STUCK, Mounia Nassangar ©Sjoerd Derine

Fragile Security

STUCK, choreographed by the waacking icon Mounia Nassangar, opened on 18 January 2025 at HAU Hebbel am Ufer as part of the Purple Dance Festival.

I imagine the steam of desire fogging the underground LGBTQ+ clubs of Los Angeles in the 1970s where waacking was born. Waacking was made by and for working class BIPoC individuals to feel beautiful and powerful with one another: a nook to blossom and recharge, away from the capitalist, racist, and homophobic society they needed to survive.

If I could be a tiger, butterfly, dragon…
anything
what would I be?

I see me
I see you
you see me

desire
my eyes devour you
every movement of your fingers
I want to lick with my tongue

greed
don’t dare
blink eyes
can’t miss
a second
of you

lust
take me
somewhere
anywhere
f*ck me
I beg

The five dancers in STUCK—Suzanne Degennaro, Serena Freira, Oumrata Konan, Nicole Kufeld, Carla Parcianello—are fierce and hot. Watching them waacking, I feel like a teenager admiring the cool kids.

Their bodies, standing in front of the proscenium, demand to be seen. Their cold gazes are aimed down at us from the stage. When sparks of fiery feelings melt the ice in their eyes, I feel something hot rising from inside of me. Their elaborate but rapid gestures of hands and arms are so precise that, when captured in a frozen frame, it could be seen as a pose. Yet the transitions between these poses flow like rushing water—fast, fluid, and seamless—and draw excited shrieks from the audience.

While Parcianello dances a solo, the other four performers watch her. Then, they circle around her and playfully challenge her, sometimes coming close enough to flick her hair. In another scene, Konan stands close in front of Parcianello, waacking with such speed that it feels like an intense confrontation. Konan’s emotions seem to be distilled into pure extract that then explodes out through the performer’s whole body. In a duet, when Kufeld’s straps slip down her shoulders, Degennaro casually pulls them up with a fleeting smile, which melts me. In Freira’s solo rendition of a Black gospel (“It’s not the security guard that makes me feel safe”), I sense the force of personal experience.

Absorbing these visceral expressions onstage, another kind of very real physical sensation distracts me. As I enter the theatre, I make prolonged eye contact with a tall white man in a black suit, wearing a necklace that bears the word POLIZEI. I note that he is seated near me, in the same row, just two seats away. To celebrate the opening of the Purple Dance Festival, Berlin’s cultural senator Joe Chialo gives a speech before the performance. When he talks about the recent funding cuts in Berlin’s cultural sector, some people boo him. At this point, I notice the police officer speaking quietly into his headset. At the end of Chialo’s address, there is more booing, along with some clapping. I find myself repressing my response, reflecting on the extreme police violence in Berlin since October 2023. Feeling disturbed, I contemplate how waacking—a dance born from marginalized communities’ search for freedom and uninhibited self-expression—coexists with the very forces of oppression this evening, being placed in a context that also amplifies the reach of the police state. At the end of the piece, I see Chialo being escorted out under police protection, and I leave the theatre as swiftly as possible.

I see you
you see me
I see me


STUCK, by Mounia Nassangar, was shown on 18 January 2025 at HAU Hebbel am Ufer as part of the Purple Dance Festival.