascent voice: they wheeze and wail, inhale and exhale with raspy whistles and sudden hoarse cries. A knot of disquiet settles in my chest and won’t leave me until the very end. Half-knelt front stage and staring into the audience, Mazza extends their arms as if in a plea, then shields their chest before retracting upstage through a series of squats and statuesque poses that all translate angst and worry. Raquel Rosildete’s light design is remarkably efficient in its faithful reproduction of introverted unrest: Mazza’s crouched silhouette is often backlit, just a few dim spotlights are thrown onto glistening surfaces upstage or battle through a thin layer of smoke to paint intricate arabesques on the floor.

Rita Mazza in The Voice. © Mayra Wallraff

Unlike Mazza and several other spectators, I can hear and speak, and my experience of The Voice is essentially different from what a Deaf person would feel. Still, when Mazza declares via the overhead screen: ‘If I show my voice, I expose myself. If I hide it, I remain in control’ while letting go of a piercing exhaling yell, I am stunned to shivers. The Voice puts on display a nervous seesaw between longing for a release and a desire to keep control. Mazza’s intense armography, their constant eye contact with the audience and raspy breathing cut with shrieks breaking out from deep within their ribcage draw a bright triumphant metaphor of yearning. And it is this yearning that resonated with me the most: yearning to unearth old memories or to reveal a new self, to break free from old manners and quirks or to rekindle a withering love flame.

Mazza’s thrilling exploration of voice embodiment and longing carries a feeling of unbearable urgency, largely due to their unique stage presence and a careful balance between controlled refinement and generous, radical honesty – honesty that in a festival rich with convenient gimmicks and ploys designed to buy spectators’ attention, offers a brief experience of rapture. —EB

Mycelium – Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon / Christos Papadopoulos

28.08.2024, Haus der Berliner Festspiele

Earlier in Tanz im August, Jerôme Bel and art historian Estelle Zhong Mengual had presented their performance lecture Non human dances (2023). While it featured an interesting selection of dance works from throughout history (a reconstruction of Loie Fuller’s Serpentine Dance was particularly thrilling), these extracts were overpowered by patronising speeches explaining how successfully they represented non-human entities. They also stressed the importance of engaging with nature through dance to promote a more empathetic relationship between humankind and our cohabiting species, yet the earnest and pseudo-poetic tone seemed to provoke more incredulous laughs than meaningful reflections from the audience.

Lyon Opera Ballet in Mycelium, by Christos Papadopoulos

Six days later, Lyon Opera Ballet presented Christos Papadopoulos’ Mycelium, a 2023 work named after and inspired by entangled networks of underground fungal threads that similarly explores non-human intelligence, but without didactic exposition. Instead, Papadopoulos favours abstract physical imagery that demonstrates the beauty and intelligence of non-human life forms and allows audiences to draw their own conclusions.

Mycelium opens with Lyon Opera Ballet’s 20 dancers shuffling one by one onto stage. Their feet are in darkness, making them appear to float as their arms undulate gracefully like jellyfish tentacles. Gradually, they gravitate towards each other to form a tight cluster that, over the course of the hour-long performance, mesmerically expands, contracts, shapeshifts, dissipates and reforms like a living organism. For the most part, the dancers execute minimalist movements in impressive unison, seemingly alluding to the attunement typical of swarm intelligence. They jerk their heads, swing their knees, and jolt their shoulders repetitively side to side, at times breaking out into more complex and irregular movement patterns that look like a ping pong ball has been let loose inside their bodies.

Just as in nature, Lyon Opera Ballet’s strength lies in numbers: when individual dancers break away from the main nucleus, it becomes apparent that some are less comfortable embodying Papadopoulos’ unique movement language than others. Some of the most effective scenes take place in the latter half of the piece, when small groups perform sweeping runs toward each other across the stage, colliding before all moving together in the same direction like tides or winds finding their course.

Mycelium’s multi-layered score has all the intensity of a brewing storm. Populated by dull, muffled percussion and snake-like rattles, it builds and accelerates over time, creating an ominous atmosphere and – unlike Non human dances, which laments the fate of non-humans as if they are helplessly at our mercy – casting the onstage inhabitants as a force to be reckoned with. While humans are undoubtedly responsible for the extinction and endangerment of many species, Mycelium reminds us that nature is not as passive as we think. There’s a strong chance that one day it will give us a taste of our own medicine. —EM

MONT VENTOUX – Kor’sia

30.08.2024, Volksbühne Berlin

Supposedly based on new futures and the journeys that inspire them – namely poet Francesco Petraca’s ascension of the titular mountain peak which initiated the Italian renaissance – MONT VENTOUX, by Madrid-based collective Kor’sia, opens intriguingly. Behind a glass window that makes them look like specimens in a museum exhibit, a cast of nine dancers ooze in and out of the dirt-covered floor of the post-apocalyptic landscape that surrounds them. Before long, however, the work becomes a jarring flipbook of incongruous contemporary dance cliches, flitting between imagery, props and movement styles without giving anything time to develop.

