L'animoteur 14 — donkey stor(i)es
intervention and ritual in public space in Płocku Poland
* drawings by © Caroline Bagnall *
On the last day of the festival, Carolina spread out all the drawings on the stage in the lecture hall, which she had made during all the performances. It was impressive to walk along all these drawings and thus viewing the performances.
report by Dorothea Rust on Dorothea Schürch's performance «Audioscore — aula — 19.07.2023» in the auditorum of the museum
Dorothea Schürch sneaks onto the stage from the side, sits down on a chair, puts on high heels that are on the floor in front of her, stands up, looks in our direction, hums a little, shakes a bit on the high heels and then gets off the high heels again. Her clothes, black pants with pleats, a top made of lace and the high heels that have obviously been repaired over and over again with tape, on closer inspection they look pretty 'crooked'. Now from a distance and on the whole she is an elegant appearance. From the very beginning, ever since she 'mounted' her shoes, she has been holding a Turkish shopping bag with her hands pressed against her body, kneading and gripping it with her hands, pressing her fingers into it. The volume of the bag inflates and shrinks ever more violently in her hands, emitting loud squeaking noises as it grows louder, which could represent a crude version of the breathing mechanism. Dorothea Schürch, on the other hand, now that she raises and lowers herself on her half-points and uses her breath in a finely dosed and multi-layered way, does sound and vocalize out of a deep listening. She opens up a rich cosmos of articulation and toning, we are drawn into her differentiated proceeding and can watch how timbre, sound and words are formed.
Her demeanour with movement, sounding and vocalising in its own restrained yet determined way conceals more than it cheaply reveals, turning each articulation into something special. Enthralling wordscapes are developed through a megaphone and a machine translating her text into polish language. She is lip-synching what the machine says. The text reveals her personal ’apoteca’ farmacy containing all sorts of ’cultural’ pills from bitter ones to seducing and anaesthetizing ones and more. The lipsync with the machine creates an irritating shift of «Who is speaking here?», as well when Dorothea repeats the Polish words, asking for approval or correction from the audience. This creates a very animated exchange between the audience and her.
Dorothea Schürch delves here, as she explains it, into the «deep listening of the sounds of unfamiliar wordscapes ... My Deep Translator medicine has the shape of an audioscore, a listening score with a Polish monologue ...» so to speak, into the 'business' of articulation with all its details and fine-tuning. She literally performs in front of us a complex process that, in speaking and translating into another language, in using another vocabulary, can open up a whole world of mutual interaction and understanding.
report by Dorothea Rust on Anina Müller's «GRWM, performance» in the GRWM, performance in the hall of temporary exhibitions of the museum
With GRWM (GET READY WITH ME), Anina Müller takes us into the world of influencers, and mentions pretty quickly that we can follow her on insta.
As a literal red rose, she sits at a make-up table with all the paraphernalia, which leads us into a beauty parlour. We are immediately wooed, on the one hand by her extraordinary clothing: her face framed by a kind of bonnet representing rose petals, her long and slender body fluttered by a transparent dark red dressing gown whose hems are finished with feathers, her feet in fancy slippers. With her legs crossed she sits on the chair in front of the make-up table, half turned away from the audience she tells us how she became the big red rose, when film turned from black into white and now explains us the 7 steps to become a beauty: like step 1 'close your eyes and feel the beauty withing by breathing, like step 3 ’applying a red file to the skin so that the pores open up and the skin becomes rosy ... like stage 5, ’how long fingernails represent the thorns of the rose and how those nails say «I am the boss» when shaking the hand upside or «I’m not the boss» when shaking hands downside with someone. The performance is a surreal scenario referring to pop-culture, inverting stereotypes. She reveals her coveted beauty secrets and also gives career tips on how to maintain your image as a symbol of love without becoming a trashy sex symbol.
As an influencer and femme fatale, she transforms every prejudice and stigma of female beauty into a potent strategy of female potency and even brings in the old-fashioned curlers. Her text is very cleverly composed and the interaction with the Polish translator, she interacts with him linguistically and gesturally, is deftly choreographed in timing, which keeps the translation very lively.
report by Dorothea Rust on Andrea Saemann's and Chris Regn's double performance «The narrative Variation of Lady Godesses and Translocal Spirits» in the auditorium of the museum
Chris and Andrea hand out personally cropped black and white photos from the performance of «Lady Goddesses». It's a stage play/performance from the 70s that was once important to the Swiss and Basel scene and has various phases of afterlife, one of which is happening here on stage in Plock. These cut-off pieces look like fans or skirts and encourage us the audience to move them fluttering in the air. Then Andrea and Chris climb onto the stage, in their outfit: black gymnastics trousers with a black top – reminiscent of gymnastics uniforms from the reform era of the last century –, on their feet they wear pink gymnastic socks with a conspicuously sewn-on white flower. The same flowers are also part of the sash Chris wears, Andrea wears a kind of chain shirt reminiscent of the S&M outfit, the two differ in their 'sashes.
Chris immediately begins by outlining the play/performance project of the «Lady Goddesses», a project made explicitly by women for women's issues. Here, an attempt is made to create a sequence of scenes that is very complex in itself, which allows us to look into this stage play of yesteryear: part 1 ’matriarchy, mothers and daughters with bloody livers, Demeter and Persephone’; part 2 ’the female body, sewn into geometric things, no heterosexual pleasure’; part 3 ’New York, thinking about freedom, disco and rape’; part 4 ’chess and grandmasters, thinking about the role of women’; and so on ... until part 12.
The project «Lady Goddesses» spirals across their time into other times through the lives of these women and through Chris' and Andreas' staging here on the spot in Plock. Chris winds their portraits around her head, which gives them back a physical quality and at the same time has a tinge of documentation. It is a great challenge to create performatively a map based on the «Lady Goddesses».
Andrea spreads out 7 thematic fields calling them 'battle fields’. As analogue neon signs they are written in Polish and German on cardboard and put on the stage floor. Andrea invites each of us to choose ones own personal 'battle field’.
In addition to the extensive textual body they read and recite (and which Maglosia translates on the spot), there is no shortage of performative action: For example, when Andrea makes a plumb bob hanging from her chain shirt swing between her legs while reciting and narrating how she becomes aware of Lucy Iragaray's theory of female genital lips rubbing against each other, and connects this with Carole Schneemann's «interior scroll», and this in turn with what was narrated before about the «Lady Goddesses». Finally, the action also reminds us of ’pole dance’. The performance by Andrea Saemann and Chris Regn is also about the reference to movements of the 70s, which expanded from the artistic to the terrorist: Niki de St. Phalle and Ulrike Mainhof, the latter writing much of emotion in her struggle against prison conditions, are also brought to the stage.
This battlefield of compulsory speech with all its obsession for details has something of a long continuous performance, which Chris and Andrea try to bring into a compressed form without losing the precision of the facts told. The whole thing is resolved at the end by another performative action the cancan dance «My legs, your legs» an atmost cheerful and animated action, with many in the audience dancing along and swinging their legs forward.