Hanna Kritten Tangsoo , Sigrid Savi: Times folded in lines

The Fold ‘Fragile Welten’ unfolds on a series of biting evenings at the beginning of November 2023. Approaching the theatre, I exhale a steamy cloud of breath; the warmth inside my body condenses in the cold of the ether, a puff of mist quickly dissipates before my eyes. An icy inbreathe tickles my nostrils, the outside entering my inside: lungs, veins, heart. We have gone full circle, pondering on the cyclicality of the year, I welcome the winter into my bodily folds. In my personal interpretation, the fold is an uninterrupted convergence of the inside and the outside of that which might seem as separate but is fundamentally one. Like the air enveloped in the body, then dispersed in the atmosphere, repeatedly, in a reciprocal folding and unfolding. 

For the theme of this series, the Tanzfabrik curatorial body has been thinking with the Deleuze – Liebniz concept of the fold¹, which can be illustrated with the image of a fabric being bent into two, bringing the two sides initially far apart, into contact, and creating a new correlation. In the light of this metaphor, I reflect on the works Cowbody/oh wow it’s you! by Hanna Kritten Tangsoo and Sigrid Savi and Lethe by Adam (aka Sandra) Man, which I attended on the 9.11.2023 in Uferstudios.

For me, what folds these two works together is their focus on time-perception, material transformation and non-human temporalities. Through different paces, vibrations and resonances the two pieces trace the artists’ fascination for a non-human kind of subjectivity. 

Furthermore to illustrate my interpretation of the link between the two pieces I propose “the paradigm of the origami”². Let’s imagine a pristine sheet of paper, skilfully twined, turned and twisted into a shape. Each folding creates a feature by dividing and conjoining, concealing and revealing, to obtain a tiny origami horse. 

If one was to unfold the figure back to its outstretched state, all the folds would still be visible on the piece of paper. They would be the traces of the movement of the paper and the hands, the patterns and the rhythms of the folding and unfolding, the dance of time, change and intra-action between human and non-human agencies³. 

In Cowbody/Oh wow it’s you! the stage is an intricate landscape of many objects; some laying inert, other moving and shaking through mechanics or gravity; some hanging on the riggings, other kept suspended by human force, other leaking, smoking and melting. My curiosity lingers between a lit candle in the shape of letters spelling: “FOREVER”, a fluorescent yellow tape spelling “NOW!” and piles of black latex gloves filled with water. 

Two performers are dancing and gesturing intimate relationships with these visible and invisible objects: pushing, pulling, displacing, opening, lifting, digging, selecting, discarding and throwing away. On a techno beat accompanied by the lyrics “sehr schnell jetzt kann Mann endlich gehen lassen” (trans: “very fast now one can finally let go”), I attune to the realm of these things: exposed, covered, containing and contained. A white mouthguard in Hanna Kritten’s mouth, reminds me of the spaces in-between, her pinkish-latex costume squishy and sweaty, both conceals and reveals her body and its intense physical effort. Sigrid Savi wears blue jeans and a long tail made of fake, brown hair. ‘Oh Wow it’s you'”, I thought to myself. Perhaps this is the horse of the cowbody? 

Throughout the piece she holds on to a small plastic bottle, with a little bit of water inside: while lifting, holding and carrying the full weight of her collaborator, she never lets go of the bottle: the object of attachment. Their play seems heavy at times, as they tremble under the full weight of carrying, lifting and holding each other. 

Everything hints at something about to happen or at the memory of what just happened, each moment unfolds with a sense of anticipation and release. An altered recorded voice in the soundscape asks us: “Do you have time to talk about god?⁴” 

The choreography makes a loop and we are back to the beginning, but obviously transformed. The cyclicality of the piece ends with a long sequence of the two performers bouncing in synchronicity on two trampolines. The music plays a kind of waltz, lulling and hypnotizing. The rhythmical ups and downs of the two bodies moved by the jumping mat, transports me on a long horse ride through a strange landscape. My thoughts follow the recorded voice announcing possibilities and certainties, desires and good intentions for the future: “The three-minute walk will clear the thoughts”. 

The three-minute walk did clear my thoughts as I enter Lethe, the second piece of the evening. In the dim lit space, as the audience walks in, a calm and solemn atmosphere welcomes us. We take our shoes off and leave our belongings near the entrance, to find a comfortable place/spot? on a long white carpet stretching across the space. Interspersed with subtle white noise and wind blowing from the speakers, I hear soft laughter and silent whispers of people settling on the carpet. 

The amplified voice of performer Lisa Densem describes a remote place: “It’s midday and very quiet, no bird no rustling of the wind, I hear my footsteps. The stones of the riverbed move when I step on them, when there is water the stones are its pathways”⁵. 

 People resettle, lying down and closing their eyes to let themselves be transported to the river by her voice: “I am in the middle of the riverbed”. And so are we, on this long carpet that mirrors the elongated pathway of an ancient riverbed where “Every stone here was once covered by water”. We gradually become these stones quiet and motionless, directing the flow of Densem’s pathway among us, readjusting as she steps between us. “Everybody was once covered in water, I swallow the saliva into my mouth”. 

I see the belly of a fellow audience member rising and falling, they steady their breath exhaling beauty into chaos. I see the hand reaching the mouth. Then leaving to scratch the eye. I see resettling limbs, thin lines reaching up into the air. I am here and elsewhere, simultaneously. 

“The river has many mouths, the water flows like milk, through the white stony land”. 

As the space darkens, four projections light up, slowly people open their eyes and resettle again. The landscape invoked by the words appears as dancing light on large screens surrounding us. On the different videos, the sole body of dancer Laura Siegmund is in corporeal dialogue with the white stones of the riverbed, attuned to the temporality of the land dances its strange presence in this desolated and sublime riverscape. 

The drone-like music accentuated by subtle melodies, high pitches and subtle vibrations accompanies our journey, the dancer guiding us on the rocks, rolling and resettling, like water being held by a riverbed or bodies being held by a huge carpet. 

Lethe is a space poem of language, movement and sound, dedicated to the Tagliamento river, one of the last great untamed waterways in Europe. When a river is untamed by humans and over time its meanders expand so largely that curves might fold back into each other, reshaping the stream in a new course and leaving a residue or a leavee of the curve. 

The two pieces Cowbody/Oh wow it’s you and Lethe, set into motion a personal reflection on the scale of time and transformation, expressed through the phenomena of the body and the land. 
These reflections are condensed in the following poem. 

Today under 
my eyes, 
the skin 
folded in lines. 
 
Tiny riverbeds 
wrinkle in a smile,   
tears spilling 
for a while. 
 
Tamed ageing 
nature primes 
the raging 
of our times.