swallow me

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!").

These stories follow a common thread of finding yourself in a confusing world where insecurity seems inevitable. The cry from 4 Non Blondes in the chorus - "What's going on?" seems to reverberate through the stories - which follow a childhood where 'trapped' is the default state, and water comes to represent a vehicle for escape. Botticelli's The Birth of Venus seems constantly present without ever being directly referred to, along with references to mermaids,  forming a self-image of the artist surrounded by a body of water that both reflects and confuses, offering glimpses of serenity and occasional turbulence: "Sometimes I don't want the waves to crash against my rocks". This is equated with the artist's own vulnerability in the face of such insecurity: "sometimes I don't want someone to touch the pages of my history book", finally resolving into a comic sexual metaphor of penetration ("And its coming in and out and in and out... And your bodies are tangled and the hair is all over the place and your going and going and... its growing and growing and growing and growing and growing and AHHHHHHHHHHH"). As the soundtrack descends to wandering piano, the artist returns to kind of weightless tumbles for the finale.

Haas' interweaving of complex personal story with her surroundings is a cunning use of contemporary trends towards rethinking nature, with water a central enduring metaphor. It fulfills the premise of self-empowerment, nevertheless hinting at that which is beyond the artist's control, through which this empowerment is measured and defined. The various shapeshifting of the ever-present water in the soundtrack is relevant here: as the form shifts between drips, trickles, waves, and full submersion, the artist's own movement (and perhaps, entire being) shifts against it. Such delicate touches elevate swallow me beyond many contemporary investigations of the nature oriented around a western perspective of the 'self' - here, it is anchored in the artist's personal story, which is itself unstable and uncertain. The dance space becomes a shifting ontological plane, where the body writes the room and vice-versa, displacing gaps with movement, only for new ones to appear again, as though a self in a process of endless reconstruction.

 

swallow me

Artistic direction, Text, Choreography, Performance: Josephine Haas

Dramaturgical Support: Judith Sánchez Ruíz

Hošek Contemporary, September 26th and 27th

 

Note: Current publication is done with the understanding that colleagues and communities from Kharkiv, Mariupol, Kyiv, Lutsk, and Lviv among others in Ukraine are currently under attack in an attempt to erase Ukrainian culture and identity. No artist should be forced to rehearse how to pick up the gun.