Anne Lise Le Gac, Anat Bosak, Muna Mussie, Ricardo de Paula / Grupo Oito: Between dopamine and flesh, memories and colonial histories: an opening weekend

Michela Filzi / September 2024

On 11 September 2024, DOPA – a site-specific performance by Anne Lise Le Gac and Anat Bosak – inaugurated to the public Tanzfabrik’s new location: Grüntaler 9. In addition to its existing spaces, Tanzfabrik has temporarily rented this commercial shop space, hoping its glass-windows would offer an invitation for passers-by in Wedding to catch a glimpse of artistic processes, and hopefully step in.
In the same location on the last night of Tanzfabrik’s Season opening, I attended Oblio, a durational ritual installation by Muna Mussie; and later the same evening CARNE – a dance performance by Ricardo de Paula / Grupo Oito – in Uferstudios’ Studio 14.
In this commissioned text, I report my experience of the three different works, following the thread of a single question: which emotional states did each piece put me in?

DOPA by Anne Lise Le Gac and Anat Bosak

Would you know how to “open the crack in a new space”? Or the process of “balancing an alarm” gone off, in some mysterious circumstances? These questions might sound confusing at first, but they make sense in the experience of the performance; perhaps because sense-making does not necessarily rely on a shared logic.
The site-specific performance DOPA, introduces the audience to procedures and protocols of an incomprehensible system, a complex structure made of technologies and bodies, a fountain of toxic water, mobiles of upside-down candles, jelly routers and “glowing organism”.

Assembling everyone in the courtyard of the Uferstudios, performer Anat Bosak gives a quick history of the campus in a humorous manner. “What were horses doing here at the end of the 19th century? They carried people in carriages to the ‘Gesundbrunnen’, the fountain of health.” Her story about water continues, with complicated detours and jumps in time: “the water was privatised, then poisoned and finally dried up”. I follow her through these accounts and interpretations: her manner of speaking, directing our attention to architectural features, and being interrupted by the performer Anne Lise Le Gac via walkie-talkie messages – it all feels exciting to me. She weaves together past, present and future timelines in a loose braid, informing and fabricating at the same time. Gradually, the large group of spectators is led into Studio 4, ‘which represents the four chambers of the heart’, she says, a phrase that resonates with me as my attention is drawn inward to my own heartbeat. I find my heart beating a little faster, possibly due to the rising levels of dopamine in my body. As I enter, a loud fire alarm goes off, reinforcing the state of alertness that the performance puts me in; is it part of the show, or is it a real alarm? As the real security features of the space mix with the fictional ones, the performers deal with the situation by encouraging my state of confusion. While the audience is free to move about in the dark space punctuated by strange sculptural objects, the performers guide us aurally, verbally and kinaesthetically through a process they refer to as ‘opening the crack’, which remains a mystery to me.

Inevitably, my thoughts are transported to zones of conflict, real danger, emergency and social collapse, both past and present, and also more close to my personal life: the conflictual atmosphere the free-scene is experiencing in Berlin at the moment. With the announced funding cuts to culture, independent artists and publicly funded venues and theatres find themselves in a state of financial emergency. Are there any emergency procedures for the upcoming crisis of the independent dance scene?
Finally, the audience is led in a procession to Grüntaler Strasse 9, the Tanzfabrik’s new gallery space. The large group streams in and squeezes into the front room of the space. The performers are handed out small green gelatine sculptures with a plastic-coated paper inside, and I witness confusion and collaboration as people group together to take out the paper and spell out to each other the gratis Wi-fi called “Freedom of Speech” and a long weblink to access the Dark Web. First we have to connect to the room’s IP internet connection via a code hanging on the wall, then open our browser and type in the access link that can be found on the small piece of paper. It is complex at first, but eventually the opening is cracked, or perhaps the crack is open.
I linger briefly in this digital space where the artists have created an archive, a dopamine map, of spaces that are trying to escape corporate control.

Oblio by Muna Mussie

Oblio is a performance emerging from the collaboration between Muna Mussie and sound designer Massimo Carozzi, within the sound project “Curva Cieca Oblio ኩርቫ ዕውር ምርሳዕ”, for the Xong record series by Xing.
At Grüntaler 9, a long sheet of synthetic material is stretched between two walls, like a banner at a demonstration. I recognise this material from my childhood in the Italian countryside – a dark green woven fabric of coarse plastic threads, often used to cover the inside of building sites and fences. Here the fabric hides the performer, Eritrean-Italian artist Muna Mussie, in her meticulous process of weaving large capital letters with a golden thread.
The thick needle she is using sticks in and out of the dark fabric in smooth and repetitive sequences, and with each repetition a golden horizontal stripe of thread appears, giving form to an emerging word. When I arrive, I read “erdrängung”, and as time passes, I contemplate the appearance of a V in front of it: Verdrängung.
The atmosphere in which I am immersed, together with the audience in the room, is calm and meditative. I sit on the floor and feel my nervous system gradually calming down, accompanied by the sound score playing on the loudspeaker behind me. In the sound piece I hear deep voices articulating guttural sounds, as well as hummed melodies and higher voices speaking languages I don’t understand.
By gradually arriving in the present moment and focussing all my attention to the simple act of witnessing the patient and peaceful process of weaving, of appearing and disappearing, my desire to understand transforms into one of contemplation. As the first letter of the word appears, the dark fabric holding the threads disappears; as the voices in the soundtrack enter my consciousness, a thought occupying that space disappears. Now listening deeply to the voices, I imagine their vocal cords vibrating with the passage of air through the windpipe, much as the stretched fabric vibrates with the touch of Muna Mussie’s skilful weaving.

