Beckett Walk V — a ghost dance
performance intervention
* from the script *
«Beckett Walk ...» is series of works with performances, interventions, videos and installations.
«Beckett Walk» in the title refers to many things: to a man of letters and his still current texts - Samuel Beckett -, to a work that belongs to the canon of art history - Bruce Nauman's video work «Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) 1968» - to the latent risk of losing balance, of losing face, to landscape and our relationship to nature and our relationship as a whole to life in all its stratifications.
initial situation
I choose a ravine of houses in WankdorfCity as the location. The location, with steep grey walls to the left and right, defines a limited space for movement. It supports sound and voice. There, I can quote ghost words and tell of ghosts that haunt me in this dance, which is performance with a collective embrace: the ghost words of Jacques Derrida from the 1983 film «Ghost Dance» by Ken MCMullen, the ghosts of my upper parts with head, neck and arms, which are going skywards, the ghosts of my lower half with pelvis and legs which are going earthwards and underground. How 'above' and 'below' could connect, in this spirit dance that is being invented here, and how to enter into the spirit dance with everyone who is here. Do we need ghost dances today, are we in a time of crisis?
The name 'Ghost Dance' can be found on the internet not only in Ken MCMullen's film, but also in many pieces of music. And it is reminiscent of a Native North American religious crisis cult that took place in two manifestations around 1870 and around 1890. Those in power saw it as a conspiracy, the preparation for an uprising. The Ghost Dance movement is in the spiritual tradition of trance dances and represents a last, largely peaceful social movement of the conquered against the subjugation and destruction of their livelihoods and traditional cultures.
Whether this dance in a ravine of houses in WanddorfCity is able to invoke spirits, and which spirits it invokes depends on whether and how the people present enter into this ghost dance. It only works collectively, in community.