Angel Meat | transmedia project (literature, performance, visual arts, media arts, video...)

Dancing on Ashes (Circle) - excerpts

2011-10-23T12:52:00.000+02:00

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

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

2011-10-12T11:47:00.000+02:00

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)

2011-08-18T21:01:00.000+02:00

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 (Amsterdam) is actually a performance-installation in which there are no live performers at all, but music machines (self-playing piano and guitar, sampler...) generating a random and hypnotic music, the projected text and the video of an Amsterdam-style erotic stand-up comedy number (performed by Ines Birkhan). The text tells the story of Yu, a young dancer who, after learning that she enters the terminal phase of a neurodegenerative disease, decides to live as intensely as possible before her forthcoming death. Having spent her childhood in the Red Light District of Amsterdam in a relative indifference toward the local sex industry, she starts a quest of self-dispossession by abandoning herself to the endless fascination offered by sex shops and sex shows , and eventually discovers the Dancing on Ashes cabaret – the core of the fictional universe of Angel Meat.

Dancing on Ashes (Fascinus) is a in situ performance conceived for the glass room of WKV in Stuttgart, taking mainly the form of a rock concert played behind a glass wall on which the text is projected. It tells the ambiguous encounter between two of the main characters of Angel Meat: Skullface, a Berlin jeweller with a complex background revealed by a morbid facial tattoo, and Alicja, a collector and manipulative erotomaniac with twisted designs. The band assembled for the occasion (with the special participation of drummer Marco Barotti) plays a noisy, violent and de-constructed jazz-rock. The music being stifled by the glass wall, it was possible to conciliate the contemplation needed to dive into reading and the vibrant and cathartic energy specific to amplified live music.

The stories of Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam) and Dancing on Ashes (Fascinus) take place in a world dominated by fetishism. A society that requires an absolute credulity and the constant acceptance of a fictional interface to keep functioning. Every day, television, advertising, news, politics and religions ask us to believe in a myriad of fictions, often improbable, if not contradictory. Human desires always have been perverted and reattached on artificial objects – it is a constant of human societies, if not a prerequisite –, but our techno-scientist society systemized the process with technological and intellectual logistics beyond anything that has ever existed. Art and eroticism are probably the only areas in which fetishism is assumed, claimed, cogitated and therefore can be mastered and applied to the benefit of humanity. Only there, the latent conflict between man and man-made productions can recede, the threats exerted on man by anything meant to increase his own power are subjugated by surrendering joy (...).

you can soon read the full article on the Design of the (In-)Human website.

Dancing on Ashes (Fascinus) - excerpts

2011-07-07T15:09:00.001+02:00

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

Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam) in NK, Berlin

2011-06-23T08:26:00.000+02:00

Dancing on Ashes (Circle) in NK, Berlin

2011-06-23T08:24:00.000+02:00

Dancing on Ashes (Circle) excerpt

2011-06-18T19:01:00.001+02:00

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
She feels grateful to Heike for this and many other things
Her love, her confidence, her passionate spirit
Her generosity, her sense of cool, her accuracy
Even her stubbornness and her lack of limits
When her sexual urges shift from kinky to twisted
With Heike, Sheena learned to let go
She could give up the hardcore dyke look she sported so far
And become half Punk-Rocker, half Queen-of-the-Jungle
Or whoever else she likes or just fancies for a while
She stopped defying the world and started enjoying herself
She was the one who introduced Roller Derby to the Circle
She even had a couple of affairs
That caused terrible rows with Heike
Followed by wholehearted reconciliations
The girls from the Circle were actually quite pissed at her
Because Heike has the status of a quasi-fairy godmother
She’s been there since the very beginning
And took part in the choice of their name
Runder Winkel –
The Rounded Triangle or Triangle Circle –
And amongst other things provides the Circle’s current HQ
A vacated storage in her building’s courtyard in Neukölln
Worth probably thrice the rent she pays for it
Since the area rose as hip Kreuzkölln
The reaction of the Circlettes unexpectedly upset Sheena
Until she figured out that these girls – however unlikely –
Had become her family, whose judgment she minds
At least her Sheena-self’s family
But Sheena is the one that matters now
Sheena is even happier about being Sheena
Since Johanna – the Johanna –
Took over the headlines
First with the Augean Stables big clean-up
When she exposed in a suicidal move
All the dirty secrets of the company she headed
And of the governments and corporates dealing with it
And made the whole system quake
Then there’ve been the lawsuits and the many side scandals
Then the shooting
And now Johanna is in her media guru phase
Appearing in all the TV talk-shows as the Naked Truth
Literally naked
Splitting the crowds into two irreconcilable blocs
Either fervent supporters, if not worshipers
Hoping she will pull down the whole system
Or just thinking that she’s so cool
Or those who despise her for being a fraud, a show-off
A traitor, an exhibitionist, a mythomaniac, a troublemonger
The Triangle Circle’s girls are quite equally split over Johanna
With as many supporters than opposers
But as usually within the group
There are as many positions as members
At the exception of Véronique
Who would always agree with Rosi
But with subs you never know when it is game
And when it is real
Tonight is the Triangle Circle’s weekly meeting –
Sheena is in charge of tidying and airing the den
The last issue of what they call a meeting was boosted
With alcohol, tobacco, MJ and generated much sweat –
And Johanna will be – again – the main topic
Because there is this gathering in a few weeks
There’ve been more and more of these over the last months
All over Germany, and a few in other European countries
But this one will be huge
There is a call to converge on Berlin this time
It’s one of these Facebook things without real organizers
That panic the authorities and the police
As always when they lack people to threaten and punish
It is acknowledged that the core of Johanna’s followers
Is composed of housewives, young pensioners
Unemployed graduates and teenage girls
And her later persona lost her all political credibility
But the social phenomena attracts more and more activists
And since the Berlin gathering is officially denounced
As illegal, seditious and dangerous for its participants
And drastic repression by the police is inevitable
The word propagates in the underground
That Black Blocs will get involved to righteously protect
The amateur protesters from the riot cops
The association of Johanna and Black Blocs
Will definitely stir the group tonight
It is obvious that Sabina will come up again
With her thing about starting an all-female Black Bloc
To not let all the fun and action go to the lads
And she will try again to talk some of the girls –
Mostly the Roller Derby players such as Sheena –
Into joining her project
Though the main agenda of the Circle
Is to sip beers and gossip in fine company
Give a hand to the Anti-Christopher Street Day Parade –
The alternative gay pride demonstration in Kreuzberg –
Or lately loudly cheerlead and celebrate the victories
Of the Berliner Arbeiterin Sportverein –
Sheena and Britta’s Roller Derby team for which
The Triangle Circle became an unofficial supporters’ club
Heike and Devyani being the most fervent
Heike because Sheena is the jammer of the team
And Devyani at first because she has an acknowledged fetish
For tattooed and pierced girls
(Though she herself never indulged in body modifications –
She considers that this belongs to white folks)
And she particularly loves neo-classic white trash Americana
En vogue amongst 21st century German Roller Derby players
Sheena will decline again Sabina’s proposition
There are enough bruises to heal (with kisses or arnica)
After a match to seek more from the police truncheons
And she can’t believe in mass action even if she understands
People’s need to imagine that they have a say in public affairs
And that they can make things better
She thinks that many different avant-gardes are needed
Some have to confront directly the Powers-that-Be
To make clear that the status quo is not acceptable
Some have to explore new paths
And create new ways for the common good
She hopes that she doesn’t abuse herself
That promoting sisterhood is a valuable personal duty
That celebrating joy, liveliness, beauty, freedom
Is not just a selfish agenda but can benefit everybody
That freeing people from bitterness, frustration, ignorance
Narrow-mindedness, inhibition, anhedonism or malice
Matters as much – if not more –
As redistributing the means of production
Of whatever else is supposed to give people
Control over their destinies
That’s what gives Sheena wings
As she whirls around the Roller Derby elliptical track
Slaloming between her Amazonian adversaries
Dressed in a vinyl miniskirt and fishnet tights
Wearing wheeled knee-high boots
A DDR-khaki T-shirt with rainbow strips along the arms
And a black leather peaked cap toping her pink dyed hair
Fueled by the wild cheers of her exhilarated gang
Flying to the victory with style and gusto.

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

2011-04-26T16:26:00.001+02:00

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

Elsenstrasse 52

2.Hinterhaus Etage 2

12059 Berlin Neukölln

0049(0)17620626386

Dancing on Ashes Hardcore Kunst Cabaret - photos

2011-03-16T13:51:00.002+01:00

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

2011-03-03T18:21:00.004+01:00

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…

Well, Sheena is smarter than that – she’s a Berliner. No, not a doughnut, a German refugee who fled to Berlin to escape her sorry fate of getting fatter Oktoberfest after Oktoberfest, and worshiping a dead octopus as the enlightened leader of the country. In Berlin she can meet refugees from all over the world – Americans who realized they can understand better how the president of Iran is elected than their own, Italians who after struggling against fascism and the mafia for decades ended up with both at the head of their government, Frenchies who in protest of having the best food, the sexiest women, the shortest working hours and the best welfare system elected someone to destroy it all, so they can complain even more…

As long as you are white, Berlin is a good place for refugees, if you keep off the currywursts of course – you know, these bits of processed dead meat so yucky that they have to conceal the taste with cheap ketchup and fake curry… The local motto is “we’re poor but sexy” – that’s a good reason not to bother getting rich like the other morons out there, and this is the right place for survivors, artists and parasites. But you know, there are worse things than poor parasites... rich parasites! You can’t send 2500 riot cops to clear Charlottenburg like they did in Friedrischhain…

Anyway, in Berlin they also have the only museum in the world dedicated to the Ramones, and this brings us back to Sheena, because it’s Sheena I’m concerned qbout, and came to tell you about, Ladies and Gentlemen… Aaah, sweet lovely sexy little Sheena… A petite but built chick with steel muscles and tits, but a pussy like a daifuku – you know, these Japanese cakes that are super soft but firm, that you feel like keeping pressed on your lips and tongue for ever… She used to trim her bush really short, with hair just on the labia and a shaved belly, and she has a wild mullet, like the chick from that South-African hip-hop band – I don’t know what’s up with me, I’m going all geographical, must be away from the States for too long!

Sheena is a complicated one I can tell you, because she loves girls but she loves cocks too. How she loves cocks… You know, I love cocks too, but she LOVES cocks! But then why fuck chicks you’ll ask? Well, she loves tits too! Then why fuck me, you ask? Well fuck you, that’s not the point. She also loves pussy, and says - smart girl – that it’s easier for a chick to have a dick than for a man to have a pussy. And that it’s actually easier to love a woman than to love a man – that makes sense!

