Yvonne Sembene, Christina Ciupke & Darko Dragičević: I Need you Tonight

‘Tanznacht Expanded’ takes place at a small gallery space, Grüntaler 9 in Wedding, and consists of events taking place through November and December. The events include social dinners, performances, discursive formats, and workshops – all open to the public for free. Tanzfabrik’s new temporary space in Grüntaler 9 is intended to expand and engage its local community and beyond, something that is reflected in the events part of ‘Tanznacht Expanded’. On 5 November 2024, artist Christina Ciupke hosts the opening event, for the participants to cook and eat together. When I join the large table to cut a pumpkin, my neighbour asks me: “Could you tell me a fairytale?”. I answer by telling a Finnish story of a sunray and a night goblin and their journey through impossibilities to come together. This audience-oriented exchange prepares me to cater my imagination to meet with Tanznacht Expanded’s community thematic throughout the unfolding events.

With her Femcel Debutant Club (WT), Yvonne Sembene takes the audience on a political and historical journey on waltz. Her format of half-performance and half-lecture concludes into a collective speculation on the individual experiences with waltz.  She tells us that the waltz, a couple’s dance, was initially banned and named the Devil’s dance, as it brought the dancing bodies together, skin to skin. Now, Sembene is on her journey to reclaim the dance and its ballroom culture from its later militarisation, elitism, racism, and female submission. Her talk on how the Ballroom Culture moves, “ripples up and down” the different societal classes giving and taking, reminds me of Minna Salami’s (Sensuous Knowledge, 2020) take on how power to humans is akin to gravity to rivers: generating movement, ebbing, flowing, gushing, and is an essential life force. Sembene concludes: “People need Culture.”.
I say yes and exit the space, imagining culture as a power essential for us at large – to be moved and able to move.
 
In ‘Tanznacht Forum’ Hacking the Code over 12 and 13 November, political scientist Emilia Roig, dramaturg Mila Pavicevic, curator Renan Laru-an, and curator Felicitas Zeeden open a debate on analysing and understanding the current German political decisions, with their main question about what cultural institutions should and could do in these circumstances. Capitalist systems, Communist systems, movements between local and global, comparisons between care work and artistic work, classism, elitism, and racism as topics are swirling around the space. The discussion centres around the urge for a community while constantly jumping back and forth between imaginative utopias and desires to find practical solutions. The diverse ideas tightened by a collective fear and grief felt in the room dizzy me: the topics are burning, as Laru-an notes. The conversation around what systems, structures and connections we can reimagine, where we direct energy, and how a community is fostered synergizes into a synesthetic experience in my body – I’m scorching with the topics. Roig’s steady prompting of the need to support skills in imagination becomes a rhythmic beat of perspective aesthetics: finding viewpoints that encompass multiple perspectives. A synesthetic state of being neurologically is based on the formation of connections in the brain between functional centres that are not normally connected. Due to this new connection our sensuous knowledge surfaces, allowing materials to organize anew in our perception, feeding our imagination, and impacting our future acts. 

‘Tanznacht Expanded’ touches on its curational mission to collective expansion through the chemistry of international and local guests coming together and expanding their knowledge and practices of what and how to be together. As a participant, my memories of the COVID-19 lockdowns emerge; when the act of coming together was monitored and policed, and how at this moment in many places of the world, many are restricted by law to stay isolated and are unable to form groups. Coming together and building a community is a political act, a societal privilege and essential to remember and to practice, always. At the Forum, Roig argued that “realization of the power of collective thoughts and belief” will save us, and to echo her and all the artists, facilitators, and participants of ‘Tanznacht Expanded’, I’d like to extend the invitation to dance together by sharing through the courtesy of Darko Dragičević , Ciupke’s collaborator in, Compilation of favourite tracks to dance with the audience-made playlist and to end to the words of the artist Ulay:
 
“Creation implies a desire for Community!”