Encounters between one member each of the ensembles Dance On and Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop set the stage for the performance A Sky Like A Wall, which premiered on 29 November 2024 in the Berlinische Galerie.
For those of you who have seen the current exhibit at the Berlinische Galerie, perhaps your experience was similar to mine. From the first glimpse of the main hall, whose walls are covered with rows of portraits, some larger than life, by photographer Rineke Dijkstra, the viewers are drawn into a complex field of visual axes, projections, and reflections. And bodies, which have come “merely” to look, are suddenly forced to abandon the illusion of their own invisibility.
©Jubal_Battisti
Tonight, as the audience swarms out in bunches to watch the performance of A Sky Like A Wall, which simultaneously takes place in different rooms of the exhibit, this blurring of boundaries between art and its recipients becomes even more apparent. With plain and precise spatial positioning, the pairs, made up of one member of each ensemble, draw the audience into a musical and dance architecture that is erected and dismantled brick by brick.
There are the lookalikes (Ildiko Ludwig and Jone San Martin) who gesticulate loudly in an unknown language about three meters apart from one another. As they transport their gibberish throughout the room, they forge a moving portal into which some enter freely and others stumble unknowingly. In the neighboring room, where the sounds of a stringed instrument have enticed me, Michael Rauter plays the cello. On the bench next to him lies the dancer Emma Lewis, as if asleep. Slowly and silently, like a gliding iceberg, she slides her body to the floor as time stands still for the audience surrounding her.
©Jubal_Battisti
This and many other duets, which are simultaneously performed throughout the exhibit, were developed as an analysis of Rabih Mroué’s Notebook of the Unspecified Color, which contains musical scores, performance scores, images, and texts that at times specifically and at other times associatively revolve around the story of the Tower of Babel. What the Bible presents as a punishment for humankind appears in A Sky Like A Wall without any conclusive judgments – to my pleasure. Whether the misunderstanding is tragic, amusing, or productive, whether the asynchronicity provokes FOMO or not, whether the limits of one’s own language must also be the limits of one’s own world (shoutout to Max Weber), is up to the viewers to decide.
In this sense, the work is radically horizontal and anarchist in an endearing way. For instance, someone who might have been standing somewhat lost in a heretofore empty room may suddenly become the first and, for a brief moment, sole witness to a Schubertian string quartet. This makes those moments, in which disparate events appear to condense out of nowhere into recurring choral climaxes or spiral into choreographic passages that are performed by the entire team of 16 musicians and dancers, all the more magical.
English translation by Melissa Maldonado
A Sky Like A Wall by Dance On Ensemble & Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop in collaboration with Rabih Mroué has been presented on November 29 & 30-December 2, 2024 at Berlinische Galerie.
