Photo: © Walter Bickmann; "Fleshless Beast" at the Sophiensaele, Oct 2016; Choreography: Roderick George; Music: LOTIC (J'Kerian Morgan) Dancers: Harumi Terayama, Jin Young Won, Olivia Ancona, Dominic Santia, Raymond Pinto, Roderick George
The Sophiensaele is one of my favorite places to see contemporary dance performed by artists from the “frei Szene”— those working without a fixed company or house theater—in Berlin. Every January the theater curates the Tanztage, a unique program of up-and-coming work by choreographers based in Berlin, paired with works by artists from a different non-European city (this year it was Tehran).
Roderick George, who most recently danced in the Forsythe Company and is originally from Houston, Texas, premiered his piece “DUST” in the Tanztage 2016, and returned to the Sophiensaele this October with “Fleshless Beast.”
Rodney's suggested listening for Letter #1, Bonaventure's “Mulatre”—with that Baroque choral wall intermixed with samples ranging from Michael Jackson's famous scream to D'Angelo and even “Get It Ready, Ready,” the New Orleans bounce track by DJ Jubilee, which was the song at every school dance I went to in the late-90s—is the perfect bridge to thinking about George's recent piece, a collaboration with DJ Lotic, who is also from Houston and based in Berlin.
As in “Dust,” “Fleshless Beast” takes George's neoclassical ballet training and melds it with contemporary release technique along with an electic mix of urban dance vocabularies. But where in “Dust” the dance language was primarily mediated through abstraction, “Fleshless Beast” is also in conversation with the story ballet tradition and tableaux vivant; in the first part of the piece, the dancers, dressed in black and wearing masks completely obscuring their faces, would, in between longer and more virtuosic choreographic sequences, get in formation in various parts of the stage, repeating, in a static form of dynamism, pulsating movements, beneath a neon cross that lit up in different colors—including, in one moment, the same colors as a US police siren, as George danced a sequence evoking someone who had been shot.
In the second part of the piece, all of the dancers have removed their masks and changed into white costumes, except one, a female dancer. Much of her movement is passive, subjected to the will of the other performers and manipulated by them. In the face of the many horrors one can be subjected to as a result of one's gender, religious, sexual or racial identity, “Fleshless Beast” questions the limits (the potential terror as well as beauty) of a post-racial and post-gendered society. Watching the first half of piece, I found myself longing to see the dancers' faces, to understand and acknowledge the particularities of their humanness.
This is the inherent contradiction made evident by the piece: to become “fleshless,” though a seemingly utopian appeal, is to inherently renounce the fullness of our humanity. Yet, by risking revelation, we allow ourselves not only to be seen but to become vulnerable to power structures and persons who might treat us as if we were without flesh: without desires, without fears, without the capacity to love, without autonomy. This is what is so devastating about the recent onslaught of revelations regarding exploitation, violence, and abuse, whether by the police or famous producers (or anyone else, for that matter). It's not that these people have some sort of “blindness” rendering them unable to see your personhood or mine, it's that certain kinds of people choose to exploit vulnerability and deny their humanity because they are, consciously or unconsciously, afraid of (or disgusted by) their own vulnerability, their own humanness. Cruelty is enacted when we try to become fleshless.
As in Bonaventure's track “Mulatre,” DJ Lotic's electronic sonic landscape for piece had an unrelenting quality, a pulsating beat that was both thrilling and exhausting to listen to. And then, at the end of “Fleshless Beast,” Lotic and George, from far upstage-right in the theater, began to sing. The lightness and power and particularity of their voices after the hour-plus-long aggressive beats offered a catharsis in the most classical sense. It took me a moment to realize that they weren't lip-synching to a recording, but singing live. I was so relieved, I cried.
Yours, Kathleen
(Note: If you're a professional dancer passing through [or living in] Berlin, George is guest teaching the contemporary dance trainings all next week at marameo.)
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