“Ket-Sui/Die Entscheidung,” Ten Pen Chi art labor
16 October 2010
Direction, Concept, and Installation: JoaXhim Manger
Choreography: Yumiko Yoshioka and Team
Dock 11, Berlin
“Not a Hit…but there shoulda been!”
I found out about the show through tanzforum.de. Strangely, there were only two performances listed this evening in Berlin and the surrounding area. I chose this show over “” because, the online material for the latter show made it appear to be more of a film/performance piece than straight up dance, and after being quarantined for the entire week with a cold, I was ready to see some live movement. Tickets were purchased at the door, the Studentermäßigung bringing it from 15€ to 5€. The comparatively high price for a ticket at a performance at Dock 11 led me to a heightened expectation of the quality and notoriety of the choreography and performance.
At the door, we were asked in German and English to turn off our mobile devices, and then invited to sit where we’d like and encouraged to move around during the piece as we saw fit. My curiosity was peaked, especially since seating is a central concern for me as a researcher, but it also creates different spectators. More mobile to be sure, but also engaging with our more human, perhaps less critical eye. (Merleau-Ponty writes that we can use an objective eye—which seems to cover both the “objective” eye of science as well as Sartre’s somewhat neurotic gaze of the other—but that our daily means of seeing other people is one which instantly recognizes them as being like ourselves.[1]) Alas, this piece played primarily front and center, and those who were more creative with their seating arrangements soon regretted the liberty they’d taken and moved toward the “front” of the stage.
The set itself was remarkable (and the image of it on the website contributed to my coming to the performance). The stage was a platform about three feet in height, covered with Astroturf (if that is the correct name for the faux-grass used on miniature golf courses), populated by round objects and bored through with holes approximately two feet in diameter. In the center hung a long pole with an end shaped like a putter, apparently composed of foam tubing covered by tape. A sound engineer (later shown to be a DJ) stood behind his deck in the back right corner.
The piece began with a single hand slowly rising out from one of the holes. The first tacit question was thus answered: are the dancers already under the stage, or will they enter from off-stage? Although at first I took the hand as something of an androgynous aesthetic object, I soon gendered the arm as male based on the rather defined triceps as the upper arm. Another arm emerged, and I noticed that it was also a right hand, and thus belonging to a different person (although using opposite hands would have suspended this judgment and widened my expectation of what lurked beneath these two holes into something monstrous…think of Luke, Hans, Leah, and Chewy in the intergalactic compost bin). As feet emerged from the holes, something akin to racial determination emerged: I concluded that these were the appendages of the same persons by noticing first the conformity of the parts of the slightly darker-hued performer, and then applied this same matching technique to the dancer whose arm first emerged. This section of entering the stage by parts continued until at least portion of each of the dancers was visible. After the arms and legs, pelvises covered by flesh-colored cloth slowly materialized, prompting my final question, “will the dancers be topless or not?” This question was put to bed by a gargantuan nipple.
To be perhaps overly neat, the first few minutes posed and answered at least four questions. Are the dancers under the stage? (yes) What sex is this person? (male in the first instance) Do the extremities emerging from different holes belong to the same person? (no, provisionally answered via skin pigmentation) Will there be female nudity? (yes)
(While at least the last of these three questions would be summoned before academic tribunals under charges of sexism, racism, and male-gaze-ism,[2] this blog is something of an investment in honesty. I don’t find the questions or even answers particularly harmful in themselves. Additionally, such readings might be helpful for choreographers to bear in mind.)
All of the dancers eventually emerged. Based on the name of the company and the central photos, I had in mind that this was a company based in Asia. When the dancers disinterred themselves it became clear that this was not an Asian company peopled by virtuosic teens and twenty-somethings. All of the men had their heads shaved or clipped very close, and their hairlines suggested they were no longer in their early twenties. (I’m annoyingly aware of my attention being drawn to this fact since own hairline began its strategic retreat long ago, aging me in a way that my visage alone wouldn’t.) No doubt in part due to the fact that, at 34, I can be called an "old" dancer, I prefer seeing dancers with some experience (in the studio, on the stage, and in life). Unfortunately he ineluctable charm of the piece—or my willing submersion in the slowly stirring world of the earlier section of the piece—was disrupted as the dancers started to snake across the stage. While the bodily aptitude of some was evident in how they sloughed out of their holes, the premonition based on the awkwardness of others’ emersions was not to be ignored. Some of the performers looked wooden compared to the careful, serpentine undulations of others. This performativity continued into their interactions with the turf-covered balls. Some interacted with them awkwardly, but without conveying the sense that this was indeed some primal encounter.
All of the dancers eventually emerged. Based on the name of the company and the central photos, I had in mind that this was a company based in Asia. When the dancers disinterred themselves it became clear that this was not an Asian company peopled by virtuosic teens and twenty-somethings. All of the men had their heads shaved or clipped very close, and their hairlines suggested they were no longer in their early twenties. (I’m annoyingly aware of my attention being drawn to this fact since own hairline began its strategic retreat long ago, aging me in a way that my visage alone wouldn’t.) No doubt in part due to the fact that, at 34, I can be called an "old" dancer, I prefer seeing dancers with some experience (in the studio, on the stage, and in life). Unfortunately he ineluctable charm of the piece—or my willing submersion in the slowly stirring world of the earlier section of the piece—was disrupted as the dancers started to snake across the stage. While the bodily aptitude of some was evident in how they sloughed out of their holes, the premonition based on the awkwardness of others’ emersions was not to be ignored. Some of the performers looked wooden compared to the careful, serpentine undulations of others. This performativity continued into their interactions with the turf-covered balls. Some interacted with them awkwardly, but without conveying the sense that this was indeed some primal encounter.
