Angel Meat. Verwerfungen

Ines Birkhan's novel 'Angel Meat. Verwerfungen' has been released by Neofelis Verlag, Berlin.

Prometheus, Jesus and I (excerpt)

After having taken a long puff from her black lipstick stained slim 120 cigarette, she states: ‘I consider that this number is successful when people stop seeing it as erotic! Not that erotic is a problem of course, but here it’s merely a starting point for an extended process: once one has exhausted his scopic drive - and how to do that better than by offering exposed genitals in an uninhibited context? - and went over the whole cycle of shame, desire and frustration, the opportunity to dive into this primal contemplation is a genuine liberation...’

She adds in a laugh: ‘you’d be surprised actually of how many people blamed me for being eventually un-erotic, spoiling the common expectations! But you know, if all you want is entertainment, you shouldn’t come to the Lumpenkabarett, we provide fun, but also much more...’

‘Let’s consider this stage work as just another form of OUPERPO - for Ouvroir de Performance Potentiel, after OULIPO - with bondage as a self-reflective tongue-in-cheek evocation of artistic constraint’ - she emphasizes her speech by miming tying herself up - ‘and the whole cabaret and erotic show thing as hindrances that force both the artist and the audience to struggle through form to reach the essence of performing art. That can be that, or a rock concert, a roller derby match, a TV show or even a riot!’

‘And when you’ve done that, when you’re bound and exposed to a fascinated crowd, you’re a hero, you’re a goddess, you’re Prometheus, you’re Jesus, you unveil and offer your true being  - a being reduced to its mere being - to whomever is willing or able to share such a gift!’ She accompanies this somehow grandiloquent utterance with her lips carefully painted in satin black forming a cunning smile that makes it impossible to decide if she’s serious or not...

When not animated by talking or smiling, her black and white face becomes a blank image, making her silences more profound - just like her bound naked body emptied and darkened the space around her...

Excerpt from a text + graphic work, to be published in Akademie SChloss Solitude Yearbook 2011. 

Making of

Dancing on Ashes (Circle) - excerpts

Dancing on Ashes (Circle) in NK, Berlin, June 2011

Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam) in 18m Galerie, Berlin | 11 November 2011

Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam)

performance / installation by Ines Birkhan and Bertram Dhellemmes

11 november 2011 | 6:00 PM

18m Galerie 
Akazienstr. 30 2. OG
10823 Berlin
www.18m-galerie.de

About "Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam)" and "Dancing on Ashes (Fascinus)" (excerpt)

by Bertram Dhellemmes

Les machines désirantes au contraire ne cessent de se détraquer en marchant, 
ne marchent que détraquées.
 (Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, L'anti-Œdipe) 

Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam) and Dancing on Ashes (Fascinus) operate as a diptych within the series of the six Dancing on Ashes performances proposed in Stuttgart and Berlin between December 2009 and June 2011 (each performance is connected with all the other performances), and they contribute to a narrative and conceptual whole in conjunction with many other works using different media – videos, posters, installations, websites, a novel –, all gathered in the transmedia project Angel Meat). 

Both performances started from a duchampian meditation on art and desire from the perspective of fetishism. They depict female characters facing objectified desire and the objects of desire – sometimes themselves – brought to the extreme, until they’ve become vital and metaphysical issues for the protagonists. These characters are not embodied on stage by actors and the depicted situations are not performed, but told through a sequenced narrative text projected in the performance space. The performances are based on two forms of historical modern ritualized erotic entertainment: cabaret and rock concert, highly stylized and reduced to their most immediate and sensitive expression. This rooting into entertainment collides with the contemplative narrative device – that is actually the active medium of this series of performances, proposing an investigation of the cathartic experience of collective reading, questioning stage performance as much as literature in its extended field.

Dancing on Ashes (Fascinus) - excerpts

This video is in HD, please watch it in full screen!

Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam) in NK, Berlin

Dancing on Ashes (Circle) in NK, Berlin

Dancing on Ashes (Circle) excerpt

Johanna has always hated being named Johanna
She’d find it humiliating to be reminded
Of the lack of imagination of her parents
Each time someone would call her
(She would later benefit from this lack of imagination
Because no expectations meant no disappointment
They would be positively indifferent about her life choices)
So in her tomboy phase she called herself Jo
And she was still Jo when she evolved from tomboy to butch
And still Jo when she moved to Berlin to study at
The Dietrich Deich Institute for Optic Research
(Leading in laser engineering and one of its kind in Germany
The best way to leave Lower Saxony at eighteen)
But when she met Heike, she became Sheena

Dancing on Ashes in NK, Berlin | 16-17 June 2011.

Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam) / Dancing on Ashes (circle)

Dancing on Ashes is a multimedia performance series mixing live music and projected narrative texts. An attempt to create a new approach to literature by transposing it into the field of performance arts, it is the backbone of the Angel Meat transmedia project.

Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam) is a performance-installation staging self-playing music instruments. It tells the story of Yu, a dancer who decides to join the Dancing on Ashes cabaret show.

Dancing on Ashes (Circle) is a music + text performance with Bertram Dhellemmes playing electronics, that will premiere in NK. You will learn about the Triangle Circle, a group of friends to which belong Skullface, one of the main protagonists of Angel Meat.

Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam) | 16th June, 10 PM

Dancing on Ashes (Circle) | 17th June, 10 PM

NK

Elsenstrasse 52

2.Hinterhaus Etage 2

12059 Berlin Neukölln

0049(0)17620626386

Dancing on Ashes Hardcore Kunst Cabaret - photos

Rachel Brooker and Bertram Dhellemmes rehearsing 'A Girl Called Sheena', Schwelle 7, Berlin, February 2011.

You will find a series of backstage and rehearsal photos of the Dancing on Ashes Hardcore Kunst Cabaret show in Schwelle 7 last February on the cabaret page.

A girl called Sheena

I’m in love with this girl named Sheena – it’s not her real name, I think that it’s something like Gudrun or Gretchen or something… She is really trying hard to de-Germanize herself; well I’d do the same if I were her…

Usually Krauts, when they try to go Yank, go for cowboy hats; have you noticed when you travel abroad, the only people with cowboy hats are Germans! When you land in Bangkok or Acapulco, the loudmouth red-faced guys in short pants and cowboy hats that go straight to the bar always ask for a Maßkrug ov bier… Sure, we have some guys like that back in the US of A, but they don’t have the right to leave the country – for those who even know there are other countries out there – unless we’re invading one of course…

Dancing on Ashes Hardcore Kunst Cabaret | Welcome 2

Meine Damen und Herren

Mesdames et Messieurs
Signore e Signori
Ladies and Gentlemen
Welcome to the cabaret
Sorry for the cliché
But we want you to feel comfortable
At least for a short while
Because it won’t last

Dancing on Ashes Hardcore Kunst Cabaret in Schwelle 7, 26/27 February 2011

Dancing on Ashes Hardcore Kunst Cabaret 

A multimedia revue with strange dance, askew music, dark performances and more, proposed and directed by Bertram Dhellemmes and Felix Ruckert. Come and meet us between worlds!

With the participation of Anna Anderegg, Marco Barotti, Ines Birkhan, Rachel Brooker, Maikel van den Buruku, Cachot an Spielgefahr, Clara, Bertram Dhellemmes, Jessica Peeters, Felix Ruckert, Maurizio Saiu, Andreas Schildbach, Esther Maria Ufer...

Schwelle 7

Uferstrasse 6, HH, 1 Stock

13357 Wedding, Berlin

26-27 February 2011

Angel Meat in Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart | until 9th January 2011

Last days of the Angel Meat exhibition in Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart.

REACTIONS TO ANGEL MEAT by Pedro Dolabela Chagas

Quite unexpectedly, one certain day Bertram Dhellemmes invited me to write about Angel Meat. He never explained anything much – he only asked me to write something. So I did write something, trying to convey to the reader my impressions about their performance. I also tried to keep this text as impersonal as possible, in a (most likely naïve) attempt at “objectivity”: to try to capture their strength and make it visible through a different register, by giving room to my individual perception while saying things that could dialogue with the perception anyone might have of their work. Bollocks, maybe, but maybe then…

There is a series of entries to their work, whose complexity I’ve tried to do justice to. One can only understand a complex body by dissecting it, and I eventually selected some of the “entries” that most appealed to me and analytically separated one from the other, in order to understand how they function in themselves as well as the kind of effect their interconnection produces. Of course anyone who’s experienced Angel Meat’s performances knows that this separation is only, at best, analytical: whenever they’re on stage, everything erupts simultaneously. So to bring those aspects together by making them juxtapose one upon the other is our final aim here: we separate the elements in order to better appreciate their fusion.

Self playing Doppelcaster

Sound installation: custom double-neck telecaster, two rings, fan, amplifier.

Angel Meat in Akademie Schloss Solitude, November 2010/January 2011

Dancing on Ashes (Kalifornia)

Still from the video installation Dancing on Ashes (Kalifornia) 

Angel Meat in Akademie Schloss Solitude, November 2010/January 2011  
you can watch the video here

Angel Meat | Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart

Dancing on Ashes (Haiku)

video presented in the the Angel Meat exhibition in Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart

Dancing on Ashes (Johanna) in Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart | 20 November 2010

PERFORMANCE CANCELLED

"Johanna keeps silent for a while – she often does this in TV interviews
She does take the time to think carefully about what she will answer
But doesn’t bother to make the customary thinkative grimace
These few seconds of void make everything else feel grossly shallow"


Dancing on Ashes (Johanna)

Extended-field-of-literature performance Dancing on Ashes (Johanna), conceived and performed by Ines Birkhan and Bertram Dhellemmes (Real Dance Super Sentai), closes the second cycle of the Dancing on Ashes performance series. Proposing a new insight on the Angel Meat multimedia project, it introduces the last main character of its fictional universe.

