Alica Minar, Dorota Michalak: What if birds aren’t singing, they’re screaming?

LUSH BLAST: Tasting the untamed is a performance by Alica Minar and Dorota Michalak that transposes forest ecosystems to a human body. The two artists’ journey into mountain hiking, mushroom, tree, and bear watching began in 2022 in the Carpathian Mountains, the largest protected wilderness within Europe stretching across Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, and Serbia. Where they studied and observed “the different knowledge that emerges and disappears in a forest.” At the artistic talk at DOCK11 on the 10th of April following the Berlin premiere, Michalak tells us that after being inside the forest, they arrived at the question: What is inside our bodies? What is the quality of our relationships? “We are multiplicity on our own. We are entangled with the system, and we are complicit.”
 
One audience member noted during the talk that the extensive research behind the performance was not overtly present in the piece: “I didn’t see any trees; I saw human bodies.” This observation centers on the artists’s distinctive approach. Rather than attempting to represent nature on stage, they transpose what they have learned from the forest to their bodies. The result is a performance where bodies move fluently and with stress, where we hear bodies singing and screaming. The one-hour-long performance shares a cornucopia of material that is in constant flux. Scenes change either abruptly or gradually leak into one another. Each element introduced in the piece, be it a human body, the music, the set design made of chains, or a chainsaw, is made to move melodically and rhythmically, creating a sense of weaving, multiplicity, and transformation throughout the performance.

The performance starts gently with a metaphoric set design that I perceive as a mountainous terrain: in the upstage right corner, musician Ola Zielińska sits behind a towering pile of microphones, stands, and instruments; in the downstage right corner, a triangle is assembled out of a group of PAR-lights, and a suspended web of interlaced chains occupies the left side of the stage. Underneath them, Michalak and dancer Breeanne Saxton lay supine on top of one another; Saxton’s breathing waves their stomach by expanding and contracting it, which Zielińska’s amplified breath accompanies. This slow, ethereal beginning is complemented by the gentle rustling and echoing of the structure of chains being moved by Saxton’s stomach. Very softly, the bodies begin to move, holding the quality of a good morning stretch. At the same time, I notice Zielińska beginning to include subtle sounds in her breath, where words gradually start to form, such as “Remember,” “Forget,” and “Protected zone.” The beginning lulls me, leading me into a receptive state, where a morning stretch becomes a supportive lean, push, and fall against another’s body, and how language is already present in our breath. A case that repeats later in the performance when Saxton speaks of being tickled by danger and subtly builds audible how a song is already present in our speech. 

 “We are multiplicity on our own. We are entangled with the system, and we are complicit.”

The soft, wavy, and flowy material introduced in the beginning will stay as a fluctuating element of swaying hips and vibrating fingers throughout the performance. But gradually, the audience can see Minar’s body, previously hidden in darkness. Standing her back to the audience, I can feel the anticipation for her to turn towards us. When she eventually flips around in full light, she poses with a chainsaw, donning a mischievous and flirtatious grin. Posing, jerky movements, frontality, unisons, and theatrical expressions mark the scene where the three performers play with the chainsaw, getting turned on by its sounds, portraying scenes of hurting one another, ultimately taking it apart, leading to fragments of the chainsaw swimming in the air, carried by the hands of the dancers. Where Saxton leads Minar and Michalak to a song:
“Imagine.”
“I want to see the life inside you.”
“Everybody is a feast.”
 
They sing with a gust to the audience, wanting to tear our limbs apart, our blood to flow out, to rip out our hearts. Later, during the artist talk, Michalak and Minar share their meetings with foresters, who perceive using machines like chainsaws as akin to care work. To which a forester in the audience resonates: “I use a chainsaw every day.” Saxton shares her initial bewilderment during their hiking trips, the impact of her realization that every place is laced with death and decay and that in nature, decomposition, dying, and decay have different values than perhaps in modern human society. “Death is a living part of the ecosystem,” an audience member peeps aptly. For the artistic team, nature presents the ambiguity of peace and violence without either valuation or devaluation—an ethos they bring out beautifully in a scene resembling a techno-club.
 
Zielińska’s beats are hammering, the strobe light is striking, and the three performers move strikingly similarly, reminding me of a well-trained military unit. The scene and the uniform expressions gradually bend, and the collective power attained allows for individual releases, with limbs flailing and voices shrieking. In a later private conversation with Michalak, she shares Barbara Ehrenreich’s book “Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy.” Synchronicity, rhythmic music, and activity can induce joy and pleasure while also being relatable to military mechanisms. It’s the double-edged chain of a chainsaw; dancing together to a simple 4-beat can serve for “collective well-being and transgression and military marching helping to overcome fears and unite a person with a bigger structure. And that’s also interesting that the rhythm of the four is the most basic one, relating to the basic weight shifts of walking, and at the same time it’s square and caging, and also universalized through western geopolitical domination.”

Rather than attempting to represent nature on stage, they transpose what they have learned from the forest to their bodies. The result is a performance where bodies move fluently and with stress, where we hear bodies singing and screaming.