Rather than walking the reader through the piece, I would like to center upon a few themes and moments relevant to the purpose of this blog. The first is when the dancers were all grouped upstage in a kind of techno-trance. They incorporated the swimming brontosaurus like hand gestures with their club-inspired movement, which was very effective for me. Having centered my attention at the beginning of the piece upon the watery hand and its supple wrist, I had a new appreciation for its exquisite movement, and how the body strains—not in vain—for this fluidity. This visual orgy was disrupted doubly by the first swinging of the gigantic putter, which is where my interest in the piece puttered out. The dancer aiming the pendulum-putter at the ravers maneuvered it with a theatrical—well, balletic—affectation that seemed from a universe distant from the primordial world we’d inhabited up to this point. The ravers all successfully, then predictably, evaded the foam-padded pendulum, which was recovered and swung again with an effort decipherable even in the cheap seats at an opera house.
Unfortunately, we weren’t in an opera house. I was able to suspend my disbelief for the Safety First® golf club, but I simply couldn’t with the emoting. Throughout the remainder of the piece, the performers made greatly efforted evasions of obviously non-threatening objects and opponents. I kept thinking of the movie, Staged Beauty. I had watched the previous night, where the female-playing male actor Ned Kyneston is criticized for willfully submitting Desdemona to her death for the sake of beauty, and not even putting up a fight. In the same sense, I wanted to see more of a fight, at least some actual interaction between the dancers. In a post-Bausch world, you can’t pull punches, and you can’t swoon either. (The Bausch comparison is perhaps unfair, but the elevated stage of Astroturf certainly does evoke her Sacre.) And nearly fifty years after the advent of Contact Improvisation, I can’t take a dancer seriously who can’t engage with another dancer. Instead Entscheidung is a dance about human relations without humans physically interacting.
Yet my hesitation about just how familiar some of these dancers were with their nooks and crannies did make one moment quite thrilling. During one episode, a dancer holding a putter took calibrated swings at arms, legs, and heads which ducked back into their holes evade his highly emotive chops (he stopped before he would have hit them anyway). The disgruntled golfer then stomped around the stage wielding a golf club in each hand, and their whiffing through the air quite visibly shook up the spectators. Two audience members left directly after this point, and I wonder if they shared my distrust in the putter-gone-postal. Although I couldn’t distinguish all of the dancers (there were six), some of them did not have my trust as being in control of their bodies. Was this guy swinging clubs a few feet from my face one of them? This is obviously snobbish, but the dance stage sets a high bar for movement; I don’t think it has to be virtuosic or even “dancey,” but my expectation is that it’s thoroughly intended.
The floor itself provided me with the only encounters with pain in the piece. I winced inwardly watching one dancer slide across the Astroturf, be surmised that it must not be painful based not upon the lack of any grimace on her face, but because this was a repeat performance and she had neither padding nor scars on her knees. Some of the spectators shouted in shock as the putting iron slammed against the ground after “narrowly” missing the arms, legs, and heads of the semi-subterranean dancers. The dancers also navigated between these holes without once stumbling. In fact, if it were the choreographer’s desire to pull the spectators into the piece more, some acknowledgment of this potential danger could be made readable. The stage captivated me as something of a mysterious entity. Dancers emerged from, I assume, grands plies, but the movement was so uniform that it appeared as if they were raised by elevators. It also seemed magnanimous to occupy a space associated with more modest scenery (and budgets).
After quietly sitting through a piece of whatever length, this is the time for the house to…what? Emote? Respond? Evaluate? Laud? Condemn? Vocally and corporally exercise? When the time for applause came, I felt immediately bifurcated into a displeased person and a supportive person. I like to think of myself as a supportive viewer, as someone who generally enjoys dance, but in retrospect I was put off by the piece. I’d been rather bored for at least half an hour, but I felt somehow irked and indignant. I couldn’t believe—and was for whatever reason offended—that a choreographer would coach dancers toward such kitchy interactions. Shall I applaud or not? We’ll chalk it up to my southern hospitality that I clapped. This was no doubt aided by the fact that one of the dancers looked right at me, and I was struck with humanity. That, as a dancer, it’s pretty seldom that you get to be in a piece you can stand behind, and not just dance in. Ariel also brought up a good point: sometimes choreographers have to set a piece just to get it out of their systems, because it won’t let you pass until it’s been acknowledged and worked through.
[1] “Positing the other does not reduce me to the status of an object in his field, nor does my perception of the other reduce him to the status of an object in mine” (Phenomenology of Perception, p. 405). Objectification only happens with an “inhuman look” (414).
[2] On gazes, male and otherwise, check out the following website:
Most of the material here is based out of film studies, which is far ahead of dance studies in considering the different sorts of gazes we employ when perceiving others.