Madrid-based company Kor’sia in MONT VENTOUX

Having broken free from the confines of their vitrine, the dancers perform impressive flips and tricks downstage, run and march in horizontal lines like militant Balenciaga models (several drape their bodies over shopping trolleys and are wheeled about like KO-ed club-goers transported home by their friends), skip nonchalantly, and grab onto each other’s limbs like mountaineers helping their group up a perilous peak.
References to classical ballet are thrown into this odd movement mix: when a curtain featuring an image of a mountain is lowered, making it appear as if the cast are reaching its summit, they all snap into a unison port de bras. The moment jars, and reinforces the stereotype that Western classical dance is the peak, purest form of movement.

Strobe lights and smoke machines frame the incongruous action, as does a pulsing, cinematic, techno score that seems to declare everything as epic, with no tonal light and shade. Still some elements of MONT VENTOUX’s production are undeniably impressive, a prime example being the glass window surging downstage as if we’ve zoomed in on our phone screens.

Many of these scenes overlap: while one dancer removes a suit of armour upstage behind the glass window, two others tangle limbs in a writhing downstage duet. It reminds me of how many interview videos on TikTok are accompanied by unrelated animated graphics to keep viewers entertained. (A dancer who appears momentarily on stage in a bright pink bunny mascot costume also seems to be a tactical ploy for our attention.) It seems that Kor’sia is creating for an audience of social media natives who can swipe from one idea to the next without needing thematic bridges or time to digest. That seems to work for many at this German premiere, which is met by rapturous applause. Maybe I’m just too millennial for this MONT VENTOUX. —EM

BEST REGARDS – Marco D’Agostin

31.08.2008, HAU 2

Today, my Instagram feed reminded me that ninety nine years ago Virginia Woolf had written to her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West: ‘My dear Vita, how nice it would be to get another letter from you – still better, to see you.’ In the age of social networks and messaging on the go, letter-writing has become a cornerstone of nostalgic musings on ‘slowing down’ and ‘we are living too fast’. Marco D’Agostin’s Best Regards is as its title suggests a fervent love letter to the epistolary genre. That falls short however on the ‘seeing’ part, which, as Woolf fittingly explained to me today, is ‘still better’.

Marco D’Agostin in BEST REGARDS. © Roberta Segata courtesy Centrale Fies

D’Agostin emerges from behind a bright LED curtain and strolls downstage to a mikestand. An easy speaker, he starts by greeting the audience. After a few heartfelt asides about the venue, D’Agostin explains that ‘Dear N’ lettered on the LED curtain refers to late DV8 Physical Theatre’s founder Nigel Charnock, a mentor of D’Agostin’s. ‘Dear N, you were too much,’ were the words with which dancer Wendy Houstoun opened her farewell letter a few days after Charnock’s death in 2012 – the same event that set D’Agostin on a lengthy exploration of his teacher’s heritage.

In a delighted and theatrically pensive voice, D’Agostin goes on with an insightful lecture about letter-writing and the history of postal stamps, peppered with half-clever reflections on letters’ different temporalities. As if lacking authoritativeness, D’Agostin convenes a string of literary celebrities: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Keats, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bishop, Rainer Maria Rilke and Calamity Jane appear in an unstoppable letter parade. These stories and quotes are all beautiful and sad, but their emotional charge fails to sink in, partly due to D’Agostin’s slightly pedagogic and monotonous delivery.

When the story arc brings us back to Charnock, D’Agostin finally segues into a more dynamic mode. Probably determined to embody Charnock’s ‘too much, too body, body’, D’Agostin motors on with boxing punches and splits, squats, twirls and jumps, freezes in dramatic poses reminiscent of fencing lunges or an Elvis Presley song finale, without ever forgetting to recite a mishmash of Houstoun’s letter, random banter and a pop-song that he’s written for Charnock. A flurry of props (a plastic cane, a bottle-shaped confetti cannon and even a bubble gun) is strangely coherent with D’Agostin’s sparkly dance routine, and brings together a poetic tragicomic atmosphere. The second part of the show appears however fractured and repetitive, reminding me of a poorly mixed poetry-dance slam that slowly morphs into a melancholic karaoke, when D’Agostin sings devotedly to a slightly cheesy piano beat and invites the audience to sing along.

A smart and tongue-in-cheek performer, D’Agostin walks the fine line between sad clownery and witty nostalgia and contrives to create a laid back and enjoyable atmosphere. His fervent and uncanny homage might have brought the audience quite far on the emotional scale, but it looks too tuned down and cautious to trigger any reaction other than nostalgic smiles. As for the main protagonists, I walked away knowing as much about D’Agostin and Charnock as I did when I came in. The latter might have been too much, Best Regards is nowhere near enough. —EB