“We Are Going to Mars: A Choreographic Concert” by Company Christoph Winkler, playing from 7 to 10 April 2022 at Sophiensæle, is a kaleidoscope of music, movement, and image that locates the final frontier within its audience as well as beyond the reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere.
I don’t know
What I’m looking for
But I know
I’m here
A lot of clutter was banging around in my head as I sat in Sophiensæle waiting for “We Are Going to Mars: A Choreographic Concert” to take off. The live installment I was about to see follows two video works which were released in fall 2021 (both pandemic-related rethinkings of an intended live work). Combining live music, dance, and video work, the show promised to be a collage of an evening, and I felt some anxiety that my internal space-junk would be reflected onstage in a way that would make it difficult to follow the performance, or to sink into it.
In the opening scene of “Space Is the Place”(1974), Sun Ra surveys a strange and lush planet, speaking to a figure with a mirror for a face about his plans to set up a colony there for Black people so they can see what they can do “with a planet all their own.” On the question of how to facilitate the travel, Sun Ra has ready solutions: “We bring them here through either isotopic teleportation, transmolecularisation, or,” he says, “better still, teleport the whole planet here through music.”
As a project, “We Are Going to Mars” investigates the history and reception of the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research, and Philosophy, founded by Edward Mukuka Nkoloso in 1960. It links this exploration with early Afrofuturism à la Sun Ra, and I was appropriately transported from the moment the choreographic concert started. My worries about my fragmented attention were swept away. In fact, I felt I had come in just the right mood.
I don’t know
What I’m looking for
But I know
I’m here
A visual and multidimensional, multidisciplinary, multimedia kaleidoscope churned in front of me, where I experienced vastness, not in interstellar-scale distances, but rather in the performers’ act of turning and turning the same material over in order to uncover its endless newness. Repetition. Citation and sampling. The video material used deep dreaming to create restless algorithmically-shifted images that unfolded to reveal another layer, and another, and another, like a strange flower that bloomed without end. The movements of dancers Symara Sarai Johnson, Dava Huesca, Lois Alexander, Michael Gagawala Kaddu, Ridwan Rasheed, and Oluwafemi Israel Adebajo never competed with the video, but rather flickered naturally between the foreground and background of my attention. The music — also the soundtrack to the second “We Are Going to Mars” video work but now played live in front of me by Cleveland-based artist collective Mourning [A] BLKstar — carried it all: image, dance, me. This was indeed music that could take you to space. Though it begged the question: which space? Was outer space more vast than inner space?
I don’t know
What I’m looking for
But I know
I’m here
“Space is not only high, it’s low,” Sun Ra says in “Space Is the Place”. “It’s the bottomless pit. There’s no end to it.”
A few years back I watched an Elon Musk talk on YouTube. It was the first time I’d heard his voice or even seen his face, and I was fascinated and horrified. His childlike affect conveyed a child’s confidence in his own words and also a child’s inability to explain the significance of things he found inherently interesting. As a result, I had the dizzy feeling that there was no content to what he was saying. The only apparent justification for Musk’s planned colonisation of Mars was so that humans would become a “multiplanetary species.” Musk didn’t touch the question, however, of why we should want that. It was as though it was so obvious that being a multiplanetary species would be better than being a one-planet one that the question didn’t need even to be asked. What horrified me most about the talk was that, based on Musk’s widespread popularity, it apparently was obvious — to many, many people.
One of the compelling things for artists about Nkoloso’s academy is surely the ambivalence that surrounds it. It’s not clear to what extent it was serious, to what extent it was critique of the Western space race, or to what extent it could have been an outer symptom of the mental unravelling of a former freedom fighter. It was, of course, possibly all of these things, and more — space is not only high, it’s low. It’s exactly this ambivalence — this vastness of intention and attention — that’s missing from visions of space colonisation like those of Elon Musk. “We Are Going to Mars”, meanwhile, bound together source material that takes space travel and the colonisation of space very seriously — the apparent power to create new worlds, the consequences of world-making, the adrenaline rush and the confusion of a brand-new start. On such a mission, what would you take with you? What would you cast away? What would you transform? At what cost? Would it be worth it? These were the kinds of concerns that drove this decolonial story about space. And they drove it as much inwards, into the bottomless pit, as they did into the beyond.
I don’t know
What I’m looking for
But I know
I’m here
“We Are Going to Mars: A Choreographic Concert” by Company Christoph Winkler was shown from 7 to 10 April 2022 at Sophiensæle.
Concept: Christoph Winkler | Dance: Lois Alexander, Symara Johnson, Dava Huesca, Michael Gagawala Kaddu, Oluwafemi Israel Adebajo, Ridwan Rasheed | Music: Mourning [A] BLKstar – Vocals: James Longs, Latoya Kent, Kyle Kidd – Drums: Elijah Vazquez – Trumpet: Theresa May – Trombone: William Washington – Guitar und Keys: Pete Saudek – Samplers und Bass: RA Washington | Costumes: Marie Akoury | Video Contents: Martin Böttger, Vadim Epstein | Video editing: Gabriella Fiore | Technical management: Fabian Eichner | Sound: Björn Stegmann | Production management: Laura Biagioni