Württembergischen Kunstverein Stuttgart
Schlossplatz 2 D-70173 Stuttgart
20th November 2010 | 8:00 PM

Angel Meat in Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart

Angel Meat

An extended-field-of-literature exhibition by Ines Birkhan and Bertram Dhellemmes.

This new actualization of transmedia project Angel Meat is a crossbreed of literature,
visual arts and performance proposing novel experiences of narrativity.

Akademie Schloss Solitude
Solitude 3 70197 Stuttgart
18 Nov. 2010 | 9 Jan. 2011

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Dancing on Ashes (Fascinus) in WKV | October 2010

photos by Christine Seefried

Poster 6

When Yu comes to the Lumpenkabarett the next day for the audition, she somehow manages to arrive one hour too early, takes this as a bad omen, and decides to give up the whole thing and to leave. She walks down Warmoesstraat in a dumb state, but when she reaches the Dam, she changes her mind again, goes back to the theatre, dives down the stairs in the dark and sits at the bar to wait for the manager.

Poster 5

Xaver raises his eyes from the screen of his laptop and watches a few seconds, without really seeing, a scene that would be astounding if it wasn’t what he sees everyday – since he established his office in the backstage of the cabaret. A tall and spidery dancer with blue hair is stringing a violin while chatting with an old guy with a low and booming voice – both are naked apart from a long white wig worn by the man (a famous Australian actor seeking a fresh kick in the European underground scene) and a rope tied in karada style around the torso of the woman (a Canadian ballet-trained yogi with an impressive Internet visibility).

Poster 4

After dinner, Alicja spends her daily half-hour in the hothouse, watering the orchids – just moistening some, soaking others –, trimming what has to be trimmed, raking the dirt, devotedly scenting the complex perfumes of flowers, wet earth and decay carried by the damp atmosphere, improvising monotone songs in glossolalia to cheer up the delicate blooms…

Fulfilling these tasks leaves her relaxed and a bit high. Then she usually perfects the moment with a glass of Vieux Cognac served in a large balloon, and a figurado – at day time she favors cigarillos but back at home, she allows herself more serious smoking.

Poster 3

'Ladies and Gentlemen, please applaude the Dead Weather'.

While Mosshart, White and their colleagues leave the stage under the applause of the audience, the robot-crane camera flies to the lounge part of the set, where Johanna, sitting on her throne-like armchair, is as carefully lit as the band, in a quite similar way, with a subtly balanced mix of white, blue and ultraviolet. She wears light-reactive body make-up that makes her skin glow almost imperceptibly, her lips and nipples as pale as her skin, making her look like a living statue. A hidden tubular fan directed to her face slightly accentuates the movement of her long hair, and her voice is lightly pitched down, compressed, equalized and phased. It is as if she belongs to a faintly shifted dimension, where gravity, time and light are somehow different, and the fact that this is obviously artificial and the result of elaborated special effects seems to even increase its impact.

Poster 2

Boris has been very enthusiastic about his blog for eighteen months – it got high rates almost instantly, good reviews from peers and a few hundred followers within a few weeks, then thousands. People love his highly literary approach to fashion, his jaunts into imaginary worlds, his old-school dialogues with his cat, his hilariously hypochondriac fascination for body modifications, his cool-hunting in the underground, his way to never really follow trends while always being up to date somehow…

It did him some good for his work also, for which reputation is valuable, and he’s been a guest poster on some big blogs with international and mainstream visibility, remuneration, invitations to a few select fashion shows and parties… There he has more or less the status of a gifted dilettante and he’s OK with it, he doesn’t want to push his design work in the spotlights yet – doesn’t feel ready for it. But most people he gets to work with know him by reputation now, and have for him the kind of positive a priori famous cool people draw.

Poster 1

As Skullface queues at the check-in desk at Airport Schiphol, this familiar state of paranoia that rises on such occasions (they always regard her as if she’s some suicide-bombing prone death-cultist), combined with intense airport-specific boredom, trigger flashes of intuitions about the events of the last weeks. She might have been a bit too busy being cool about the whole Alicja/Devyani thing, could it be that she ended up manipulating herself in fear of being manipulated?