Verdrängung means displacement, but also repression, and refers to the experience of migration and marginalisation. Oblio is part of a three-year process in which the artist creates spaces for public mourning of the loss of historical and private memory. In the form of workshops, she invites people with a migration background to gather around the practice of weaving, memory and community.
Towards the end of the performance, as she connects the beginning of the word with its end, stretching the string behind the sheet, I hear words in the sound piece that I understand. Mixed in with the music is the sound of what I identify as a female voice speaking words in Italian, my mother tongue. These words also appear and disappear, and I understand them individually, but I can’t make sense of the whole sentences, it seems as if the different sentences are woven into a fabric of text. I listen and try to keep them in my mind, as flashes of faded memories, not my own, but that of others. Below I transcribe and translate the words I can remember now, a few days after the experience; they may not follow logic, but they make sense in a subconscious way: reading back, my mind can’t escape the thought of Italy’s colonial history in Eritrea.

Lanceremo, sfideremo
altro, un eroe, libertá
legge, tricolore, vita
camicia, italiano e avanti, sogno
Insieme, noi, bandiera, amore, aspetta
sfideremo, marceremo, avanti, se.

We will throw, we will challenge
another, a hero, liberty
law, tricolour, life
shirt, Italian and forward, a dream
Together, we, flag, love, wait
we will challenge, we will march, forward, if.

CARNE by Ricardo de Paula / Grupo Oito

As I enter Studio 14 with a large group of spectators, my sense of smell is awakened by the familiar yet unfamiliar scent of Palo Santo. Palo Santo has become commonplace in our daily lives here in Europe, in our homes, crystal shops and fancy yoga studios. I personally associate it with meditation and energetic space clearing, but what do I really know about it from my white European perspective? Palo Santo is part of our colonial history as an object of appropriation from indigenous American cultures and spiritual practices, along with many other plants, foods, practices and symbols.
It amazes me how quickly my mind moves to political considerations, triggered by a single waft of the charged smell of burning Palo Santo; and I quickly realise that I am in for an overload of such considerations as the piece CARNE unfolds.

Grupo Oito invites us on an immersive awakening of our minds through our senses; a journey to question our relationship with consumption, in the physical sense of eating and being eaten, and in the metaphorical sense through a bold questioning of our consumerist, capitalist and colonial economy and social structure. The theatre is filled with a soft haze, dim lights and the colour red, a warm, hungry and lustful atmosphere. A delicate sculpture of popcorn hangs at the entrance, next to one of the performers standing in a pompous bathtub filled with popcorn, he holds an ivory horn out of which he fishes popcorns that fall into the already full bathtub.
Corn, bananas, tropical plants and other fruits decorate the set, alluding to the many products introduced to Europe since the colonisation of the Americas.

The piece begins with a slow crescendo of movement, with one performer occupying the centre of the stage in a large metal box, where she ties and hangs her body with red ropes, while at the periphery of the stage two couples of performers are in close contact, lying on the floor. Between touching and fighting, they dance sensually in circles around the centre stage, increasing in intensity with each circular return.
“Love is queer, trans, gender fluid, non-conforming. Love is more than physical, love is transition, love is profane, love is tied in knots, love is resistance, love is rest”; the soundscore articulates a long list of definitions of love, intertwined with the performers’ moaning voices, their slapping of bare skin, their laughter. Pleasure and playfulness fill the theatre, and yet there is something eerie in the air. This eerie feeling culminates in a video projection on the floor of a performer dipping a croissant into a glass of his own freshly drawn blood. I feel my stomach tighten, I can’t escape the feeling of disgust, and yet how could I know? After all, I’ve never tasted a croissant dipped in blood.
The piece is a rollercoaster of group choreographies and solos, tableaux vivants, powerful images and spoken words that play in the liminal spaces between the sensual, the provocative, the anti-capitalist, the decolonial, the humorous, the political, the poetic, the hysterical, the sexual, the violent, the revolting, the cannibalistic. “Capitalism gives us the impression that this is our last dance, but we’re not going to give up”: for all its crude criticism, the play resonates with hopeful hymns of resistance.

The central theme of the piece – which is also expressed in the title – is the flesh, the metabolic force of consuming, eating, digesting the other, perhaps each other, in order to feed one’s own flesh, one’s own body, one’s own life. The biting need to devour the non-human in order to stay alive; the inescapable need to sacrifice the non-human on this planet in order to promote our own sustenance, our own survival.
But the play also makes me shudder and wonder what happens when survival turns into over-indulgence, lustful excess. What happens when nothing is ever enough? When there is no end to the human desire to devour everything and everyone? What happens when there is no respect for the intrinsic value of the energy that is sacrificed to be transformed into matter; the life energy of the tree to make the apples, the life force of the body to give birth to the baby? It seems to me that the sacrifice for the whole ecosystem becomes greater and greater until humanity falls into anthropophagy, the eating of its own flesh, like the snake that bites its own tail.

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