Since November 2024, choreographer Mel Brinkmann has been meeting with seven young dancers once a week in Mädchen*zentrum Szenenwechsel. The result is Divas, an expressive dance performance performed from 11 to 13 April 2025 at Uferstudios.
A long, silvery, reflective carpet, a spotlight, a microphone, a camera. There’s a tense excitement in the air. We could be at an Oscars ceremony, the Grammy Awards, or the Berlinale. Backstage, at the edge of the spotlight, the seven divas gather together before elegantly striding forward along the carpet. Confident glances into the camera, whose images are projected onto a giant screen on the back wall for us viewers.
“Today, I want to talk about why I dance.” This is how the different statements of the 10 to 15-year old dancers begin. Dancing sets her free, says one. Dancing is her life, says another. Dancing makes her feel strong and relaxed, another one notes. The statements on the red (silver) carpet, where dance gets relatively little attention in “real life”, are a plea for dancing. However, it goes without saying that this young ensemble loves to dance. From start to finish, there is one brilliant interlude after another, with the divas pulling out all the stops. They skillfully integrate silver fans or sunglasses into the numerous different group choreographies and duets. They toy with self-presentation and disguise, defiant glances and occasionally with intentional indifference.
Using prototypical gestures of stylized femininity, the girls offer an almost precise cliche of the diva. While her life appears desirable – she eats éclairs in Paris, is attractive and athletic, and is always the center of attention – triggering this desire in others in order to be a successful diva is actually hard work and remotely imposed discipline. During a monologue towards the end of the piece, one of the young dancers hits the nail right on the head: “Perfect!”, she calls out. “I’m exactly how my prompt book says I am!”
As an adult viewer, who was also once ten, eleven, fifteen, I can’t help but drift at high speed through a whole series of ambivalent feelings during Divas. Admiration for the self-confidence of one of the young women who captivates the entire room; empathy with another one in a femme fatale costume who seems more like a child and appears a bit insecure. But I also have flashbacks of my own conflicts with beauty and achievement ideals, which I could never adequately fulfill in my eyes. Or the desire for recognition, not for perfectly fitting the norm, but for who I really was and wanted to be.
Are these perhaps feelings and questions that these girls are also grappling with in some way or another? It was definitely their own choice to work on this topic with choreographer, performer and director Mel Brinkmann and her artistic team. Perhaps not only due to an unadulterated fascination with the divas of this world.
English translation by Melissa Maldonado
Divas, by Mel Brinkmann was performed from 11 to 13 April 2025 at Uferstudios.
