Christina Ciupke & Darko Dragičević, Armin Hokmi, Jen Rosenblit, Liina Magnea, Mohamed-Ali Ltaief: Time Lingering

As the title Take me somewhere nice – Party without end, without meaning and without purpose suggests, Christina Ciupke and Darko Dragičević plant in their work.

Personally, I find this to register strongest in the way they have named this piece. Their sarcasm is evident not only during their artistic research of embodying mass tourism and its conditions, but also in their choreographic choices for the show to provoke a realization that “what satisfies the tastes of the masses is not without consequences.” *

The audience is free to sit or walk on a floor covered by trash, to watch a dance of gradual deformation. In 90 minutes of continuous and non-stop dance, Ciupke and Dragičević represent the stereotype of ignorance that exhausts nature’s resources. The piece is mostly in silence. However, occasional repetition of a slow melancholic song prompts video projections of footage showing climate disasters. These video loops are accompanied by long-drawn-out dances by the two figures, representing the ignorant behaviour of mass tourism. 

The piece, this exhausting dance, resembles a dystopia in progress. It connects a nostalgia for a certain better past to the gradual eroding image of a future destruction. 

Elsewhere Rhapsody, a multi-layered work by Jen Rosenblit confronts me internally with questions of identity, community and belonging from the very first moment. Upon stepping in, I experience a mixed feeling as if walking my curiosity to a far neighbourhood. 

The piece starts and the opening sentence tickles: “You might for a moment see something resembling a fence, it is not intended to keep things out, though I cannot promise inclusivity as an actual thing. Its gesture is of unendingness rather than its overbearing symbolic border.”

In search of relation, I cease my attempt to grasp the words that, together with the visual information, are choreographing my affective states. Soon, the flow pace and depth of the verbal addresses exceed my linguistic capacities. Linguistically unarmed yet sensorially engaged, the more I yield, the more, the piece embraces me, till its last moment. 

The piece narrates intimacy. It depicts a disorderly stream of erotic experience in four chapters and arrays the complexity of a permeable poesy. Back and forth, displaced between shades and desires for memory and forgetfulness, it manoeuvres and reveals the multiplicity of its narration through which it grows and makes space with the strength of desire. 

Shiraz, as a name, strongly carries a series of cultural, historical and artistic references. Armin Hokmi’s choreography reflects, memorializes, and celebrates the existence of a cultural event in the past. Although Shiraz as a dance project directly takes its name from the Shiraz Arts Festival held between 1967 and 1977 in the south of Iran, the piece itself takes quite an indirect approach, allowing its choreography to distance itself from direct representations.   

The piece is established and progresses with a continuous repetition of subtle hip movements by the dancers. This repetitive movement, which is one of the elements of Iranian dance vocabulary, allows for slow traversal in space and sets up multiple spatial relationalities among the dancers.  

Through the repetition, brief moments of convergence appear and are magnified. These moments coincide with certain musical beats and incorporate momentary upper body gestures that I observe to be mostly from classical Western vocabularies. These are the moments when the vocabularies of different aesthetics, temporalities and geographies tie together.  

The precise choreography challenges the pursuit of synchronicity. It is achieved through a collective, yet autonomous effort by the performers, whose hidden faces, internal mode of attention, gazeless-ness and isolated movements remind me of the expressive physicality of ancient headless statues. They instill a sense of mystery and fragmentation reminiscent of an imagined past. 

Regardless of whether the reappearance of a grand festival within a dance piece is possible or not, Armin’s passionate work and artist talk effectively introduce something different from a past of another geography, in relation to the current political climate of Germany’s performing art scene in which Shiraz is premiered. 

The pieces of the fold ‘Far, Far Away’, each in their own particular capacities, all linger in time. Through the presence of their performances, they connect with other temporal spheres, encompassing different modes of the present, past, and future. With their different artistic means, tastes, stances and intensity, they slide along the continuum between the utopian and dystopian spectra.  

Take me somewhere nice- party without… looks into the dystopian future. It observes, criticises and warns about the future of climate change as a consequence of the promoted capitalistic idea of leisure, manifested in the form of mass tourism. 
Shiraz reminisces about the utopian aspects of a past festival which over a ten-year period attempted to “radically rethink its relationship to the audience and modalities of framing artworks.”* 
ElseWhere Rhapsody blurs the temporal lines between the tenses. Through the speculative dissection of a narrative from the past, it underscores the power of the erotic for imagining, creating and envisioning what may seem impossible, both in the present moment and in the future.