Inky Lee, Milla Koistinen, Dance Intensive: String Figures & Becoming-With

I am here for picking up the string of a storyline that will soon move on, knot, retreat, move forward and twist until it finds you or misses you. In the end, either culmination is (im)perfectly alright. We must learn how to receive the string, how to become-with; how to, in Haraway’s words “become response-able” to the living around us. 

A ribbon gets stretched very slowly in space, fingers running along the soft looking fabric. From the air, the ribbon is guided towards the floor, stabilized with two fingers, and then pulled along the floor lines. It passes right by my feet. When the performer’s arms seemed to no longer be able to pull any further apart, I instantly place my finger on the ribbon to support the performers mission, following an impulse of my body. Just then, my mind starts to switch on. Straight away, I start asking myself whether it is intended for the audience to pick up the ribbons or not? Whether the piece really wants to invite interaction? Triggered by this spiral of thoughts, I quickly withdraw my finger.  

A moment of true surrender to an interaction, over in a flash. I was in the audience watching Say Surrender, Stay developed by choreographer Milla Koistinen together with the Dance Intensive programme of Tanzfabrik Berlin. Closing my eyes from time to time, the humming in the soundscore and my heightened awareness from the rhythm and setting of the whole piece, created a tingling feeling and expansion in my body. De-centering the vision gave space to all other senses, I perceived what was behind, besides, and above. Also, my back opened up to the room. Inhaling into expansion, exhaling into surrendering. I was deeply immersed in the work, in a somehow individual and at the same time collective in-between, which invited me to focus not only on things happening around but with me. In quiet concentration, sitting in-between the performers and audience members, I followed the conscious movements sometimes the ones further away and sometimes the ones directly in front of me. The darkened, large studio space was reduced to the absolute essentials, namely the people in it, with performers and audience often mingling imperceptibly. Soft spotlights flooded the room and shrouded it in dim light.  Snails of enrolled ribbons got unrolled, in a soft rhythm, gestures of offering and receiving took place, ribbons got stretched in space, forming, reforming networks over the course of the evening. They intersected, interweaved, had their own and shared lives, sometimes rising above the heads of performers and observers, sometimes meandering close to the ground and between us. The lights cast grid-like, elongated shadows on the floor as they met three rectangles of bars reaching up to the ceiling, spread across the space. This created a beautiful geometric reflection, mirroring the connecting lines of the ribbons woven throughout the room. The bodies moved deliberately, sometimes pausing by leaning against each other, resting on shoulders or laps, only to move through the room more dynamically again. A collective weaving, in a shared flow of becoming together. 

I reached out with my gaze for another string, gliding over neon yellow-coloured wool, finding a knot that clung tightly to a waist. The string was going to be cut in the next moment with a pair of scissors held by the very same performer. I  was now in the re-staged performance of Floating Roots by artist and writer Inky Lee¹, observing the repetitive actions of the performers. They paced across the stage in straight lines with deliberate steps. From time to time, their neutral gazes met, connecting for a moment, only to move apart again. Some of the performers held large spools of neon strings which were unwound and stretched taut as they walked through the space. At times, the strings were selectively attached to another performer’s hip or wrapped around a body. Visible, but also invisible, inventive lines of connection were drawn between the performers, who sought kinship in each other’s stories as they talked about their experiences of isolation, racism, queerphobia and alienation as descendants of Asian immigrants in Germany and Austria. The auto-biographical excerpts were shared via an off-stage soundscape and also via two deaf performers who translated into International Sign Language. Stories were woven together before our eyes, buzzing from the desire to belong, but also from the desire to cut the connection, to slip out of the net and to conquer the power of singularity, which is ambivalently longed for and feared at the same time.  

Becoming together without remaining alone? Both pieces in Tanzfabrik Berlin’s #11 FOLD under the title ‘Weaving Collectivities’ dealt with sensual forms of integration and social cohesion. In doing so, both works managed to stretch the view, to expand it to include all the stories taking place, to pivot from a central perspective to the periphery.  This wide-ranging view encompasses the entire community and makes the lines of connection visible. In the Introduction of her book Staying with the Trouble the biologist and feminist-ecologist thinker Donna J. Haraway writes: «Staying with the trouble requires making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other or not at all. » She describes the staying with the trouble as a state that allows us to persevere with the unknown and not seek false refuge in security and stability. This also includes surrendering to collectivity, giving up control, building trust and accepting risks. Weaving together and thus visualizing the individual stories and voices that are part of these networks is a way to get moving, to also move history. Staying with the trouble –  remaining restless, continuing to be in motion and creating the collective weave in the worldliness of all possible fruitful companions – helps us to break out of the individual stagnation, paralysis and inner resistance that so often overcomes us in the face of social upheavals and crises. At least for me, I walked into that night with blurred boundaries and an open mind.