But she has also a whole theory about how two girls fucking each other in the ass with big dildos might reach the acme of human essence, free of enslaving procreation and gender and stuff, and lead to the epiphanic birth of the tantric hermaphrodite – or was it platonic? Anyway, by combining then a non-genital sexual act with physical penetration, you embody the sublimation of life force via human psyche and somehow fight the cosmic entropy at stake in the reproduction-slash-death cycle – pussy being supposed to provide a un-actualized potential counterpoint, thus combining both fulfillment and frustration – though you can also use your fingers and… Well I didn’t understand everything, I’m no good with theory, but I could catch up in practice…

Yeah, Sheena got some brains when she moved to Berlin, where she found plenty of other dykes hanging out in gemütlichen cafés sitting in front of organic soy lattes and eager to listen to her philosophical sexual speculations for hours – and possibly help her in her research process. Some days it gets her so excited that she can’t stop talking about it, so usually I have her lick my pussy to shut her up, but she still wants to talk so it goes like: “Mmmmmh… In the process for hysterizing gender, you can appropriate…. Mmmmmh… the innervation of the anal region exceeds the one of the genital…. Mmmmmh… so you can invert the domination relation by adopting a Gnostic point of view… Mmmmmh… the phallic cult still vivid today in Japan existed in pre-Roman Etruria…. Mmmmmh”. That makes me crazy! Calm down, people!

But Sheena has a big flaw: she’s an unfaithful little whore… Oh, not unfaithful to me, this I could handle, and I’m not a saint myself – well you know what I mean, Hey, little miss, how you been since last night? No, she’s been unfaithful to her regular girlfriend, and I was on the side, until they patched it up, and suddenly I was out of the picture… Me, out of the picture! Not the first time I’ve been the mistress – though I usually prefer to be the Maîtresse – but this time I fell in love with this little bastard, and my heart is broken into pieces. So after all, this story is not so funny…

Dancing on Ashes Hardcore Kunst Cabaret | Welcome 2

2011-03-03T11:04:00.002+01:00

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
You have to know that you came here
At your own risks
Because you expose yourselves
To have your minds blown
By the extravagant magnificence
And breathtaking boldness
Of what you will witness here tonight
You thought that you would just come
For some weekend entertainment
To be amused and titillated
Exhibit yourselves in some hip venue
And be part of the cool crowd
But here you are now
Looking at us, stuck on your seats
Anything can happen
And your lives might never be the same
But the worst thing that might happen to you
Is that nothing happens
That you would just go home
Check your Facebook and watch some series
On free-online-tv.com
And just think: ‘Mmh, yes, that was fun
A little bit boring though
And so pretentious’
This is an atrocious option
That we refuse to even consider
But don’t worry
Even if you don’t notice it yet
You are not really yourselves anymore
You are part of the Lumpenkabarett
AKA the Dancing on Ashes Hardcore Kunst Cabaret
You are characters in a complex fiction
Thoroughly elaborated over years
With ramifications in every art field
You are in a novel, in a film, in a performance
On the web, in a song, in a show
In gossip, in rumors, in urban legends
That’s why you actually dressed up
To come here tonight
And sit here all well tempered
Full of trust and expectations
In this well composed audience
You made fictions of yourselves
To dissolve in ours
This is just beautiful
We will treat you well
And stage all this carefully
At the end of the show
We will bow before you
Not full of humbleness and gratitude
As expected from us vile artists
But to salute your performance
As the audience of the Lumpenkabarett
We are already proud of you
And praise this collective effort
Meine Damen und Herren
Mesdames et Messieurs
Signore e Signori
Ladies and Gentlemen
Welcome to the Cabaret

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

2011-02-10T02:17:00.005+01:00

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

2011-01-04T05:39:00.001+01:00

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

REACTIONS TO ANGEL MEAT by Pedro Dolabela Chagas

2010-12-23T01:59:00.002+01:00

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.

FACES

The male figure’s face and the female figure’s face are covered with deep white make up with details in black. If that weren’t spooky enough to catalyze attention, we soon realize that their faces are not only white: they’re blank. The male and the female figures are devoid of expression: their faces do not dramatize their presence on stage, they do not dramatize their interconnection, they do not dramatize the events of the narrative plot, they do not dramatize or suffer or react to anything. Dramatic intensity is certainly there, and sometimes in abundance – but it never comes from face expression. Not even when the female figure starts to move (to dance?) do faces tell you anything: they don’t help you, they don’t tell you how to behave, they don’t tell you how to feel. This means that it’s you who’s stuck with the buck: the faces won’t guide you, and all reaction is strictly your own. That makes the experience more difficult, in a way – it adds roughness to it. The two figures do not stand by you, they refuse to offer you any kind of identification or personal connection (either with them or with you fellow member of the audience, with whom you will have no laughs or tears to share), and so they make you alone: their presence does not leave you alone, it makes you alone.

In a way, altogether with the music the male and the female figures are part of setting, but that is not the whole story. For even though they’re absent when perhaps you most need them (is it humorous what I’m seeing?, is it ironic?, who is it they’re criticizing?, but again, is that criticism at all?), even though they will not tell you how to think, they’ll never let you forget they are there – as if forcing you to react, to stay until the end, to endure. And even if you somehow manage to get used to them, they will still feel expressionless to you: anything else would – and to a great extent – spoil the life that the narrative plot has by now acquired in its own right. A single smile, a single twist would be too intrusive: it would divert the impact the narrative wants to produce by itself.

MAN AND WOMAN

You can put three men or three women on a stage. You can have ten or twenty men or ten or twenty women onstage, and that’s ok: at some point the number will explain itself. But two men or two women might be in excess. Two men or two women, that just cannot fit: some tension, any tension has to erupt between them. Two people from the same sex onstage, the least you’ll expect between them is dialogue – if not straightforward conflict.

But the same does not apply to a man and a woman. In Angel Meat’s performance it soon becomes obvious that the male and the female figures are not “together” in any sense of the word: there is no “relationship” between them. That is precisely why they have to be from different sexes: it is the only combination that allows for two people to occupy the same stage without generating absence or excess. In Angel Meat’s case, that seems to be precisely the effect intended: the two figures are simply there – they have no clear connection with each other, they do not interact. Even their playing music together is hard to be read as partnership: since their sound does not feel like actual “composition”, it simply doesn’t look like they share the complicity or perhaps even the “division of labor” that an ensemble conveys. In direct contrast with a musical group performance (where it is obvious and visible that everybody needs one another), the two Angel Meat figures are just there, in the strong non-interacting presence of their bodies – and that’s enough. This takes not a “couple”, but a man and a woman: that’s the equilibrium that seems “natural”, the combination that allows for two people to be onstage without arousing the expectation of conflict, that allows their bodies and faces to dispose themselves without raising the question as to what will happen between them – and we know that nothing will have between them...

SOUND

Is there music in Angel Meat? Why not, but maybe… Maybe the answer is no: maybe it’s not about music, it’s all about sound…

At which point someone will step on and ask me to point out the essential difference between one thing and the other. This person will then proceed to deconstruct my argument by crushing any attempt at distinguishing sound from music, finally embarrassing me into recognizing that, well, there’s no essential difference between one and the other, which everybody always knew from the start, implying as a consequence that Angel Meat do, after all, compose and perform music… But that’s not the point, that’s simply not the point. My distinction is instrumental: as the female figure, for instance, starts to step heavily and rhythmically right before the male figure starts stretching out noise from his guitar without even looking at the audience, what their is doing is to create a setting – it’s to create an ambience. Even if their stuff demands a lot of composition (and rehearsing), “composition” is not of the matter here: their sound is there for a specific effect, and nothing they play would ever make sense if detached from the context in which it’s played. And it’s sound over sound over sound…

It is the instruments speaking themselves: it’s not the guitar playing a certain “tune”, it’s the guitar playing itself, playing off its own set of possibilities. The flute does the same (it’s pure flute), and the (beautiful) moments of convergence between the two do gather momentum – but such momentum does not seem to be conceived as a musical achievement (it is not produced for itself or for the sake of its own fruition) but as a setting and ambience for the narrative flow. In Angel Meat, sound is part of narration.

TEXT

This is the biggest surprise you’ll get: a little after the performance begins, instead of following lines spoken by actors you’ll find yourself reading the lines of a text (projected on a screen on top behind the male and the female figures). And lines are exactly what they are. There are no “paragraphs” appearing, but lines succeeding one another in a sharp telegraphic pace. Right then you realize how much Angel Meat’s faces, bodies and sound have created a setting: they are the medium through which the narrative now begins to unfold. Unbelievably enough, this is what it is: Angel Meat is a form of literature, or I should say: Angel Meat is a literary form.

In a very surprising way, they do the unthinkable: they make reading a collective practice. Press culture got us used to silent individual reading; Angel Meat creates silent collective reading. The audience is now reading a text, and one can only imagine that their reactions vary a lot – but that’s something you cannot easily see, or at least not all the time. Sometimes you sense you neighboring crowd silently laughing or expressing other reactions to the text, but collective reading remains for the most part individual (or subjective). That’s the risk of turning performance into reading: coming from personal habits and tastes, reading reactions remain individual, so that the impact of Angel Meat will be atomized to a great extent. No two readers are the same, and there will be no such thing as the general reaction a traditional performance can arouse: reading can be collective, but the response will be personal.

But that is, of course, part of the game – that is part of the risk. The lines succeed one another within the setting created by sounds and bodies. The workings of the male and female figures construct the context for a narration that is as telegraphic as that of a graphic novel (where the context is visually built – just like in Angel Meat’s performance, in a certain way). The inflow of lines works through a principle of addition: bits of information juxtaposed on one another build up what will eventually read as a story – a real story, with well-defined characters and actions, happening in well-delineated contexts, evolving through complexly-built situations… until it strangely ends in suspension. This is something crucial: their text doesn’t function like the lines of a song (unless you’re thinking about Lou Reed’s Walk on the wild side and its sudden successive exposition of immediately vivid characters). But even the comparison with Lou Reed (who Bertram himself confirms to be a source of inspiration) doesn’t explain it all, for Angel Meat’s texts give themselves the time to develop the characters in ways that would never be available for a four-minute musical track. They present characters (and not only “types”) with their own personalities, fears, doubts and pursuits, slowly revealed as they’re settled within a picture, situation or plot. But in the scope of the performance theirs is not a story that “comes” from a place and “leads” to another: it begins and ends without properly beginning or ending. As readers, we are “ejected” in something that is already ongoing, to be left in a situation that is largely undecided.

The lines are smartly built. Instead of adding 1 to 1, they generate lacunae or else bring unexpected information in. They might dialogue directly with the public, they might turn surrealistic, they might bomb you down with heavy anti-systemic political content. They might gather tension among the characters portrayed, they might produce suspense or expectation. They can be funny, witty or surprising. They can be bleak, somber or acid. This upholds any safe position the reader might look for, especially since there’s no sense of complicity between him and the narrative voice enunciating the text: for instance, there is no irony or criticism that the reader could appropriate as his own, pretty much in the same spirit as the male and the female faces do not provide him with emotions he can appropriate. The text does not give you a firm ground to hold on to – it’s even hard to get a sense of where it’s leading you to.

