Anna VI — Floating Gaps

* remnants of cut up performance clothing *

background of the performance series «Anna ...»

This performance is the sixth version of the series in which I approach the cosmos and the figure of my mother Anna. It is also the transformation of a forgotten past, which I bring into the now, and with which a new, challenging and possibly also irritating situation is created. With each new version I expand the material. This time I am building a bridge from my mother, who loved to dance - she was particularly fond of the 'Bödele', a tap dance form from Central Switzerland that she had learned from her father - to my background in postmodern dance. Impulses from my dance apprenticeship years in New York in the 1980s overlap with the publication «Floating Gaps» and resonate in this performance.

Floating Gaps is the memory gap

«Every short text about a performance always comes across as a silent promise. In the 'gap' between reading this text and redeeming it in the performance, which is also a performance about performance and the human condition, I do the balancing act between the book covers of «Floating Gaps», between dance and performance, the performance venue General Public and the audience present. The context writes along with performance.»

This short description is used to announce the performance, is a guide for the script: From the publication «Floating Gaps» I take cultural theoretical and philosophical quotations, statements by artists on the performance situation in Basel in the 1970s and 80s, statements by the editors and photos. The patina of the black-and-white photos provides the formal framework: my clothing with black trousers and white blouse as well as black men's shoes and a top hat; the wooden slats made of elder branches, which are sprayed with white colour and to which cardboard panels with photocopied book illustrations are attached; a black men's umbrella and a white napkin as blindfold, and my white MacBook as playback device. I enrich this material with a subtext derived from my knowledge of the canon of postmodern dance of the 1960s/70s and its offshoots in New York in the 1980s. During these years I trained as a dancer 'on site' in New York. The protagonists of this scene were, among other things, the impulse generators for performance in Switzerland and are mentioned accordingly in the book. Therefore, I create additional panels showing some of the protagonists of postmodern dance such as Anna Halprin, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti and others.

The gallery space of the General Public is located on the ground floor of a residential and office building and measures about 70 m2. It can be divided into a small, 'back' and a larger, 'front' area by means of a folding sliding door. The folding door remains open during the performance. The front room is well lit; here the spectators sit close together, along the walls, on empty, white plastic beverage crates. With the audience in the space it gets tight and I don't have much room to move. I leave the back room in the dark, this is where I have deposited my material for the performance.

After a dance introduction - I move horizontally on the floor with a top hat and umbrella to music from the 1980s - I blindfold myself. I ask the audience to act as my eyes, to navigate me around the room, to help me find the panels that are stacked up in the back room. Depending on which panel I pick up, chance decides how the performance continues, which memory threads I pull and which situation in the space emerges. With my memory performance, the momentary orientation in the space and with the support of the audience present, I try to conjure up past moments and stories into the exhibition space. With the help of archive material, I translate these into situations and images on siteith the help of archive material I translate them into situations and images on site.

script