Dance and other Drugs (Or how to stop Time)

The French poet Charles Baudelaire commanded us late romantics to always stay intoxicated. ‘It is time to be drunk!’ he wrote in 1864. ‘So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk!’ I guess I took it a bit too literally. I should have known not to listen to the old bore.

* * *

It all started two weeks before Springback Academy. A new chapter to an old tale: virus infection, paracetamol, paracetamol, vitamin D, paracetamol, zinc, vitamin C, and so on. An all too familiar formula. As a result, cancelling became my main refrain: cancel a performance, cancel a promised review… And meetings? Cancel, cancel, cancel.

One could assume that it would pass well in time. When I arrived in Germany, I was eager to meet new people and satisfy my thirst for dance: reflect, discuss, learn, write… In line with this thinking, my body decided to say yes to all outside impulses. Yes, to impatient excitement, and a resounding YES to another virus (or was it all the same?).

The formula had to be adjusted: caffeine, paracetamol, caffeine, paracetamol, sleeping pills mixed with vitamin C and zinc… It made for an impactful cocktail. I walked from show to show in a frenetic thrill, the focus flickering like in a Gaspar Noé film. It still lingers in my head as a hallucinatory trip, a dive through the rabbit hole of…

The Feverish Sensations

before, after, and – most of all – during the performances.

I could feel my tingling limbs, shivering even as a hot sensation crawled over me, spreading through my upper body and head. After 40 minutes in plush theatre seats, I was soaked to the bone in sweat. Living two places simultaneously: my mind on the stage and in my own mini-performance, invisible to the surroundings. Before me, dancing bodies transmitted their infectious energy through the room. Within me, I was melting away rather than spreading.

Once this thorough examination was complete, I got my prescription: a review every morning and every night. On my ‘dance high,’ I woke before six in a feverish dream. The perfect sentences came to me in a haze, illuminating the dance, the universe and everything in between.

I must confess I am still drinking from the same pond while writing this, with an inexplicable warmth caressing my face. When I give it free rein, I can’t promise it won’t run wild!

* * *

As I look back, I cannot escape the longing for all I DID NOT SEE.

21st March: 9pm, Darmstadt. Lying in the darkness of my hotel room, preparing to sleep, blood pumping in my ears, I was still hoping this was a one-day thing. About Tom Cassani’s Iterations, Hannah wrote that ‘the more delicately he deconstructs his act, the more astounding it becomes.’

22nd March: 2pm, Wiesbaden. I sat motionless in the hall while strong techno beats emanated from behind the door. I felt grateful to have dodged that bullet, skipping what would have been pure torture for my aching head. A ‘shared tour the force’, Simina related appreciatively in her review of Born by the Sea, that ‘finally morphs, through jolting gestures, into a stiff embrace – a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment of tenderness as the stage fades to black.’

23rd March: 2pm, Mainz and 4pm, Wiesbaden. It is all a blur: I was waiting in the same halls with a touch of regret (in many directions, mostly wanting to be able to see it all). Luke saw ‘dark magic at work’ in Bless the Sound that Saved a Witch like Me, adding that it was ‘a thrill to be under Veyrunes’ spell’. In REFACE, Robin found ‘all the ingredients of a work that will undoubtedly find its posterity and make you want to relive, maybe, reface the journey.’

To relive the journey is to trace racing thoughts and impressions as they fade into memories. And these memories follow no journey at all. Frozen, like images in a photo album, they develop their own story, freed from the restrictions of time. We perceive time as motion. While we were buzzing from performance to performance, and reliving everything in endless nightly dream excursions, it flew by. Yet looking back, every moment seems expanded and filled to the brim. In contrast, the hours of lonely stillness in between have receded to an instant, replaced by images of what could have been, what I could have seen.

* * *

As I mentioned, this was not exactly the first time. My body and I have a strained rapport. So, we have come to a mutual understanding: We usually split apart when we attend a performance. I watch the piece, then I listen (patiently, with a parental, weary sympathy) to the list of complaints my body puts forth. With perfect aesthetic disinterest I observe the travails of the performer and my body at once, careful to keep the two from clashing. (My apologies to Kant, but trust me: it’s a futile task…)

Being a dance critic is quietly terrifying – when the curtain falls, the object of study is gone. You are left to do justice to a moment in time all by yourself. At Spring Forward, on the other hand, I experienced a different form of criticism. In the embrace of a collective of brilliant minds, each individual writer could come to their own conclusions safe in the knowledge that their words would be complemented and modified by other perspectives: a critical hive-mind.

Fatigue was the last performance on my review list. I was particularly looking forward to it as the premise seemed to resonate with my state of mind (a rare occurrence!). As I was lulled into its slow and aloof repetition, I wondered if this might actually be it: a mixture of beauty and frustration, time passing immeasurably slowly and simultaneously rushing by without giving me a chance to react. Yet the performance ultimately reached an infuriating climax, and this time I was the one to write about it: ‘I left the theatre drained, unsure whether the chaotic ending represented a cheeky joke at our expense, or merely a collapse into self-absorbed aesthetic nonsense.’

Marína Srnka