GESTURES, BODIES

Much of the equilibrium is conferred by gesture. Hand movements by an otherwise static male figure, changes in the position of the body of the female figure (without any proper “dancing”) are strong enough to create a whole setting.

Gestures create expectations about what comes next. They also set the pace of the presentation; they give it rhythm. Gestures announce changes in rhythm that match the events narrated on the screen. And they strengthen the distance (and distinction) between the persons on the stage and the people that surround them: it is through gesture that the male and the female figures create their own space – which is never a given is an event such as a performance, where the physical-but-invisible border between public and stage can be crossed over in a number of ways.

So gestures produce ambience, setting, rhythm. Together with dance – as well as with the blank presence of expressionless figures – it is through the bodies that performance happens: “The actor-interpreter, during the performance that exhibits his body and its setting, does not call on visuality alone. He opens himself up to contact. I hear him, I see him, virtually touch him: a very close virtuality, one strongly eroticized.” (ZUMTHOR, OPAI, 153) In their non-hermeneutic presence (in their suspension of meaning-attribution) bodies do, after all, configure the setting for the flow of information with their movements, with their clothing, make up and hair style, and with their physical, sensorial, chemical, kinetic (and somehow semantic and emotional) impact. Without being immediately charged with meaning, they nevertheless conduct meaning – the give meaning a shape. But Angel Meat do so by inverting Zumthor’s description of “closeness”, or at least by producing some closeness that inverts the expectation the concept might arise: their shaping of meaning happens through a total refusal of identification; their bodies are other to the public; even if they’re standing right before your eyes, they could not be more distant.

AESTHETIC DISTANCE

Performance creates a collectivity, or at least it might. But in Angel Meat’s case, literature takes over – or at least partially.

Zumthor once said that “Performance is the complex action by which a poetic message is simultaneously transmitted and perceived in the here and now. Speaker, receiver(s) of the message, circumstances […] are concretely confronted, are indisputable.” (ZUMTHOR, OPAI, 22) The weight of circumstance is thus incommensurable: a performance is circumstance in a number of ways; it is governed by circumstances to which it actively responds by acting upon them. In Zumthor’s description performance appears as interaction, dialogue, and emergence – does that apply to Angel Meat?

It is true that, when it comes to planning, Angel Meat does a great job in dealing with contexts as they come. That’s pretty much what happened at the Röhmerstrasse performance, when they got tied up in a corner with the audience pressed right upon their noses and with almost no room for movement at all, and still got away with it. But it is also true that Angel Meat tries to assume control of the action, somewhat turning the performance into a theatrical representation, with its traditionally well-defined partition of roles between actors and audience. The divide is too strong to create interaction, the attribution of roles is too sharp, and in the end control takes over: what you actually see is a presentation, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Of course there is nothing wrong with that (and it might only be the Brazilian in me reacting to an all-European frame of behavior), but I cannot help holding the utopia of seeing Angel Meat’s performances erupt as a surprise. Their audience should be unaware of their coming, and never know how to react. They shouldn’t have their names printed on any leaflet, or have people over expressly to see them – they shouldn’t be anticipated in any way. That would give birth to real context – abruptly, with little room for control. Aesthetic distance would be broken to pieces, which might be good for Ines Birkhan and Bertram Dhellemmes: as writers and musicians and actors they could find ways to have their public not as spectators, but as co-authors of their own production. I, for one, deeply and honestly believe that Ines and Bertram could get me – if they really wanted to – into screaming and shouting and banging my head and shaking my whole body under their input, instead of comfortably seeing their pieces (which is already cool enough, it’s never too much to repeat). But perhaps their pieces could be less thought of as “pieces”, “plays” or “works”, and bring on some loss of control...

Or maybe not. It already stuns me to see the amount of elements Angel Meat use, the amount of detail they’re able to handle, their so innovative use of text (in its plethora of image-creation without image support), which altogether makes me feel their work as being always in progress – which is great. They do hold the power to always become other to themselves, and I can only be curious about what will come next.

Unpublished article by Pedro Dolabela Chagas (junior professor at the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies at the Universidade Estadual do Sudoeste da Bahia), written in January 2010.

Self playing Doppelcaster

2010-12-07T23:08:00.001+01:00

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

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

Dancing on Ashes (Kalifornia)

2010-11-20T18:42:00.001+01:00

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

2010-11-18T01:06:00.003+01:00

Dancing on Ashes (Haiku)

2010-11-17T18:41:00.000+01:00

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

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

2010-11-16T02:08:00.003+01:00

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

2010-11-13T16:30:00.008+01:00

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

Dancing on Ashes (Fascinus) in WKV | October 2010

2010-11-12T20:40:00.001+01:00

photos by Christine Seefried

Poster 6

2010-11-11T00:12:00.002+01:00

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.

On stage, a loose rehearsal is going on, or maybe the performers are having a break, because they’ve just been casually talking for the last ten minutes. It’s quite odd to see them in full costume but in non-performance mode – it has somehow more impact than when they are dancing or playing music! The front woman in expressionist black and white make-up is wearing thigh high boots with twelve centimeter heels, opera gloves, a leather choker and not much more. She seems to suffer from backache since she keeps twisting her spine and stretching with painful grins, locking her arms behind her head, or leaning frontwards completely – like dancers do –, still talking.

The tall musician – wearing similar but rougher make-up, and a black suit – just stands there looking in the void, answering with few words, and seems absorbed in intricate and somber thoughts – though this might just as well be an impression due to the make-up. Then he slowly puts down his guitar on its stand, walks to the black curtains that he tears open and rolls a wheeled mirror to the centre of the stage. He then undergoes an astonishing transformation: in a few gestures, he opens his black shirt, unbuckles his trousers that drop on his boots, messes up his long hair, twists his upper body like a hunchback and distorts his face in a grotesque grimace. It ‘s as if he conjured out of nowhere an obscene, hellish clown with a toothless and drooling mouth wide open, bulging eyes turned white, twisted fingers writhing with crustacean movements, the whole body seemingly moved by a slow cramp resolving in a silent scream, like in horror of seeing itself in the mirror…

Then, as suddenly as he had turned into this misshapen freak, the musician straightens up, quickly puts his clothes back on with a sulky pout – but here again it’s hard to tell – and a clearly skeptical sniff, and mumbles: ‘I’m really not sure’. The woman is now hanging upside down from a rail fixed on the upstage wall, loosening her sore backbone – she asks: 'So, can we work on the new Johanna sketch, now?' Since he doesn’t answer, she goes on: 'Did you watch this YouTube video I e-mailed you yesterday? Johanna on some Austrian TV show, just baffling!'

At the sound of heavy steps descending the stairs, Yu switches from the stage to the forthcoming meeting, quickly recalling the pitch she prepared for the cabaret manager. It’s hard to tell if she belongs here, but at least she has to try.

Poster 5

2010-11-11T00:06:00.002+01:00

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).

As the computer chimes, Xaver quickly reads the message that just arrived on his IM, types a few words in answer, closes the laptop while standing up and goes to the door, interrupting the conversation as he has to pass between the two chatting there.

In the next room, a girl in a fuchsia bathrobe and cleansing mask brushes one of three black wigs resting on Styrofoam display heads. He addresses her with a strained voice: ‘Here we are, I have my appointment with Johanna right now! I’m on my way!’ Without turning her head, she retorts: ‘Good for you…’ Clearly expecting no better, he heads to the exit door when she ask him: 'Was it Aika I saw the other day in Amsterdam, what was she doing there? - No it wasn't, if it had been her, she'd be all around D’s new double-neck Telecaster, you know her, she's the only female guitar geek in Europe’ – even in a hurry, Xaver cannot help telling stories – ‘I guess you saw Yu, this Chinese-something dancer who came to audition. I was ready to sign her up right away, but I haven’t heard of her since… Must go now, ciao-ciao!’

Xaver doesn’t know yet that, in spite of her successful audition, Yu suddenly decided to fly to Jakarta in a desperate quest for meaning about her life and imminent death - he will learn it from Skullface much later, once Yu’s comatose body is brought back to Amsterdam, and won’t get all the details. But he will never forget her bizarre mix of violence and indifference, the troubled but vibrant sexuality expressed in her dance, and above all the vertiginous blankness of her Buddha face, even as she was rolling on the floor tearing off her clothes as if they were burning her skin (her personal idea of strip-tease it seemed).

For now, Xaver drives his coupé (he indulges in sport cars and managed to keep this one through the last decade of financial ups and downs) on the way to finally meet Johanna, after weeks of almost humiliating negotiations with an endless chain of in-betweens. How she achieved in half a year what he’s been trying to do for more than twenty years could not only be the result of the money invested, or the professionalism of her communication staff! He has to know more, to find out how he can use this knowledge for his own agenda – or maybe join her cause.

Poster 4

2010-11-10T23:46:00.007+01:00

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.

Biting her cigar tight, she wriggles out of her frock with the big glass still in her hand, struggling as the silk sticks to her moist skin, then kicks the cloth across the room – she is in a really good mood today! She goes to the big jewellery box resting on a tripod in front of a psyche mirror, rummages in it and fishes out a heavy white bronze necklace ornate with a huge sard stone that she casually puts around her neck. She admires the result in the mirror, blows a cloud of smoke to the ceiling, takes a sip of liquor and searches carefully for matching bracelets – she sets for an assortment of silver bangles. While slipping them on her forearms, she thinks of Devyani’s recent account of how she used to use bangles as brass knuckles in street fights when a teenager, and tries to imagine the luscious young woman as a brawling riffraff: the idea is quite exciting! Alicja puts the last ring around her knuckles, raises her fist to the mirror and tries to look threatening, then chuckles and wonders when Dev will be back – she’s been on tour for a few weeks now. Her absence is getting tiresome.

Slowly she walks across the big living room, exaggeratedly swaying to feel the metal jewels slither on her skin. From Devyani, her thoughts wander to Skullface, then to the bull excavation model she had her build – this is also exciting! It will be finished within one week, and she agreed with the craftswoman that she would deliver it herself at her place the next Friday, after office hours. She will wait for her in the greenhouse, open the door with a watering can in her hand – her gardening dress impregnated with the rich tropical scent –, and invite her to see her orchid collection. Then it’s double up, she’ll have exposed herself to Skullface, who either will enter her universe, or run away.

Alicja picks up a kimono, wraps herself in it and drops into the leather sofa in front of the flat screen. She’s planned to enjoy this solitary evening indulging in one of the very few pleasures she’s almost ashamed of: she will watch TV – or precisely she will watch Johanna on TV. She’s enthralled by how powerful and un-inhibited Johanna became over the last months, taking control of the mass media by doing the contrary of what is expected, with an agenda opposed to all the standards usually hammered into the passive audience, opposed to the average commercial and political propaganda vomited by TV. And like everybody else, Alicja wants to know how far all this will go!

