BRIDGE
Bridge is a performance that Juliane Solmsdorf and I developed together,
a choreography that goes from Ghosts to Cha cha cha, and like Skarbek (from
which I resused the big mask) and my dance with the camera in Video the dancing
is influenced by expressionistic modern dance from the 1920s. It was our
first performance together; Kriechen im Wedding followed.
Masquerade
Masquerade is based on a photo which I had found some ten years ago in a
travel magazine in St.Petersburg. I can’t remember what South-American
country this image was supposed to stand for. The image shows two people
in a carneval scene – one of them being a men, while the sex of the
other one is not quite clear. They are in ecstasy – they scream, shout,
stare. They dance in a stiff, almost ritual way. Blood or red paint is running
down their sweaty faces and bodies. The man is wearing a white wig, which
for years I had taken to be the body and feathers of a dead chicken, so much
did I connect this scene with Afroamerican Religions like Cadomblé or
Voodoo, in which chickens heads are snapped of over the heads of the believers,
who fall in trance, being ridden by the gods that possess them.
Transformation, Carneval, Trance, Theatre – I was always interested in getting under the skin of other people, and in people that try to transform into different beings. It’s so boring to be forever caught in the one body and gender and in the one self that you are assumed to be. Life is short and I don’t believe in reincarnation. It’s like consenting to prison.
The image is painted on copper, which itself will undergo a slow process of transformation. I can’t predict what the painting will look like in a few years. Unlike Denkmal for Paul Rosbaud the surface of Masquerade hasn’t been varnished, which means that the parts that aren’t covered with paint will oxidize and eventually become green.
I like the idea of these different tempi: the background that changes very slowly in real time, while the scene in the mind of the spectator must be a quickly moving one; and finally the time that has elapsed since the photo was taken somewhere in the world.