On three evenings (12-13 June 2025), six students from the MA Solo Dance and Authorship (SoDA) at the Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin (HZT) present their ongoing research projects. This article reflects on two of these presentations.
What effect does the language we use to talk about our body have on it? When does language respond to the physical reality, when does language shape it? And what takes shape in that space between word and tongue, where the physically tangible world and our means of defining it converge? The research presentations for the MA SoDa are both, more or less, elaborate performances, which the students test out in front of, with, and on the audience, as well as moments of reflection in an ongoing work-in-progress, a step away from the (research) body, an observation and contextualization. Framed by a statement, they give the audience the possibility to not only see what is happening on the stage, but also to experience what came before, what is yet to come, where the research failed, and what was perhaps only unwillingly included in the work.
Leon Locher’s presentation Headline explicitly deals with the connection between language and lived experience. In a performative experiment, Locher, with the support of four other actors working at the intersection between art and activism, brings to the stage a collective practice in the form of a reading and writing group focused on Heinrich Böll’s novel Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum) (1974). Using Katharina Blum, who was defamed as a “terrorist’s bride” by the press for her connections to a criminal, the artist collective traces the violence of attribution and language, a violence which to this day, and once again, is being experienced by countless people who challenge the dominant political discourse, specifically the war in Gaza, with their bodies, actions, and expressions of solidarity. The staging, with a row of table microphones, is reminiscent of a modern courtroom or a talk show studio. The research team draws connection between the Federal Republic of Germany in the 70s and today, invents variations of Böll’s story, integrates autobiographical aspects, and reenacts scenes in order to create alternative dialogues through embodiment. I believe that the moments in which we ourselves as the audience feel the implicit threat being negotiated here, while our reactions are being observed, filmed, and recorded, have the potential for further exploitation.
This brings me to Jemima Rose Dean’s Heaux and Harvest, a presentation during which the gaze between the performer and her audience plays a key role as a medium for communication and negotiation. The conceptual pair, “heaux” (pseudo-French and plural for “ho”) and “harvest”, indicates two areas where Dean makes a living, while also spanning the area of her research: seasonal harvesting work and sex work as a dancer in a strip club. What connects these two forms of work, each physical in their own way? What differentiates them?
Dean’s field research, which took place in two completely different locations, one under an open sky in South Africa and the other in an unnamed Berlin club, comes together in the studio. Dean sometimes appears to adopt the hilarious approach of intertwining the fields as closely as possible. With neck-breaking high heels and sporting bib overalls with nothing but red fishnet stockings and a tight bustier peeking out, she not only shuffles across the floor on her knees “reaping” red coins, she also drags the undoubtedly several-kilo heavy individual parts of a pole dance bar and stage through the space. This is where she will ultimately dance her grand finale. While Dean repeatedly looks directly into our, also my, eyes between poses, while showcasing herself, and performing other actions, her voice can only be heard indirectly through voiceover, creating a space in which many questions arise for me: what can a glance say, and what not? Which bodies have the opportunity to speak for and about themselves, which ones do not? And finally, where does the body contradict what is said about it?