Poster 3

2010-11-01T02:13:00.005+01:00

'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.

The program's host seems very happy with himself, he obviously has an ace up his sleeve: 'Johanna, I would like to show you something my crew shot yesterday evening in a Berlin cabaret... They have this show that claims to be a training program to survive what they call the inevitable collapse of the capitalist society' – he grins ironically – 'they are probably very happy that we advertise for them tonight because I doubt that anybody else pays attention to this kind of artsy-fartsy underground show...'

The camera frames Johanna's face in close-up to catch her reaction but the director notices immediately how she de-focuses her eyes in a way that conveys a feeling of tremendous boredom, even though her face stays impassive. They have to keep this frame at least five more seconds or they'll break the rhythm, but he whispers in the host's ear-flap to cut the smart-ass comments and go to the point.

‘Or maybe they will be the next sensation, because for sure they caught the spirit of the time, as you will see right away. Ladies and Gentlemen, I have the pleasure to introduce you to the Hardcore Kunst Lumpenkabarett Dancing on Ashes!’

On the screen behind them, the logo of the show decomposes in accelerating squares, colliding in each others and vanishing in pixel explosions, revealing what seems to be a crouching bear, agitated with sudden quakes. A hand loaded with shining rings emerges from the creature, pulls what appears to be a heavy fur-coat to expose bare buttocks on top of high-heel boots. The soundtrack mixes drum-rolls, laughs and a high-pitched shriek that is probably guitar feedback. At the other end of the fur-coat a head rises, wearing a long blond wig and a latex mask bearing the features of Johanna. The fake Johanna crosses the stage ringed with black curtains on all four, growling like a wolf, while a recorded voice starts to tell the life of the Death Angel of Consumerism.

Poster 2

2010-11-01T01:58:00.002+01:00

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.

But lately the excitement has been fading away, maybe since he started to work and hang out regularly at the Lumpenkabarett – he thinks. For a while, the whole costumes, make-up, accessories thing was like an intense and hyper-focused fashion laboratory – combining playful twists of classicism and cabaret clichés with a total absence of the restrictions ordinarily due to modesty, though never indulging in easy extravagance. The DIY dark glamour he contributed to develop there appeals to his own contradictions, from the hysterisation of genders (like they say) as an anti-gender statement to the formidable efficiency of the alliance of futile entertainment and political subversion.

Back home from the cabaret, Boris usually feels quite inspired and lyrical about it, and writes his most praised posts, shamelessly reinventing the show, the people or his costumes more than actually describing them. The cabaret as much as his blog are fictional zones, where it is necessary to add a serious dose of fantasy, desire and imagination to reality to precipitate it into denser matter. He wrote somewhere about this that it is essential to address art, love, politics, religion and every important mental artefact with the same suspension of disbelief that is required for a B science-fiction movie.

But the Lumpenkabarett feels more and more like the only place in town where the air keeps breathable in an otherwise noxious atmosphere. It’s as if a titanic sulphur cloud has settled over Europe in the last few years, everybody seeing it coming, but half of the people being busy making it bigger, while the other half tries to do anything not to think about it. And since the cabaret people added the Johanna sketches to the Dancing on Ashes show, Boris started to look at this phenomenon as something more significant than the last empty hype it seems to be when you purposefully avoid TV and standard mass-media.

Then Boris realises that both Johanna’s crusade and Dancing on Ashes’s travesty of it, while just shows, reach a level of reality that had utterly escaped him so far.

Poster 1

2010-11-01T01:39:00.003+01:00

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?

Reaching the control desk after more queuing, she notices the panic look in the eyes of the security woman (who presses discreetly a red button on her walkie-talkie), and her peripheral vision fills with converging uniforms. No big deal, she doesn't have much baggage but anyway she had her suitcase put in the luggage hold, since she doesn’t want to be controlled with her metal toys prototypes – she’d rather avoid prompting a small-scale post-porn Brancusi controversy. Also she isn’t wearing her favorite steel-toe Doc Martens or any superfluous metal, so the metal-detector gate doesn’t ring, but she’s body-searched anyway, adopting spontaneously a resigned crucifixion pose. ‘So much for death-cult’ she broods, as usually in this situation.

While standing there with wide open arms and being thoroughly scanned, Skullface thinks that she now has a clearer understanding of what is wrong with Alicja. Not morally or psychologically wrong like it would appear at first, that she doesn't give a shit of, but deeply disloyal. She had forgotten the nauseous feeling of betrayal, for many years she – softly – managed to make clear that she’s not someone you want to mess with. But Alicja’s lunacy makes her both difficult to read and quite blind to elementary signals.

Skullface doesn't care about legality, but if she has to do something illegal, she wants to do it purposefully, in full control and for worthy reasons. She decided to keep remote from the law like from any other kind of institution, to avoid as much as possible any kind of grip society could have on her. Now Alicja not only selfishly endangered her social autarchy, but she didn’t make her know it at any moment, leaving her store in her workshop materials that – if you think of it – cannot have legal provenance. While unsettled with the whole project, she’s been unaware that what felt at first innocuous could be actually the source of trouble.

The control people seem even more nervous than usually, apparently because of the increasing amount of travelers wearing little mirror disks in badges or pendants that signal them as supporters of Johanna - supporters, followers, adepts, fans, it's not clear. They reluctantly admit that Skullface is not a threat to airborne transportation, and actually the woman who gives her back her handbag slightly smiles at her, but she’s wearing dark red nail polish and a ball-ring in her left tragus.

Dancing on Ashes (Fascinus) excerpt

2010-10-07T00:53:00.003+02:00

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
She has spotted Alicja for a while
The tall woman is around a little bit too much
As if she suddenly became the friend of all her friends
While obviously avoiding to get in direct contact with her
Skullface knows it will happen, but cannot figure out yet
What form it will take
She is not upset nor obsessed, just aware
It’s not the first time this happens
Then at some point Alicja is a good friend of Devyani
They share a taste for gossip, dirty talk and salacious innuendos
They hang together in straight bars and play flamboyant femmes
Devyani adopts Alicja’s trait of smoking cigars in an affected way
And her deep loose décolletés allowing occasional nipple slips
(Though with just slightly bigger breasts, Devyani lacks the chic of it)
Now when Alicja walks by the atelier – a few times a week! –
She casually waves hello through the window
But her face loses its mobility, like she tries to control herself
Skullface is used to Devyani’s posse of vivid lesbians
More the partying kind than LGTB rights militants
She likes most of them but doesn’t join often
After all, when she has a boyfriend
She doesn’t hang with people for the sake of their heterosexuality
So Alicja’s flirtatious ways with Devyani are quite familiar
Even if she’s a little overage for Girl Power plays
Then comes the opening of a craft arts exhibition
Where Skullface shows a few things she makes
In addition to her successful silver jewels line
On her spare time she fashions these ambiguous objects
Between evocative sculptures and one-off designer sex toys
Made of exotic woods and polished aluminium
She claims it’s not art, not sex toys either
They are not for use, though fully functional
And they are not for sale (but she keeps them
In a little display in her atelier, for occasional amateurs)
Alicja is there with Devyani and Boris and a few other friends
She wears a light grey pantsuit over a wide-open white blouse
A big chiseled bronze medallion rests between her breasts
And she has the gaze of a panther
She browses sneeringly through everything else in the show
Blowing the smoke of her thin cigarillo to the ceiling
Whispering comments to her friends who burst into laughter
Her trajectory is obviously calculated to reach Skullface’s window
After thirty minutes of display of her social skills
Skullface waits for her, chatting with a friend of her mother
Who comes to see everything she shows, buys her jewels
And even shows up regularly at the Cabaret
She usually feels a little bit embarrassed to talk about sexual topics
With elders, or anybody related to her family
But she likes the intensity of this woman
Who was an early member of the Commune
And an ardent advocate of its free sexuality rules
Of course Alicja cunningly manages to join the conversation
And almost without noticing
In spite of her awareness that it would happen
Skullface has her first conversation with her
Well not exactly a conversation actually
Alicja has a special way to inconspicuously control discussions
And have her interlocutor voice either a variation or her own opinion
Or a point that would allow her a brilliant contradiction
Her words are like chiseling blades reorganizing mental matter
And each of them comes with sharp hands and head movements
She shapes meanings with wide-open hands and tense fingers
Until they turn into objects that one could see and feel
But Skullface is somehow disappointed
In a way, she enjoyed Alicja’s slow and convoluted approach
She took it as a one of these gratuitous seduction games
She would never initiate herself but enjoys being the object of
And suddenly Alicja is all over and takes all the room
Skullface feels like she’s just another pretext
For the woman’s endless self-indulgence and inflated ego
Even though Alicja emphatically praises her sexual artifacts
Calling them ‘sacred objects devoted to a love cult’
‘Ultimate intermediates between organic and inorganic’
‘Timeless epitomes of human craftsmanship’
And even ‘cosmic communion prosthesis’
(But Skullface is not sure, she lost track at some point)
A circle of marveled listeners formed around them
Shaking heads and grinning in approval
As if Skullface should be proud and delighted to be the object
Of such brilliant understanding and appreciation
When she actually feels dispossessed and almost fooled
Sensing that beyond enthusiasm and flattery lays a hidden agenda
Then Alicja lets other people talk – mostly commenting on her words
She goes to the display and looks again carefully
At the shining curves of the stylized organic shapes
Thoughtfully tapping with a fingernail on the window
Seemingly struck by an unexpected aspect of Skullface’s work
She talks now to Devyani
But her voice is clearly understandable over the other conversations
As if carried on overhead by the smoke of her cigarillo
'You know, however beautiful these are, they lack something
Actually, they lack dangerousness
They can for sure fulfill aesthetic and physical high pleasures’
(As Alicja leans over the window, her blouse opens wider
And one can see the reflection of nipple piercing shields)
‘But for those who expect more from being alive
Willing to embrace life totally and reach the ultimate thrill
Hazard is what brings you to the heroic dimension
Out of which living is not really living
The one who could make such an object
Equally pleasurable and dangerous would be a great creator!’
By the time Alicja finishes her speech
Skullface managed to be in the courtyard
Smoking her cigarette-of-the-month and chatting with Boris
And clearly visible through the window – her back at least
After that episode, Devyani is away for a few weeks
Touring Western Europe with the Cabaret show
In charge of make-up, hairdressing, wardrobe and high spirits
Alicja manages to not have completely disappeared
She goes to a gym in the neighborhood or something
She sits at a café terrace near by with a pile of books and her laptop
Once she’s at the local flea market on Sundays
With an old lady that might well be her mother
(What seems to be a heroic demonstration of normality)
She waves casually, like she’s too busy to stop by but will soon
Then one day she materializes in Skullface’s workshop
Kisses her hello Belgian style as if it’s understood
And skipping the usual social talk, says straightforwardly:
‘I need you to help me with something’
‘Here we are’ Skullface thinks
‘You know my work at the Brandenburger Schlossmuseum
It’s not very sexy but still so inspiring for me
I’ve been busy for years with recreating ancient rites
And I’m tired of waiting until I find an institutional frame
To make an important project of mine happen’
She reaches to her designer bag and digs out a grey Muji notebook
Opens it to show a roughly scribbled sketch
‘I need to visualize an idea I have, and I can’t do it on my own
I need someone to make a model of an archeological excavation
Showing the extraction of an antique bigger than life bull statue’
Now Skullface is dumbfounded, she expected something dodgy
Some twisted scheme fitting to this bizarre woman
She often attracts morbid people tripping on her tattoo
Trying to involve her in some lame and macabre games
But Alicja seems too self-centered to credit her as special
And just needs her handicraft skills
That feels good, she has no reasons not to do it
A few hours work, reasonable money, quite an unusual project
Alicja talks about blank spots in European mythology
Three horned bulls Gaulish statuettes
Hermaphrodite white bulls dedicated to the moon
Zeus turning into a bull to ravish Europa across the sea
Only a couple of weeks later Devyani will tell Skullface
About Alicja’s personal understanding and practice of hierogamy
Her fantasy about having a sacred bull statue
Ridden by young lascivious bacchantes in full moon
Also how Alicja is absolutely dedicated to have
Her fantasies actualize, and how this attracts people to her
But by that time Skullface and Alicja were already tied.

