A couple of exhbitions, a concert, a festival of short films, and a cinematography club later, and your correspondant is feeling a little worse for wear. Those familiar with burnout will recognise the signs: when small things become unmanagable and impossible, when the body and mind begin to account for a period of sustained deference, during which urgent tasks dwarf their potential undertaker, with "not urgent but important" ones relegated to an expectant, ever-growing pile.
Post-intense period, the demands of life tend to come flooding back, and that is what is happening to me at the moment. Although the urgencies of the most recent invasion of Ukraine seem incomporable with my own relatively light psychological suffering, it is nevertheless always funny to observe the body and mind, and how they remind you of your own humanity and limitations, which are real even if these seem comparably trivial.
The last weeks were filled with incredible experiences as part of the Exhibition and Event Series of Ukrainian Culture, and I am proud and happy to be able to work in support of these events, which were unanimously moving and powerful interventions in Berlin's cultural landscape, led by my colleagues at Cultural Workers Studio.
Although I continually failed in the last period, somehow, I was able to keep a skeleton critical practice going on tanzschreiber - albeit without my usual attention to detail (or ability to meet deadlines).
Here are those texts:
https://tanzschreiber.de/en/a-committed-sense-of-rhythm/
Juan Domínguez's oddball piece Rhythm Is The Place certinaly left many in the audience scratching their heads - nevertheless, an important albeit esoteric experiment in tempo.
https://tanzschreiber.de/en/still-bursts-frills-and-a-mating-call/
La Cage's work Oiseau was such a gentle, slight experience - I really appreciated its production ethic and focus on simplicity, although judging by the collaboration's published texts, we have some differences about non-human agency.
https://tanzschreiber.de/en/splitting-roles/
Time Out of Joint was among my trickier tasks for tanzschreiber so far - I saw it on International Women's Day, and was confident that I would be able to be unfailingly enthusiastic. Instead I was met with a complex, conflict-ridden work, and this made writing about it not easy, as I had an uncomfortable encounter with my own unrealistic expectations of female uniformity in solidarity.
https://tanzschreiber.de/en/the-cool-deep-maths-of-the-body/
I write a sort of clowny introduction here - but I often feel out of place in the more ecstatic, performative introversions of Berlin, which make almost no sense to me. This piece Deepspace from visiting choreographer James Batchelor seems like it has sort of aged since its premiere in 2016, and a perhaps once-radical approach now seems almost classical - I nevertheless found a lot to appreciate in its euclidian trimmings.
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For me, now, the doctor in my head (the one I can afford) prescribes it's a bit of rest and time in the garden. I will return with more writing soon, including the last of my Tanzschreiber articles and some interviews I was working on in the last period.
In the meantime, to quote the poet and activist Lesya Ukrianka:
Now the spring comes, gleaming gold!
Is it with such pity, lamenting aloud
That the stories of young summers are told?
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