Dancing on Ashes (Fascinus) excerpt

Had Skullface googled Alicja’s name
She would have put things together much sooner
But would that have changed anything?
Because of the tattoo on her face
Skullface is used to provoking strong reactions in people
Rejection or fascination, both actualizing in quite different ways
Over time, she built a complex combination of indifference –
Carefully dosed to not become cold, blasé or distant –
Vigilance – danger is never very far when you’re different –
And a slight taste of vanity that she prefers to acknowledge
Better than to be in denial

Dancing on Ashes (Fascinus) in Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart | 20 October 2010

"Her words are like chiseling blades reorganizing mental matter

And each of them comes with sharp hand and head movements

She shapes meanings with wide-open hands and tense fingers

Until they turn into objects that one could see and feel"

Dancing on Ashes (Fascinus)

Dancing on Ashes (Fascinus) is the 5th performance of the Dancing on Ashes series, another window on the artistic and narrative universe developed in the Angel Meat transmedia project.

a performance by Ines Birkhan, Bertram Dhellemmes & Marco Barotti.

Württembergischen Kunstverein Stuttgart

Schlossplatz 2 D-70173 Stuttgart

20th October 2010 | 8:00 PM

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Dancing on Ashes video excerpts

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excerpts from performances Dancing on Ashes (Welcome to) and Dancing on Ashes (North) -

full version videos are available on request here.

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Comedy | excerpt from Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam)

You can see the whole video of Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam) on request here.

Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam) video excerpts

Dancing on Ashes (Lovers) excerpt

Dancing on Ashes (Lovers)

Dancing on Ashes (Lovers) excerpt

‘Should someone ask me about my occupation,
I would say that I’m a lover’ she indulges in saying
‘Love is always what draws the course of my life’
Devyani looks at the sweating bodies around her
Senses the mix of excitement and exhaustion
After two hours of exhilarating dance
Precise stepping, grounded feet, nimble legs
Intricate and expressive waving arms
Hands and fingers telling tales of desire
Swinging hips and bouncing breasts
Serpentine spines and floating heads
Lascivious eyes and fluttering eyelashes…

Dancing on Ashes (Lovers) in Sowieso Neukölln, Berlin | 7 May 2010

'She lashes a significant stare at Zsófia with her kohl-laded eyes

And with a headshake invites her to stay in the studio

Zsófia starts folding her silken scarves on her thighs

Not looking at her until she comes near and starts to talk'

Dancing on Ashes (Lovers)

Ines Birkhan: dance, music
Bertram Dhellemmes: dramaturgy

Dancing on Ashes (Lovers), a radical solo dance, music and text performance, opens the second Dancing on Ashes trilogy, in the cabaret-esque frame of Sowieso Neukölln.

first part: improvised music by Thea Farhadian (violin, electronics) and Daniel Schorno (eponymous electronics).

Sowieso Neukölln e.V. | Weisestr. 24 | 12049 Berlin
7 May 2010, 8:30 PM | www.sowieso-neukoelln.de

making of

Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam) excerpt

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Lumpenkabarett, thank you for paying us a visit – thank you for paying anyway! After all, that’s what you do: you’ve been working like morons all day long to pay your boss’s sex tour in Bangkok next month, and to pay your taxes so Lumpenproletarien and artists can survive on public subsidies.

Anyway, this is one of the few happy times you’ll have this year, so, let’s have fun…

This is the Lumpenkabarett, here we have sharp Kunst, good music and hot ladies, such as I. And I tell you, people, it’s good to be a lady. I say, I feel sorry for the men here but really it’s so good to be a woman. Only a woman can look beautiful and dignified in heels and stockings, on all four, gagged and chained in the basement with a ponytail butt-plug stuck in the ass. I can tell you, I was there 10 minutes ago!

Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam)

Dancing on ashes (Amsterdam)

Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam) in Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, March 2010

making of

Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam) in Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, March 2010

making of

Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam) in Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, March 2010

Dancing on Ashes (Welcome to)

photos by Norbert Schliewe

Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam) excerpt

A few months before she flies to Java
To die on the land of her ancestors
(Well not exactly her ancestors but this is another story)
A land she never visited before
Or doesn’t know much about actually
Yu is in Amsterdam
She just had the confirmation that her Jonson syndrome
Has reached the lethal point she feared all her short life

Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam) in Akademie Schloss Solitude | 22 March 2010

“She tries to imagine manufactured objects loving her

How their technological indifference would be stimulating

She tries to imagine herself attired in fishnet and rubber

Warmth underlaid with cold and soft with hard”

Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam)

Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam) is a performance-installation by Ines Birkhan and Bertram Dhellemmes. A hybrid and ambiguous work, it is part of the Dancing on Ashes “expanded field of literature” performance series, and belongs to the long term transmedia project Angel Meat.

Akademie Schloss Solitude

70197 Stuttgart

22 March 2010 | 8:00 PM

making of

In the Woods 1