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

2010-09-27T17:55:00.002+02:00

"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

Dancing on Ashes video excerpts

2010-07-06T11:17:00.009+02:00

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

full version videos are available on request here.

Comedy | excerpt from Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam)

2010-07-03T23:51:00.002+02:00

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

Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam) video excerpts

2010-06-03T23:28:00.003+02:00

Dancing on Ashes (Lovers) excerpt

2010-05-18T17:51:00.002+02:00

Dancing on Ashes (Lovers)

2010-05-09T05:51:00.001+02:00

Dancing on Ashes (Lovers) excerpt

2010-05-05T15:22:00.004+02:00

‘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…
‘Some women have to sweat more than others
to get a grip on their desires’ she often tells her students
Now Devyani asks them with a soft and smiling voice
To sit in the cross legged position - or the lotus for those who can
In order to close the session with a breathing exercise
‘Close your eyes and, as in the beginning of the class
Focus on your base chakra - the muladhara
Located between your anus and vagina
The root of Kundalini energy’
Her voice lowers and becomes monotonous, almost chanting
She allows herself a little bit of Hindi accent she otherwise doesn’t have
‘Breathe in through this center underneath the coccyx
The seat of the subconscious, the undiscovered
Where human and animal energies merge
And let your breath - prana - travel all the way up to...’
As she says so, she hears a deep and disdainful sigh
Ending in a little tongue click
‘All the way up to the sahasrara chakra at the crown of your head.’
A strong wave of bad vibes comes from Zsófia on the right
The girls sitting next to her seem slightly distressed
Though they try to remain concentrated and keep enjoying
The endorphin rush that brings fullness to the dance class
Devyani feels rising anger but continues talking with a toneless voice
‘Inhale and exhale deeply through your nose
Slow, deep inhalation
Slow and deep exhalation…’
Zsófia is not a dancer, but a trained yoga practitioner
Since she joined the class a few weeks ago
She’s been displaying righteous indignation at Devyani’s loose use
Of yogic concepts and terminology
Two weeks ago she started to argue in front of the other students
About mulabhanda, the perineal lock
How it totally didn’t make sense to introduce
Such an advanced Yogic practice to beginners
How dangerous it could become
And that she should know what kind of energies
She’s messing with, blah blah blah…
‘Zsófia you little fucker who do you think you are?
You think that you can teach me about the body!’ Devyani broods
Fuck me! I never meant to be a dance teacher
Any professional or just serious dancer could call me a fraud
But what I can teach to these white ass chicks makes them happy
It makes them feel alive and sexy
They will never be good dancers
Not the kind that can perform for an audience
But I can feel their sexuality and liveliness bloom through dance
It’s just beautiful’
Devyani loves women
She loves their hips, their breasts, their shoulders, their smiles
She finds vaginas the most complex yet beautiful thing ever
And the clitoris is an endless field of exploration – for her and others
With women she knows exactly what to share and when to surrender
She loves strong and sensual women, happy to be women
Women with jewels and tattoos (she’s a Suicide Girls early fan)
All the jobs she does for a living are about making women beautiful:
Nail paint, African style hair braiding, make-up for cabaret shows
This Bollywood dance class for Prinzlauerberg bachelorettes…
‘Thank you, Miladies, see you next week’
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
‘Listen Zsófia, honestly I don’t give a shit about Yoga’
Devyani continues the conversation from the previous week
‘Indian people don’t practice Yoga anyway
Yoga is for white people, because yoga sells good
To me it is just another of these obscurantist burdens
That holds India back; it drains people from their desire
Inhibits sexuality, suppresses love and promotes submission
Who wants that but people like you, who have everything
And are not happy with it yet?’
Devyani surprises herself with the fierceness of her attack
She doesn’t really believe in what she says
But just wants to hurt the bitch and shut her up
‘But then why do you use pranayama and chakras?
And why wrongly, most of all?’ Zsófia laughs at her face
‘I just use these words to open up pathways
And it works; the hyper-oxygenation makes them high
And they have their dose of exotic mysticism!’
Zsófia shakes her head pityingly and inhales deeply
Obviously she prepares for a long principled speech
In the dressing room, the girls are giggling and trampling
They are now naked and like usual half wrestling, half tickling
Devyani lays her right hand on her thigh, loosening her arm
She lets her wide plain copper bangle slide over her wrist
And grips it tightly around her knuckles as an improvised cestus
A mean trick she made up in her street-fight years
And gave up for more than a decade
'Fuck Ahimsa' she snarls, and strikes Zsófia in the face.
Zsófia falls backwards on the floor, screeching with pain and shock
A bunch of startled naked girls rushes into the studio
Devyani stands there, surrounded by flustered nymphs
Her victim sobbing at her feet, her face in her hands
An ardent feeling of love and peace arising from deep inside
She closes her eyes and breathes deeply.

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

2010-05-03T21:57:00.003+02:00

'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

2010-04-21T10:36:00.001+02:00

Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam) excerpt

2010-04-03T22:11:00.006+02:00

“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!

Much joy in being a woman, indeed, and again, I feel sorry for men! The problem with guys is that they only have one dick, this is far from enough! We know it, they know it, that’s where all the trouble starts. So the smart ones comfort each other, and we girls are left with the dumb ones! Oh, what a misery.

Dumb for dumb, that is why many ladies choose to have a special friend that comes without any annoying side effects. So do I, so let me introduce you, not with but to my best friend here… I always carry him around, not in my pocket though, he doesn’t fit in my pocket, of course – otherwise he wouldn’t be my best friend! You know, size matters… So hey, this is G., say hello to G! He is always on the spot, dear little darling! He’s so cute, he’s like a liquorice popsicle.

G. is a little bit fat and needs to exercise, so we train together everyday, but not too much because I want him to stay a little bit fat… Well yes, men take pride in having a long cock, but of course ladies, we know, it is the width that matters. It has to be a bit difficult to be enjoyable, doesn’t it? Ladies, tell this to your partners, it’s time the truth comes into daylight! Anyway, I do try not to use it too much because I want to stay tight like a politician’s grip on power.

What? What do you say, G.? I talk too much? But little darling, that’s what I’m here for! No, the live sex show is later, sorry… What, you think you know how to make me shut up? But you’re too big to fit in my mouth, naughty boy, aren’t you? But if you think (mumble)… well that’s all right with me. Oh lala, anyway, let’s go on now.

I can see you all marvel at this beauty, who would not? Yes I will share it; I already have a date tonight actually. Yes, with you lady, you with the white blouse! You can come backstage after the show, like we agreed, G. will happily service you while you lick my pussy; I just had it waxed and it’s smooth like George Bush’s brainwave. I’ve always been very anti-bush… And if you’re not vigilant, it can come back without you noticing! What, your husband wants to come too? No problem, I just wanted to try a new trick with gaffer-tape that I learned yesterday from Herr Bürgermeister… Well, OK, where was I?

And now, ladies and gentlemen! It is high time to introduce my other best friend. For G. would be a lonely little boy and I would be of course a frustrated little girl without our dear friend Hans-Heinrich - better threesome than lonesome. Hello Hans-Heinrich, say hello to our lovely audience. Don’t be upset with the spotlights, I know that you’re more used to darker places, but this is the Lumpenkabarett, everything must go into the light!

As you can see Hans-Heinrich is a sophisticated fellow, a beautiful synthesis of technology, anatomy and fantasy and – sorry G., I need my two hands so I must stick you there for a while… - he can serve a variety of purposes that are all highly enjoyable. He’s an honorable whip and a fantastic butt-plug for pony play. He’s also slightly oversized for an honorable lady such as I, but everything is in the process, very slow and lubricated. But it’s getting too intimate, isn’t it?

You know, you often hear that in love, I mean in sex… actually, no, in love, the foreplay is very important. Well, this is not true, the foreplay is actually everything! And for people like me, the foreplay is happening all the time. Night and day, everything I do, whatever I wear, it’s always a part of the foreplay. That’s also why I’m here in front of you in the Lumpenkabarett, ladies and gentlemen, when I’m on stage I’m making love to you… That doesn’t mean that you make love to me, but hey, one has to choose her side!

