An excerpt of her upcoming piece developed through the Master’s program in Choreography at HZT Berlin, Vera Shchelkina’s Everyone here is a bit of a horse, which played in the Potsdamer Tanztage festival from 22–23 May, directs encounters through manual contact.
Under an open-air tent outside fabrik Potsdam, the choreographer introduces herself and explains that the “tutorial” will be conducted in German and English. She suggests we copy the “animals” or simply observe if we don’t understand something. She presses play on her phone, and a voice begins speaking over the PA. Three performers (Birte Opitz, Marta Ferraris, Marcel Casablanca) enter wearing masks by Maria Färber (perhaps a badger, a bear, and a monkey), moving as quadrupeds.
The recorded voice instructs us to shake hands. Darting from stranger to stranger, I feel the intimacy and distance of this ubiquitous custom, a signifier of peace, trust, and good faith. My face stretches into a smiling mask. We’re invited to experiment. We stroke, twinkle, wiggle and tap each other’s fingers and hands, lingering longer than a usual greeting, our eye contact dropping to where our hands connect in abstraction.
Next, we’re told to make “paws” with curled fingers, then to meet paw-to-paw, pressing folded fingers together. The masked dancers demonstrate how to move through space with their paws as front limbs. I feel the opening of my hip sockets and the discomfort of bearing weight on bent, bare fingers. I retreat to the side, relieving my hands from the cold hardness of the ground.
We’re told to explore the mechanics of smiling—lips stretched, teeth shown—and that when monkeys smile, it often signals submission, fear, or anxiety as well as happiness. This is not unlike my human experience of the meaning of a smile. Is the aim to have us inhabit smiles through a primate’s lens or to expose our own submission as a relation to monkeys? Performing smiling in a public space on command feels to me like dissociation, a social masking of uncertainty and anxiety as my human experience.
Shchelkina hovers nearby, holding the speaker overhead to amplify the voice above the rain on the tent roof, her fingers more often swiping the phone screen to control playback than becoming paws. The voice, shifting from a female to male register, lends the tutorial a god-like omniscience. Shchelkina’s role is supervisory. Why not deliver the tutorial live, fostering co-created relations rather than a scripted mediation? Perhaps if the masked performers were to speak, a live verbalising would conflict with her positioning of them as non-human “animals”. Yet she is without a mask, with a machine. The invitation into embodiment feels shallow. Beyond vague gestures—paws, their masks—there is little attempt to inhabit another creature’s perception, physiology, or temporality. The script races through instructions in twenty minutes, echoing the accelerated pace of tech-mediated human life rather than inviting us into the slowed, sensory world of non-humans.
The tone shifts when we’re asked to take out something leather—a wallet, belt, or boot—and feel its surface. This activity gives rise to reflection through doing, rather than enacting. It prompts me to consider the animal whose skin has become these objects, how easily their presence is erased in the service of human utility. Here, the work briefly becomes what it promises: a tactile, embodied reckoning with the discomfort that being human today should produce, as we dominate, extract from, and control other life forms to disproportionate and unsustainable extremes.
An excerpt of Vera Shchelkina’s Everyone here is a bit of a horse, played in the Potsdamer Tanztage festival from 22–23 May 2025. It’s premiere will take place on 13–14 June 2025 at HZT. Tickets here
