For a third time, the duet, We Are (Nothing) Everything, by Makisig Akin and Anya Cloud was performed in Berlin (16-19 January 2025, DOCK11). Rightly so!, according to the author of this article, who has rarely experienced such a captivated audience.
To be honest, I have to admit that a few people had already left before the frenzied final applause. And they were entitled to. Because intimacy – even if we are yearning for it – is a complicated thing, which can be hard for many people thanks to an acquired sense of guilt over our own emotional and physical desires. However, those who stayed until the very end, helping transport the performing pair through the rows of the audience and up the bleachers as they remained entwined in an endless French kiss, gave a standing ovation. In the first rows, viewers took off their T-shirts and swung them over their heads like flags. Stadium vibes times ten. I, too, was infected by Akin and Cloud’s wild ground combat and lifting constellations in the theater courtyard, where I let myself be carried away to a brief wrestling match along with an acquaintance who I happened to run into at the performance. It was a party!
Now that I’ve expressed my euphoric conclusion, I’d like to go back to the beginning of the evening. The room we enter is like a ring, brightly lit with mats on the floor. Only the ring ropes are missing. While I’m looking for a seat on one of its three sides, DJ Rafush is playing a live mix of electronic beats and fragments of familiar hits, from Handel to Aqua. The performers, Cloud and Akin, are dancing hand in hand. However, their movements follow different patterns of the continuously transforming polyrhythms. As a prerequisite, they insist on that which they have in common while rejecting that which is the same. The scene ends with their tightly intertwined limbs of different lengths in the center of the mats. Cloud’s face gently rubs against the soles of Akin’s feet, momentarily resting in them before the two remove each other’s wet, sweaty T-shirts with their toes.
It is now clear that everything these performers have or are will be deployed, tested. Everything that takes place this evening grates against the boundaries of the status quo, insists on vitality, looks for opportunities to expand the space of possibility with sheer physical strength, quiet tenderness, wit, humor, and so much time that a nap is even possible along the way. The work of the two queer artists, who also now and again perform pieces, offer workshops, and regularly host a queer contact-improvisation jam at Tanzfabrik Berlin under the name The Love Makers Company, is much more – or even something entirely different – than “just” a very good artistic product. It is a vehicle and expression of a special relationship, which is capable, with its utopian way of loving, of bringing about an anarchistic feeling of us-ness, in the most positive sense.
English translation by Melissa Maldonando
We Are (Nothing) Everything, by Makisig Akin and Anya Cloud was shown from January 16 to 19, 2025 at DOCK11.