But it’s getting late, people, it’s time to get a good resting night because you start working at dawn tomorrow. So a light dinner, a little honeyfuck and hop into bed! And me? I must now satisfy my little friends, for we have a rule, they can never go back to their scabbards without being used… So, duty calls, bye-bye!”

text and still from the video included in the Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam) performance-installation

Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam)

2010-03-24T13:10:00.000+01:00

Dancing on ashes (Amsterdam)

2010-03-24T10:25:00.001+01:00

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

making of

2010-03-21T16:39:00.000+01:00

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

making of

2010-03-20T19:38:00.000+01:00

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

Dancing on Ashes (Welcome to)

2010-03-18T10:11:00.005+01:00

photos by Norbert Schliewe

Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam) excerpt

2010-03-16T23:10:00.004+01:00

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
Since her parents’ restaurant on Zeedijk closed
She hardly goes back to the Red Light District
And not at all since the dance studio on Koestraat closed as well
That was a couple years ago, and things changed a lot since
The new city council, under the pressure of EU
Started the gentrification process of the area
Now at least a third of the famous windows
Are rented to fashion designers
Who probably think they are so cool and daring
To share the district with prostitutes and drug dealers
Like on American TV series
Now the only guys dressed like pimps in the place
Are hyped young trendsetters and art students
Between their flea market phase and the minimalist one
Yu also used to wear layers of 1€ clothes from Waterlooplein
She wore hideous woollen skirts over Adidas pants cut knee-high
Over ragged jeans stuck in big flashy leg warmers
And AFC Ajax scarf and ski cap she was particularly fond of
Today for the very first time she wears heels and a miniskirt
(It’s springtime in A’dam)
Because on the list of what she has to do before dying
There are a few things related to sex
First Yu passes by Oudekerkplein
To see this renowned anonymous ground sculpture
Of a hand grabbing a tit
Today she takes the time to really look at it
And slowly she feels the bronze hand
Holding her own bronze breast
First she expects to sense nothing
Like usually
Dreadfulness and excitement cancelling each other
But today in this sluttish outfit
Yu catches something different
Something violent
Rising through her shielded perception
As she stands over the sculpture
A fat black woman in a white lace basque
Looks at her from her window, smiling
Strangely she reminds her of these Matongué mamas
Who board Euroline coaches at the Brussels bus stop
Then she remembers this trip a few years ago
When she first met this girl with the tattoo on her face
Who called her Buddhaface
Like Yu was the special one
By then the stone Buddha had already started growing in her
And had already taken control of her heart
And brain
And body
And face
Now, before the weight of the mineral Buddha
Drags her to the tomb
She must start her own quest
And experience… well, everything
Or at least something else
But there’s nothing she can share anymore
Neither with friend or lover
She was never deprived of either
She was always eager to bathe herself in warm feelings
But now she’s beyond that
Beyond the illusion of love and friendship
Now it’s time for the body to be crude and raw and free
Yu walks by the sex-shop windows along the Voorburgwal
As a teenager she used to come around with her gang
Pointing at giant dildos, crotchless panties and riding crops
Bursting into laughter and squeaky screams
Hissed away by half-irritated half-amused hookers
Alone she’d usually just look straight and walk slightly faster
Today she stops and looks for good
She looks to see and see beyond
The whole city revolves around merchandised sex
And later in school when amongst a group of foreign students
It’s understood that you talk casually and slightly blasé
About sex toys, porn, prostitution, group sex and stuff
But kids have a way here to develop selective blindness
About grown-up matters, and later on it’s simpler to go on like this
So today she really looks
For the first time
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 by cold and soft by hard
Being exposed in this ineptly inverted intimacy
Would somehow feel right again in our upside-down reality
Yu checks around if people noticed her staring at a window
But here it’s all very normal, and it looks mostly
Like a cheap souvenir shop window
For loudmouth Russian businessmen who couldn’t come home
Without a penis-shaped crystal bong and a few salacious stories
And aroused French couples on extended weekend trips
Yu wants to get inside one of these shops
But not a cheap one with plastic day-glow gadgets and pink lace
So she walks around to find a more attractive place
Until she remembers
That the only shops that are not targeted at philistines
Sell fetish clothes and bondage accessories
Then she knows where to go
Yu contemplates a wall-display covered with leather masks
Surgical steel butt-plugs, handcuffs, anal hooks, ball-gags, whips
Corsets, slave collars, hoods, chain harnesses, chastity belts,
Cock rings and cages, nipple clamps, leg-spreaders, straps, ropes
Strap-on dildos, spanking skirts, love balls and designer sex toys
Slightly high with the heady smell of rubber
A part of her feels overwhelmed
But mostly she feels distant and a little bit sad
As if all this belongs to a past that never occurred
She can’t be burdened with objects
She can’t be hidden or disguised
She’s standing there for a long while in front of this love weaponry
As if entranced
The shop hostess leaves her alone
A pretty, sexy and seemingly crazy Asian girl
Staring at the complete paraphernalia
Meant to turn her into the ultimate sex slave
This is good for business
Yu knows now what she was looking for in the Red Light District
She wants to be looked at
With nothing between her and the viewer
No clothes, no dance, no love, no feelings
She wants to be freed from saṃsāra
She doesn’t want to think too much because she will be scared
She has to do it right now
She remembers this club on Warmoesstraat
A kind of underground place mixing sex shows and cabaret
One or two girls from school have been dancing there
For the thrills, quick money and street credibility
It is open 24/7, but you have to know how to find it
They pretend to be illegal, that’s the best advertisement
This strong stench of beer yeast and sweat
People have to get used to since smoking is forbidden
Rises from the descending staircase
In the hall there are big photos of live sex acts from the 80s
And black and white posters announcing the current show
“Dancing on Ashes” aka “the Lumpenkabarett”
The room is very dark but the stage is brightly lit
A half-naked girl in kabuki make-up just stepped in the spotlights
Yu sits at the table closest to the entrance door
And waits for the end of the sketch to try to get noticed by the crew.

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

2010-03-08T11:57:00.004+01:00

“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

2010-03-05T02:12:00.001+01:00

In the Woods 1

2010-02-15T08:45:00.001+01:00

About 'Dancing on Ashes' by Pedro Dolabela Chagas

2010-02-09T02:35:00.002+01:00

This text is an excerpt from a yet unpublished article by Pedro Dolabela Chagas (junior professor at the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies at the Universidade Estadual do Sudoeste da Bahia).

(...) Unbelievably enough, this is what it is: Angel Meat is a form of literature, or I should say: Angel Meat is a literary form.

In a very surprising way, they do the unthinkable: they make reading a collective practice. Press culture got us used to silent individual reading; Angel Meat creates silent collective reading. The audience is now reading a text, and one can only imagine that their reactions vary a lot – but that’s something you cannot easily see, or at least not all the time. Sometimes you sense you neighboring crowd silently laughing or expressing other reactions to the text, but collective reading remains for the most part individual (or subjective). That’s the risk of turning performance into reading: coming from personal habits and tastes, reading reactions remain individual, so that the impact of Angel Meat will be atomized to a great extent. No two readers are the same, and there will be no such thing as the general reaction a traditional performance can arouse: reading can be collective, but the response will be personal.

But that is, of course, part of the game – that is part of the risk. The lines succeed one another within the setting created by sounds and bodies. The workings of the male and female figures construct the context for a narration that is as telegraphic as that of a graphic novel (where the context is visually built – just like in Angel Meat’s performance, in a certain way). The inflow of lines works through a principle of addition: bits of information juxtaposed on one another build up what will eventually read as a story – a real story, with well-defined characters and actions, happening in well-delineated contexts, evolving through complexly-built situations… until it strangely ends in suspension. This is something crucial: their text doesn’t function like the lines of a song (unless you’re thinking about Lou Reed’s Walk on the wild side and its sudden successive exposition of immediately vivid characters). But even the comparison with Lou Reed (who Bertram himself confirms to be a source of inspiration) doesn’t explain it all, for Angel Meat’s texts give themselves the time to develop the characters in ways that would never be available for a four-minute musical track (...).

Dancing on Ashes (North)

2010-02-08T18:52:00.002+01:00

Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, January 2010.

Dancing on Ashes (Welcome to)

2010-02-08T14:43:00.006+01:00

Projectraum Römerstrasse, Stuttgart, December 2009.

Dancing on Ashes (North)

2010-02-02T01:33:00.000+01:00

Dancing on Ashes (North)

2010-01-14T01:29:00.003+01:00

rehearsal

2010-01-08T01:14:00.006+01:00

Making of 3

2010-01-07T23:30:00.000+01:00

Dancing on Ashes (North) in Akademie Schloss Solitude | 14 Jan. 2010

2010-01-02T16:19:00.003+01:00

‘She loosely puts on her army boots and drags her feet to the door

She stands shivering a couple of minutes in the doorway

Staring at what seems to her an almost petrified forest

Until she notices the liveliness of morning birds’ singing’

Dancing on Ashes (North)

A new glimpse at the transmedia Angel Meat multiverse, Dancing on Ashes (North) continues and deepens the exploration of the extended field of literature proposed in Real Dance Super Sentai's previous pieces.

A performance by Ines Birkhan and Bertram Dhellemmes.

Akademie Schloss Solitude

70197 Stuttgart

14 January 2010 | 8:00 PM

Dancing on Ashes (North) excerpt

2010-01-02T07:48:00.003+01:00

Just imagine a cold morning, a very cold one
After a wild party in the woods, a wild wild one
The cabin reeks of cold tobacco, sweat, spilled beer and kerosene
Skullface - who is not Skullface yet, but will be very soon -
Wakes up from pain, then cold, then more pain
The kerosene heater is far from enough, the wood fire is dead
She has to pick a few logs outside to start a new one
Or these drunken morons will freeze to death
Adrift in the vapors of their alcoholic sleep
Her face is burning like hell
She also feels frozen and nauseated, but this is more familiar
Wrapped in a rough blanket over the clothes she slept in
(For at least five days now)
She loosely puts on her army boots and drags her feet to the door
She stands shivering a couple of minutes in the doorway
Staring at what seems to her an almost petrified forest
Until she notices the liveliness of morning birds’ singing
Moving has reactivated her blood circulation
And revives the pain, and blood starts to drip on her face
She enjoys every bit of it
Because she wanted it so badly
And now she is the queen of her tribe
She reached the acme of her street credibility
And she’s lost forever to the Christian capitalist bourgeois society
She can’t smile because of the crusts on her lips
She puts three logs in the rusted cast iron stove
And adds a glass of kerosene to start a quick fire
They won’t call her Snow White anymore
Like these suckers used to
And they won’t call her the Austrian Virgin anymore
(She used to pretend to be a virgin
It aroused the guys
Who talked of sacrificing her to Satan, or Odin, or Hitler
But of course she hadn’t been a virgin for a while already
Wasn’t she raised in the Commune
Under the rule of free love?)
She softly touches her swollen face with icy fingertips
It relieves the pain for a short while
She has a pocket mirror somewhere in her rucksack
But she wants to feel it from the inside before seeing it
And she knows that for a few days
Her face will be bruised and bleeding
Right now she probably looks as scary as the Krampus
The devil that hunts children on the 5th of December
Every year she expected and feared its celebration
When she visited her grand parents in the Berchtesgadener Alps
She also brought some healing cream and her favorite painkillers
But yesterday’s cheap and strong Estonian vodka
Still keeps her numb enough for the moment
A growl comes from one of the human shapes
Cocooned in sleeping bags on the cabin’s floor
It’s big Varulv, who spent half of the night
Drunkenly screaming to the trees
His hatred of humans and society and above all Christians
Varulv who sang of destruction and blood and fire
Imploring unresponsive Nordic Gods to assist him
In his desperate fight against Christian capitalist nihilism
That allows the weak to rule the powerful
In Norwegian police files
Varulv is recorded as the leader of this Black Metal gang
That gather today in the woods north of Lillehammer
Half celebrating loose spring rites
And actually half running from the police
After the last wooden church arson reactivated
The media’s hysteria against the rising Black Metal Satanism
And the gang’s latent and constitutive paranoia
She plays with the thought of Varulv’s reaction
When he sees her ravaged face
Despite his outrageously staged misanthropy
He’s a sensitive and ambiguous boy
Though struggling with his appetite for personal power
He will love her and hate her for what she did
She will be the living icon of this gang of wrecked kids
She who sacrificed her juvenile beauty to the Darkness
When most of them are mere turbulent teenagers
On vacation from dull parents, schools and futures
But where she’s from, standards are different
Otto will hate her, she can tell for sure
For the same reasons that Varulv will
Because she overpowered them
The old Viennese actionist
And the young Black Metal thug
She is both a living piece of art walking the earth
And a bloody spit at the face of society
And she did it alone, she’s only sixteen and already far ahead
Well she did it almost alone
The Russian guy who tattooed her claims to have learnt his art
In a Uralian gulag
Not a political prisoner though, but what they called a hooligan
A street kid re-educated in camps
Who learned to love the Soviet Union like the mother he never had
And still does, though it has collapsed a couple of years ago
He had plenty of tattoo practice on his fellow zeks
Including shocking face tattoos
Once relocated in the west (it’s not clear how this happened)
He realized that there, tattooing pays much better than thievery
The metalhead kids in Oslo love his genuine Mafiya tattoos
They line up in front of his tiny shop to get inked
And they invite him to their crazy parties
Sometimes they do quite scare him
These little spoiled brats have no principles and no limits
The girls are particularly scary
In Motherland they never had to display this level of machismo
The German one he’s tattooed last night
Seemed to have plotted for months
For this conjunction to happen
The group of kids gathering in the forest away from Oslo
Him invited to supposedly the wildest party ever
The presence of an unusual amount of fierce alcohol
Everybody collapsing a little bit to soon
Himself drunk enough to be convinced to do a face tattoo
On an under-aged runaway
(He would never have done this in his renowned tattoo parlor
In fear of loosing his license – wild days are behind!)
But still he was able to hold firmly the needle and draw the lines
Of a stylized skull
On this pretty face.

