Somatic science fiction of doom. Review by Agnes Schneidewind
Processes as performance
The Animalarium Dance Collective has developed a practice combining improvisation, choreography and systemic constellation work, called Choreo-Constellating. They share this practice in workshops and performances which are entangled and allow different levels of participation in the work. A workshop at Zukunftshof and one at WUK performing arts preceded the most recent performance at the latter. In these formats, the collective approaches somatic explorations of coexistences in the ecological crisis with focus on site-specific history and possible futures. In the workshops, locals are welcome to share their own topics and concerns related to the environment which will be included to the collection later. Dealing with the apocalyptic, performances and workshops are hypersensitive science fiction with more-than-human and other very abstract protagonists. The performers or, in the workshops, the participants open their bodies to local players, symptoms and fantasies, inviting ancestors and descendants, micro and macro levels of global dependencies to channel and articulate through their bodies, with dance and song. The end of the world is at stake. Time is short, but also relative. All get agency: "urban dandelions", "the Danube", "fireflies", "grumpiness" and "the unconscious", because we are in Vienna.
As a participant in the workshops, a tender invitation to just express what is inside, I have experienced the permeability of my own body, ease and shaking through which we may move. This makes me especially curious for the performance. How can the stage also be this welcoming container for appearing feelings, sensations, dances of laughers, doubts and tears? How is this even interesting to just witness from the outside, but not experience oneself?
Eventually, the performance Constellation #4 Shows for Futures begins similarly to the workshops, with a kind host and lots of transparency. It even feels a bit like a workshop. The audience is invited onto the stage, to familiarise themselves with the clusters of words on the ground. The dimensions of the concepts range from tiny to enormous, words, sentences and questions, and they all get the same space of a white A4 sheet of paper. Complexity, non-hierarchy and openness already start to work on the inside.
Dream lends complexity a body
The game consists of the performers connecting with something before they know cognitively what it is. An upside-down piece of paper. On the back is an abstract word or sentence that is shown to the audience. Between beginnings and endings, we take part in a potential conflict of giants, in songs of "the empire", dances of the "bat" or "that which wants to die". The performers invite beings and things to speak through them which have no voice in the world, no longer have one, or never had one. A latent risk of moral misconduct included. For example, when "air pollution particles" or "selfishness" suddenly do good. What does that mean here? As observers we know what is underneath the piece of paper. But the performers don't. This challenges what I see, because I see what I know. And then "the bat" doesn't know that it is a bat but somehow starts to behave like a bat. I'm enabled to make connections everywhere. The piece of paper becomes the silent director: articulation and clarity of sensations, or the lack of it, both equally valid, in the performance as well as in the workshop, choreograph space and bodies.
I enter a practice of dreaming. An expanded state of consciousness in which the subtle body is activated. Perceptions, emotions and affects are given space, articulating themselves in movement, in the voice, in sound, in attention, and where it falls and does not fall. There is nothing decorative, or unnecessary. Viewed from the outside, a dream could seem quiet and uneventful, like sleep. But when we enter it, actively or passively, the condensation makes everything meaningful, slowing down and speeding up at the same time. The physical space fills with experienced content. Here, it's a collective dream, navigating with the help of the host, attention through speaking concepts, bodies that have become other. Questions, conflicts and imaginations that permeate human bodies. Complex concepts and words, which want something and fear something, desire junctions or holes and surreal entanglements. The wish to understand what this could mean, how this can be solved. I piece together meanings and encounter my own expectations, their fulfilments and disappointments. In the midst of this exciting complexity, sometimes the banal becomes wonderfully satisfying. At the end of a countdown, last wishes, and the quiet joy of the "firefly" relieved by the darkness on stage.