Selin Davasse, vAL, Agata Siniarska a.k.a. TATARI, in artistic collaboration with rat milk : The Golden Hour: The ACROSS Festival Accompanied Us into the Night

Elisa Frasson / November 2024

ACROSS Festival, now in its third edition, is a transgenerational, multi-genre performance, concert, and workshop programme in Berlin-Wedding that runs from September to December, free and open to all, curated by Malte Pieper, Nitsan Margaliot, and Maj Smoszna. By working on specific urban spots in Wedding, it creates lasting and temporary creative and relational communities.

IMMERSE YOURSELF IN THE CITY

In the late afternoon of Saturday 19 October, I had the opportunity to navigate between Rathausvorplatz and Galerie Wedding through performative and city bodies, exploring proximity, intimacy, comfort and, at the same time, discomfort in an important shifting of physical and mood states.

The performances located in the city, on stages that are not stages in the classical sense, offer total immersion — sometimes unintentionally for those who pass by chance — in the work. They offer a glimpse of the urban context through the lens of performative actions.

I originally come from Italy, where there is a tradition not only of street theatre but also of dance festivals in urban environments, and a fruitful history of open-air summer festivals, situations “typical” of Mediterranean countries, where the warm, long days are a definite help.

To perform in the public space becomes a site-based bodily practice since it is a work either created specifically for a chosen place or it is an existing work, which, situated in a defined context, restructured itself in relation to the place itself. Furthermore, performing in a public space opens up the possibility of radical intimacy: being inside the urban landscape and between the bodies of the performers and the inhabitants of the area or passers-by generates a closeness that goes beyond the bodies moving alongside each other.
My body as an audience does not always remain seated, it moves, constantly scanning my peripheral vision.

Rathausvorplatz is a square that structurally dissociates itself from a perhaps more Mediterranean view of a square as a gathering space: it is surrounded on three sides by Jobcenter offices, the library a little to one side, and on the other side the town hall, with the Galerie Wedding headquarters. The only café present is closed indefinitely. On the fourth side there is a street, the sounds of which are quite important but not too invasive. It feels like a transitional square, a wild urban square.

By bringing performance into the public space, ACROSS Festival signifies its desire for civic education. By taking the conscious risk of immersing the artists in an open space, devoid of the protective sanctuary of the black box stage, it gives the public — whether they are conscious of it or not — important sensory experiences, even if they are not always easy to understand, but are certainly capable of igniting curiosity (as one spectator told me during the afternoon).
However, I soon realised that despite the inherent transitionality of the square, ACROSS is able to unite different communities: from the festival flyers distributed in two languages (German and Turkish), to the people who inhabit the space during the performances.

PHOTO DIARY OF BODIES AND SCRATCHY WRITINGS

A grey, somewhat weathered staircase. The Jobcenter sign — that of the job search agency — reigns supreme. It is still light outside, it is around 4 p.m.
The performer Selin Davasse, dressed in a tight grey jumpsuit and sporting a microphone, is crouched with her knees bent, her back arched, and her arms placed behind her body.
Her feet are dyed red, her hair is loose. Her body is tense and she is casting her gaze diagonally while speaking.

Here the focus widens to reveal the location. With her back to the Jobcenter, this time Selin is kneeling at the foot of the stairs, her shins resting on the ground. She is not alone: some people are positioned on the steps, others in front of her on orange stools, they are attentive to her.
In the reflections of the Jobcenter glass doors we notice other elements, such as buildings, windows, trees etc. allowing us to enter even more into the surrounding urban landscape.

Selin’s performance She-Pigeon sees the impersonation of the pigeon being. From historically sacred animals for some cultures, these intelligent animals have been used since antiquity to communicate important information that would otherwise have been lost. Over the years, however, their presence has become a source of discomfort in cities as they have been defined with prejudice as carriers of disease.
Selin conveys the feeling of loneliness of a misunderstood being. Locating herself on the city’s dirty pavement, she welcomes dirt, in direct confrontation with the world.

A pause between performances. I look up. The sunset is coming. Above the library, some graffiti reads: “Drob [drop] rents not bombs”, which sums up the current socio-political situation in one sentence. The city has a body of social criticism.

A pavement-like floor, a concrete structure, perhaps offices. Behind, people can be glimpsed. Night is falling.
vAL has a baseball bat in hand and is dressed in sporty and colourful clothes. He has one foot resting on some beverage crates. vAL’s posture is alert, and his gaze is active.

vAL is now leaning forward, one hand on his knee, holding the hand of an audience member with the other. Around them several people watch with interest.
vAL’s performance REF begins in the square and then continues inside the Wedding Galerie.

vAL uses the medium of popular sports, of the challenges and tensions it implies, but also of the sought-after complicity with the audience. vAL is an athlete who does not win, but who uses the playing field to prompt a reflection on the concept of land, its use and boundaries. He runs from one side of the square to the other, invading the field. He touches the ground, rolls over, traces tension lines in space and the gaps between people with the movement of his body.

Night has fallen. A wall and a red pipe in the background.
A body, that of Agata Siniarska a.k.a. TATARI, is lying supine on the pavement, first tracing the boundaries of her body with white chalk, then lying in it. The grey jumpsuit and black head covering completely embrace her. Her performance takes place between the office porch and the staircase in front of the Jobcenter.

We recognise the stairs from before: this time the performer’s body has a completely different posture: she is on her stomach, seemingly lifeless. Her body shape gives the staircase its three-dimensionality. She seems to be sliding down, almost relaxed. Her body breaks the boundaries of her skin and melts with the stairs.

TATARI’s performance is also a piece of sound research: going through different audio emotional states, from tension to anger, Agata’s voice scratches and disrupts the mood of the evening. At times, it seems like she is evoking ancestral sounds coming out of the cave.

Performing in the urban environment puts one in touch with the real, with the daily life that takes place within it – such as those returning home after shopping, those who do not have a home and spend time with performers and the audience, or a group of teenagers who approach the sound performance with curiosity.
The curators of ACROSS do not seek to create a refined arena for staging, but rather consciously place performances in dialogue with space to interrogate spaces and gazes. By providing artistic, critical, and relational tools for citizens to deal with changes in city and structural policies, the experiences proposed by ACROSS Festival are not only dedicated to our contemporaneity, but do have an impact on the future. The urban landscape as a stage becomes a possibility where an ecology of attention to place and aggregation is possible, creating places for participation.

On the subject of dance in public space, the literature and interest in the Dance Studies field is increasing significantly. I only mention here the recently published special issue of Dance Context Journal – “Dance in Public Space”.

ACROSS Festival takes place both in the public open space of Rathausvorplatz and inside the Galerie Wedding. In this case, I consider Galerie Wedding not as a White Cube, instead as a public space, as it is a spokesperson for instances of openness of artistic practices in the Wedding district.

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