Excerpt from Dancing on Ashes (North)

photo session with Thom Eichinger

2009-12-14T14:57:00.001+01:00

Dancing on ashes (Welcome to) in Projectspace Römerstrasse

2009-12-13T12:32:00.001+01:00

photos by Demian Bern

Interview

2009-12-11T14:24:00.000+01:00

Interview with Övül Durmuşoğlu - photo by Selim Birsel

stage setting

2009-12-10T17:06:00.000+01:00

Making of 2

2009-12-09T12:51:00.000+01:00

making of

2009-12-04T21:04:00.004+01:00

rehearsal

2009-12-01T21:53:00.000+01:00

Dancing on Ashes (Welcome to) excerpt

2009-11-27T08:05:00.004+01:00

Aika is a little bit from everywhere
She doesn’t want it, but she’s a little bit from everywhere
Aika is genetically cool
She can’t really do anything else, but this she does perfectly
In such a cool world, she even can make a living out of it
But then she can never leave
She can never leave the cool world
Tonight Aika is at the Lumpenkabarett
Because it’s the cool place to be
And of course, she’s a friend of one of the musicians
The one with the spooky make up
(And she is a friend of the sister of the PR of the place
Who sometimes subcontracts the cabaret program layout to her)
When Aika entered the cabaret,
She noticed right away this hip costume designer
She absolutely has to talk to him after the show
Boris first of all checks the outfits he made for the show
The chick with the flute is going to dance at some point
That’s why he put zippers on the sides of the leather mini
Quite sexy for a girl, Boris thinks absent-mindedly
Somehow he dumbly expected actual glowing cinder on the ground
I’d put her in a see-through black lace Victorian dress, he chuckles
Boris discretely takes a photo with his iPhone
It will be on his blog tonight
When does the show really start? he mutters
Boris looks around
And gets a glimpse of the girl with the tattoo on her face
Somewhere at a table in the back of the Lumpenkabarett
Fuck, Skullface looks as serene as ever
How does she do that? he wonders
Skullface appreciates the fact that people in the audience are so quiet
So far she enjoys the show – its slow unravelling
She likes this kind of focused work, it helps her to refocus
It’s easy to lose your point even when you have an imperious agenda
She’s so used to being looked at with her eerie face tattoo
That she herself became a very good watcher
But tonight Skullface worries that people will think
That she’s part of the show or something
And then she gets angry at herself
For having such insignificant thoughts
And tries to forget herself
And to open her soul to what happens on stage
Johanna is not at the Cabaret show tonight, of course
Later she will be on Das Erste again
Guest starring on Harald Schmidt’s new night-show
For the moment Johanna is still in her apartment in Cologne
She just sits still and concentrates
The people around her spontaneously became silent themselves
Like always
She just wears a long white cotton tunic
Like always
That she will drop when she enters the TV set
Like always
Because she is the naked truth
Because she is dressed with the sky
Dressed with the four cardinal points
Because when she comes naked into the spotlights and speaks
They listen to her
They let her preach about the malevolence in our consumerist society
They let her tell her story again, because that’s what the audience wants
Because she is the last TV guru
But they don’t get that she could really be the last TV guru
Still, she’s missing the Lumpenkabarett show tonight
And then the flute player puts the flute on the floor
And starts a slow dance
And Aika watches but she doesn’t see her
She sees Iggy Pop and she sees Akira Kasai
And she sees herself at the age of 10
And Boris feels drawn to the dance
He feels his thigh muscles contract in unison with her movements
And Skullface notes how the dancer’s movements create
A strange cluster of invisible lines in space
Lines and shapes that grow their own liveliness
And Johanna would have observed how the smoke slowly stirs on stage
And wraps the artists and the audience in an almost mystical fragrance
And Aika loves the transparent black Thunderbird bass
Everything on stage seems to revolve around it now
And Boris remembers the taste of his new lover last night
Then he observes himself remembering, then he dives into himself
And something in Skullface thinks of how the aspen leaves tremble
In the late spring breeze up north
And Johanna could have felt something about humility and casualness
That she will never reach again
And Aika marvels at the sight of a rotating wrist
And Boris hasn’t ever been so at peace for months
And Skullface feels like going home to work right now
And Johanna is told that the limo is waiting
And the dancer leaves the stage, the musician stops playing and it’s over.

excerpt from Dancing on Ashes (Welcome to) performance

premiere in Projectspace Römerstrasse, Stuttgart, December 5th 2009

Ines practices flute drones

2009-11-23T08:13:00.002+01:00

performance in Projectspace Römerstr., Stuttgart - Dec 4

2009-11-18T23:41:00.004+01:00

Dancing on Ashes (Welcome to)

“Aika is genetically cool
She can’t really do anything else, but this she does perfectly
In such a cool world, she even can make a living out of it
But then she can never leave
She can never leave the cool world"

Dancing on Ashes (Welcome to) is a performance installation that will introduce you to the transmedia multiverse of Angel Meat.

Ines Birkhan and Bertram Dhellemmes present a composite work involving dance and music performance, video and staged literature. Though Dancing on Ashes (Welcome to) is a piece that stands for itself, it is also an opportunity to start the exploration of a work-in-progress that investigates through different medias the connections between experimental arts, pop subcultures and ancestral cathartic theatre.

Römer VIII - Mit heißer Nadel

Saturday, Dec 5th 2009 at 8pm

Projectspace Römerstr. 2, 70180 Stuttgart

Akademie Schloss Solitude

A cooperation of Akademie Schloss Solitude and Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg.

photo session

2009-11-12T23:52:00.002+01:00

Photos by Demian Bern, Ines Birkhan & Bertram Dhellemmes

Studio work for Dancing on Ashes

2009-11-08T20:37:00.006+01:00

We will show in December in Stuttgart an early version of Dancing on Ashes revolving mostly around text and music (more information about this soon). Here is a short video of Bertram improvising on his silicone strings Ashbory bass (aka pocket double-bass) to try his new bass amp during a studio research session.

Angel Meat goes online

2009-10-26T01:08:00.002+01:00

At the occasion of the presentation of Angel Meat at the Kakanien Revisited colloquium last Saturday in Vienna, we released 3 new literature blogs belonging to the Angel Meat multiverse. These blogs are meant to be written by characters of the main narrative - that will be a novel - or more mysteriously related to the live show...

You can follow these parallel story-lines here:

Madame Boris (German)

Hierogamie (German)

Queen of Cool (English)

more character studies

2009-10-18T08:03:00.014+02:00

So we started to develop Angel Meat in the frame of Schloss Solitude. So far we mostly focused on the literary and Internet dimension of the project, since Ines will present this side of Angel Meat next week for the Kakanien revisited colloquium in Vienna (you'll hear more about this soon), but in the last days we could also start the studio work, with dance and music (we have a very special studio here, golden rococo stucco on the ceiling and crystal chandeliers...).

We still explore the protean and ambiguous MC, who - though she is a completely superficial character with a strong visual identity and exists only on stage -, must embody other key characters such as Johanna. She is mostly an image, based on gothic / death rock / femme fatale clichés plus the little something that should make her alive.

We also go into another direction for the music, dropping the computer compositions for a while to experiment with acoustic instruments - flute, bass and voice. There will be some recordings posted here in the coming weeks.

Ines Birkhan lecture in Kakanien Revisited, October 24

2009-10-09T15:22:00.002+02:00

Ines Birkhan was invited by Kakanien Revisited to give a lecture at a graduate conference for young literature scientists, about the relation between literature and the Internet. For this occasion, she will make a first public presentation of the transmedia project Angel Meat, focusing on its literature dimension.

Place and time: in Filmarchiv / Vienna, 23 - 24th oct. 2009.
www.kakanien.ac.at

Akademie Schloss Solitude

2009-10-05T21:24:00.004+02:00

Arrival today in Akademie Schloss Solitude for a 6-month residence to develop the Angel Meat project. This combined with Ines' first novel release next week (and an intervention at the Kakanien Revisited colloquium in Wien shortly after) makes a very intense period for us.

That's good.

The place is stunning! We're going to work wonderfully here...

new developments

2009-07-22T23:25:00.005+02:00

Angel Meat's project starts to reach its real dimension. The last weeks' preparation work for the Schloss Solitude residence provided significant evolution to the concept, mostly to its transmedia identity, with the idea of including a film project in the whole thing.

Angel Meat becomes then a true multiverse, with different realities embodied by different media - literature, stage performance and film, all revolving around the kunst Cabaret show now definitely called "Dancing on Ashes"... Side projects like a website and a fanzine will provide extra point of views.

So the next step before working on the flesh of the project is to prepare the production of this film - also titled Dancing on Ashes.

Meanwhile Ines keeps feeding her personal literature blog with writing based on the project - until Angel Meat's official website is ready to host this part of the work...

