In „Imminent Arrival,“ originally a 20-minute dance collaboration with Paula Pau, familial spirituality and queer identities intersect. The piece explores the evangelical churches of Northeast Brazil and Malaysian Taoism, revealing subversive spaces within their conservative, binary gender norms. In the piece, we challenge the Western gaze and experiment with the possibilities of the theater as a space for contradiction, confrontation and healing. The performance invites audiences to witness the clash between cultural and religious values and non-western queerness, expressed through transformative movement, provocation and intimate closeness.
During the research, an important component for us was the gaze and objectification of ourselves as performers: How could we challenge the supposedly platonic gaze of the audience? How could we counter fantasies, fetishes and exoticizations? How to look back? We were willing to investigate the parallels between fetish(ism) and theater and its potential: as a space for negotiation, for storytelling, for arguing. How can theater heal or the opposite with its colonial structures, as an exclusive space that is not very diverse and is dominated by a white German bourgeoisie? And how do we behave in this space as part of an exclusive dance scene, affected by structural discriminations and its inherent exclusions?
Shifting between genres, our was to blend our past avant-garde abstract performances with pop-culture show elements, on a show that encouraged the audience to ask themselves questions about their positioning through empathy and experience, that evoked physical and emotional reactions without manipulating, that can produce trance and ecstasy as we know it from our churches.
Imminent Arrival as a piece was presented at tanzhaus nrw on their Now & Next programm (2021). As a research, it was awardaded with the SPRUNGBRETT<>TANZRECHERCHE scholarship (2021) & had its result presented as a film on festival tanznrw 21 due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions (2021).
Andras 