There seems a glut of performance work revolving around 'nature' lately. With the coming of tangible, visible, material and consequential effects of climate change, art has made a strong pivot towards rethinking our relationship with nature - words like 'Anthropocene', 'decentering', and 'non-human agency' seem to litter the wasteland of cultural work in Berlin, risking either labouring a kind of obvious point, or being overused to the extent where they are almost meaningless. It can be that, some 50 years after the initial evidence of climate change was presented and almost as many years since consensus of dangerous anthropogenic influence over climate was established in the scientific community, such works are attempting to explore a territory that can best be defined as 'too little, too late'.
swallow me is a solo performance firmly focused on contextualising a relationship with nature through the artist's self-empowerment journey. Josephine Haas begins on the stage of Hošek Contemporary (which is actually on a boat docked in Berlin's Mitte district) immersed in the sound of crashing waves on a shoreline - already presenting a nature that offers the threats and pleasures of envelopment and submission, as well as potential for defiance. The artist begins in almost fetal position, gently rocking and swaying, perhaps mimicking the boat, or a cot of their childhood. As the sound of water evolves into a trickle, the movement becomes jerky, and Haas appears pulled around the stage by invisible forces out of control, before then flowing into something more harmonic and later 'splashy'.
Photo: Turlach O'Broin
The spell is somewhat broken as we descend into first-person testimony with the sudden interruption of Haas' story about a nosy hairdresser, who is full of worldly and unwelcome advice about how to deal with the burden of her plentiful hair ("It's like a history book"). There follows a karaoke version of 4 Non Blondes' classic What's Up, and another story about hair - this time Haas' father brushing it at 6 years old. At 7 years old we are taken (in a storytelling sense) into the swimming pool with Haas - a place of security, but inevitably punctuated by the artist's self-talk that sounds almost punishing ("Stop it! Get off!" or "I know!").