The picture on the right side is a study for the Devadatta character - a musician of the cabaret.

check Ines Birkhan's blog

2009-04-25T19:26:00.004+02:00

Ines Birkhan starts to develop the literature part of Angel Meat's new direction as a multimedia project. You can witness the process by checking her blog (in German).

Angel Meat turns now into an octopus.

Angel Meat in Akademie Schloss Solitude

2009-01-30T09:47:00.010+01:00

Ines Birkhan and Bertram Dhellemmes are resident artists in Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2009 for the Angel Meat project. This residence emphasize the literary dimension of the project, since the last version of Angel Meat gives larger room to the writing of Ines Birkhan and the staging of reading.

for German readers, this is the first text produced for Angel Meat:

JOHANNA

Im Schlachthaus schleppen Männer Tierteile. Der Vater hat’s seit Jahren mit den Lendenwirbeln, will endlich aufrücken - zum Schlachtschussapparat. Da kann man sitzen - wie die Mutter. Der geht’s vielleicht gut! Sie raucht, hackt und verpackt.
Zygote, Besamung, runder Zellhaufen, Kiemenspalte, ein Stück Fisch aus der Uuursuppe. Nabelschnur, Lungenflügel, Kopf, Extremitäten, Meeensch. Konstantes exponentielles Ausufern - vom Fruchtwasser der Mutterliebe gespeist.
Schnuller, Milchfläschchen, Kindwägen. Ein Mädchen! Voll Vorfreude zupfen die Eltern rosa Maschen zu Recht.

Klein-Johanna auf dem kalten Fliesenboden, bringt sich das Lesen selbst bei. In der Schule langweilt sie sich, bis sie als Überfliegerin entdeckt wird und in einem Internat für Hochbegabte landet. Von dort wird sie Richtung Wirtschaftsstudium gelotst. Es winken Stipendien für die großen Wirtschaftsunis: Harvard, Dubai University, Shanghai University of Finance... der goldene Zweig künftigen Jungunternehmertums.

Johanna wird sehr ehrgeizig sein und mit reptilienartiger Schnelligkeit Konkurrentinnen vom Spielfeld fegen. Konstante harte Arbeit, statt wilder Partynächte. Einsam vorm Computer. Doch bald wird sie auch verstärkt fühlen, wie das Frau-sein ihren Gipfelstieg verzögert. Es gilt die obligatorischen Zwischenetappen auf Schaumstoffmatratzen der Mittelklassehotels möglichst reuelos zu absolvieren.
Während die schöne Johanna sich nach oben fickt, arrangiert sie gedanklich künftige Kunstsammlungen in orchideengeschmückten Wohnzimmern. Hunderte kleine, dicke, graue, schlaue und schnelle Schwänze dringen in ihr angespanntes Inneres. Keine Chance. Alle Liebesgeständnisse, Impotenzen und Brutalitäten gleiten stromlinienförmig ab. Der eiserne Wille, schließlich ganz oben, als Topspielerin der globalisierten Welt zu rangieren, soll nicht durch Gefühlsduseleien irgendwelcher Männer aufgehalten werden!

Ihr letzter Boss, der blöde Affe, Vorstandsvorsitzender der aller-, aller-, allermächtigsten Company, deren Namen man nicht nennt, die, von der noch niemand gehört hat - die, die alle Fäden auf einmal in der Hand hat, die mit Öl, Waffen, Biotechnologie und Telekommunikation dealt... dieser blöde Affe eben, wird über Jahre hin wie Bleigewicht Johannas endgültigen Aufstieg erschweren.
Noch kann man ihre Firmenloyalität kaufen. Alle wichtige, alle brenzlige, alle Arbeit wird von ihr erledigt. Und der Chef schürft tiefer und tiefer in der endlosen Goldgrube - Johannas brillantes Gehirn. In der Öffentlichkeit jedoch darf sie nur zweite Geige spielen, während er sich insgeheim an ihrer Unterwerfung weidet. Beliebig wird sie an Geschäftspartner weitergereicht. Ihre Brillanz macht sie zu einer begehrten Trophäe - bis das verdammte Kondom vom einem der ausdruckslosen Schwänze rollt und seinen Inhalt in ihr verschüttet.

Vor dem Ultraschallbildschirm macht die Gynäkologin ein erstauntes Gesicht. „Frau Schmidt, sehen Sie selbst. Hier haben wir eine Sicht von oben auf die hauchdünnen Konturen - des Thorax, und hier, etwas deutlicher - die fötale C-Form der Wirbelsäule. Beine und Arme sind erst in Ansätzen vorhanden... Dieses kleine Lebewesen befindet sich... nicht in der Gebärmutter... ist auch keine fehlerhaft eingenistete Zygote... Sie sind nicht schwanger. Was wir hier sehen, muss der eingetrocknete Körper eines Zwillingsbruders sein! Eine Verklebung und Verwebung geschwisterlicher Zellhaufen in den ersten Lebenswochen. Ihr Organismus hat sich durchgesetzt und die Reste des kleinen Wesens zwischen Milz und Niere gebettet – dort präserviert. Statistisch so unwahrscheinlich wie ein Lottogewinn! Wollen sie es operativ entfernen lassen?“ „Nein. - Nein.“

Johanna in desolater Verwirrung auf den Knien, schluchzt von Schuldgefühlen gepeitscht, als hätte sie den Bruder eigenhändig gefressen.
Zur Beruhigung wird sie ein heißes Bad nehmen, wie gewohnt eine reinigende Totes Meer Maske aufstreichen, nach der Rasierklinge greifen, um die lästigen Stoppel zu entfernen. Auch dort von der Stelle... am Bauch... dort unter der Milz...- !
Wild springt sie aus dem Wasser und beginnt unkontrollierbar zu zittern. Ihr Körper dehnt sich zu allen Seiten aus - sprengt die Haut - faucht, kratzt, kreischt, reißt Armaturen und Lampen von den Wänden. Ein entsetzliches Brüllen steigt aus den Lungen hervor, Fensterscheiben bersten. „Ich werde alles zerstören! Werde mich rächen - für jede einzelne Erniedrigung. Für jede gelebte Lüge will ich einen Betrug aufdecken. Na wartet! Und wie ich aus euren aufgeblasenen Egos die Luft rauslassen werde!“ Dann wimmert sie um Hilfe und schlägt ihren Kopf gegen die Fliesen, bis es in ihrem Inneren ganz still wird. Behutsam tauchen ihre Finger in die Bauchdecke und flüstert: „Gib ein Zeichen. Bist du bei mir?“ In einer Spiegelscherbe betrachtet sie die Haarstoppel, wie sie durch die Bauchdecke stoßen.

Sie wachsen schnell, diese schönen glatten schwarzen Haare. Weich und kräftig zugleich, wie aus dem Schweif eines wilden Fohlens. Schon reichen sie bis an die Knie. Vor dem Schlafengehen kämmt und pflegt Johanna sie mit ätherischen Ölen und beschließt, in Zukunft so viele Grenzen wie möglich zu überschreiten. In langen Nächten feilt sie ihre Vorgehensweise bis ins letzte Detail aus. Die Schlagkraft kalten durchdachten Zorns ist mächtig! „Deine Rache wird dermaßen kalkuliert sein, dass sich Kalis Gebrüll daneben stümperhaft ausnimmt.“ strömt es aus dem dunklen Haar und bettet sie in heroische Träume.

Zunächst braucht Johanna Verbündete: Journalisten Anwälte, Richter. An sie werden erste kleine Indizienhappen verfüttert. Über das Verschwinden öffentlicher Gelder, Geheimakten zur Verarschung von Aktionären... Und dann kommen größere Brocken, Medienköder: Mega-Korruptionsfälle, Lieferungen chemischer Waffen an beide Fronten grausamer Kriege und nachweislicher Wahlbetrug in hochheiligen europäischen Demokratien.
Während Johanna einen Evidenzberg nach dem anderen aus dem Ärmel zieht, muss sie sich mit der enormen Passivität der Bevölkerung herumschlagen. „Ja, wissen wir. Aber was können wir tun?“
In außerordentlichen Auftritten beginnt sie sich selbst zu inszenieren. Es bleibt nur eine Strategie: Kultfigur werden! Aus ihrer Position heraus - skandalöses Kabarett machen, nackt tanzen, singen, schreien! Sich von Innen nach Außen wenden. Sich mit dem gesamten Körper der Unterdrückung und Entfremdung verweigern. Langsam sammelt sich eine wachsende Gruppe von Fans um sie. Scheue, brütende Wesen, die aus Johannas pulsierenden Blutbahnen den nötigen Willen und Durchhaltevermögen ziehen. Sie veranstaltet Massenkonzerte und Schreiorgien der Verweigerung. Und endlich kommt Bewegung in die dumpfen Herzen!

So wird es zum Erdrutsch im Bewusstsein der Bevölkerung kommen. Und selbst systemtreue Tageszeitungen und Fernsehsender werden ihn nicht stoppen können. Die Menschen im Westen haben jetzt die Schnauze voll.
Unermüdlich wird zum Massenstreik gerufen. „Hört auf zu arbeiten, hört auf zu konsumieren. Ihr seid verantwortlich dafür, dass dieses mörderische System noch existiert. Freiwillig verschenkt ihr eure Seelen an das kopflose Kapitalmonster, dass bald die gesamte Erde besitzt. Ihr seid seine Triebkraft, seine Batterie, seine Gelenksschmiere – und das bedeutet: Ihr könnt es auch zerstören!“
„Hört auf Müll zu konsumieren, hört auf genmanipulierte Scheiße zu fressen. Lasst euch nicht weiter versklaven! Verweigert euch. Wir werden neue Wege finden!“
Und Johanna und ihre Anhänger werden immer tiefer ins Schwarze treffen. Werden unzählige Öl- und Getreidelager zur Sicherung von Verkaufspreisen aufspüren. Werden die Indizien der geheimen Unterstützung fundamentaler Terroristen durch westliche Regierungen allgemein zugänglich machen. Und die Skrupellosigkeit einiger Weniger, die immer neue Kriege erschaffen, um ihr Geschäft in Gang zu halten, wird so transparent, einfach so transparent! „Seht nur, wie sich die großen Haie mit Goldbarren im Maul in den frisch geknüpften Netzwerken verfangen.“
„Verweigert euch! Verweigert euch!“

Bis eines Tages auf die neu erstandene Ikone geschossen wird.
Hohe Zuschauerquoten, ein Samstagabend, während der beliebten Live Show im Fernsehen.
Hier wird sie stehen, wütend und schön, wie Shiva einst, nur von Luft bekleidet...
Und die Kugel wird vom schwarzen Haarknoten überm Bauch abprallen und nicht in sie eindringen.

early research studio session

2009-01-18T23:54:00.001+01:00

working session, August 2008