“Without a back wall”
I often ask myself where the experience of a performance starts for an audience. In the solo performance The Basement by 71BODIES and Daniel Mariblanca, we are kindly welcomed and given some practical information already in the foyer as the public is admitted in groups. I am among the first to enter the theatre. It gives me time to land in the room while the other audience members find their seats. Two two-tiered stage seating modules define the room. They are placed in the middle, creating an arena around a centre stage that looks like an aisle, covered with a narrow beige carpet. At one end of the carpet is a large table, a worktable or an altar, placed in front of a free-standing wall or a shelf with various openings. At the other end lies a bouquet of red roses, and behind it, a person (Daniel Mariblanca) who is nearly undressed and has his legs pulled under him. He bends forward and towards the roses and the table. His naked back is arched as a protective layer against the world, like a turtle drawn into its shell.
The axis between the character and the table evokes associations, first, to a church nave with someone on the floor praying for mercy. But the stage also reminds me of a courtroom where we, the audience, are placed as prosecutors or defenders, or, as witnesses or jury, on either side of what is about to unfold. Scenographically, the room evokes memories of a film set, such as Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003), as all the elements, the two-tier seating modules, the free-standing wall with the table, and the carpet, are placed without being attached to the specific room in question. Kjersti Alm Eriksen’s set design creates a visual framework that evokes a wealth of associations and triggers sensory impressions, contributing to making the performance points beyond itself. In a Brechtian way, the scenography highlights the theatre’s function and potential as a fictional space and laboratory where anything can happen without anyone dying but where we still can be touched and made aware of realities beyond our own. We are seated as witnesses without a back wall to support us. The stage room is dimly lit. We hear only the sound of water dripping and footsteps passing. The atmosphere is as if we have entered an abandoned chapel, a forsaken cellar or a dungeon. We are hence placed in a surreal and dream-like scenario where something is about to happen. In this visually well-composed setting, a simmering uneasiness prevails as the light dims and the crouched character with the mask begins to move. We are about to be taken on a journey into experiences that many queer people and people with minority backgrounds fear and can recognise.
Like an Apollo caught in an Icarus fall
Wearing only a jock-strap, a skin-coloured silicone mask, white tennis socks and dark high-heeled ankle boots, Mariblanca crawls out of his position and lifts the bouquet of roses, red as blood, love and passion. It is as if he is about to devour the roses in one moment while in the following making love with the bouquet before he firmly stuffs it into the belt of his jock-strap and begins moving into a dancing knot with himself, Butoh-like intense and uncompromisingly articulated. Supported by a rhythmic soundscape that is quiveringly present. It all gives associations to Francis Bacon’s fleshy and twisted bodies. It is as if the body dissolves before us as the various limbs become entangled while Mariblanca searches for a way out of the situation. Rose petals lie on the floor; the body rocks from side to side. A heel hits the floor. It poundingly blasts a wedge into the body’s pressure cooker situation. It is as if life itself is squeezed to an existential limit, Mariblanca thrown into an extensive lemon press, which makes him bark like a dog, fuck without love, whilst the rose petals fly before ending up like an Apollo caught in an Icarus fall.
On his knees in a vogueing sequence, he moves up to the opposite end of the aisle. After a series of spasms, pressed and overwhelmed, he ends up bent over the table as if taken from behind by force while the rose petals lie strewn in the aisle. It’s like witnessing an altar boy’s coerced encounter with powers beyond his control or an uncensored scene from an Almodovar film. Here, the invisible is made visible. Traumatic experiences of power abuse are given a body. Nameless destinies and experiences of inflicted pain and humiliation are made apparent. It is not comfortable. It cannot be comfortable. The blood-spattered red table speaks to our time, as Kurt Joos’ choreography The Green Table did in the thirties. But where Joos showed the power games of those in power to decide on war and peace for all, here, the experiences of the many victims of abuse who have never received redress or justice are made manifest.
As Mariblanca finally throws the bouquet away, the vise is pulled even further. I think of Oliver Sale’s text
My transness is not something you can love, because my transness is a brutal object. It is a violence and we both know it. My transness is a prodding question, a finger in the ribs of everyone I meet. You should fear my transness, if you don’t, you aren’t looking hard enough. My transness destroys your foundations. It is the stick of dynamite, the wrecking ball, the jack and sledgehammer, the crowbar, the water and wind that finally breaks it down to dust, and the flora and fauna that consume it and convert it to something finally new. It is the tree forcing itself through the pavement, and the wildflowers in your tended lawn. How could it not be, every crack in your world is a place my transness will metabolise. Fear it, it is the right thing to do. But let yourself fear it softly, gently. Fear it as the wildflowers, blooming in late spring, fill your garden with a brand-new scent you remember vividly. Fear it as the deers’ walk out of the forest and you see in them the old markings you scraped into the walls of your home. Fear what you know is true. My transness is your transness. And when all is gone between us, and the brutal objects stand, they will have lost all their edges. and we will have nothing left to hurt one another with, not even our transness. Nothing to hold onto. And for that I’m afraid. Do not love my transness. It will tear the floor out from right where you stand. Be afraid. Be afraid. And let yourself be changed anyway.
While this text is grinding in my head, Mariblanca increases the performance’s intensity even further. The jockstrap is thrown away; he is naked and blood-spattered, while the carpet in the aisle is pulled up, and the performance reaches its climax as his character lies down on the table like a crucified man taken down from the cross, and the world falls upon him. No one intervenes in the pain and humiliation that unfolds before our eyes. In this way, the pain is doubled. We are implicated.
The rebirth
In deep pliés, the body drops. The character moves as if retreating before going head-on again: Shaking the table, whimpering like a wounded wolf, searching for its voice, breaking out of its confinement. What follows shifts the perspective, and power relationships and premisses are shaken. Mariblanca moves into the spaces beyond the aisle, spinning around his axis to the soundscape of Lykorgous Poryfris, which eggs and underpins what can arise when power relations change. It does so by turning to tunes and rhythms that echo Renaissance dance music, and with that, the Renaissance’s spirit and promise of renewal and redemption occurs, like a rebirth where the character finds his own body: Mariblanca throws away the mask and exhales. The turning point is experienced as liberating for both the performer and the audience. He looks at us for the first time without a mask. We see each other, and the space between us opens. Like a victory lap after 10,000 meters, he moves between the two seating modules, turning and dancing. Free as only a terrific dancer can be.
Because a coin always has two sides. If the first part took us along and made us implicated witnesses to “the dark side of the moon”- then we are now led fragilely but safely into a “Let- the-sunshine-in”-place where we meet as fellow human beings in the room with Mariblanca. He quickly alters the premises of our relationship in the space with simple moves, poetic and magical, by having us meet in a circle in the aisle. Like around a campfire, he talks about “dancing” and “touching” and how “every part has to be touched” while naming all body parts and giving them space. Body and paint are used in a way that recycles techniques we know from the performance artists of the ‘60s and ‘70s, but he furthers and challenges these icons and us in a way that goes beyond the level of provocation, to have something to say that he wants to share with us. In this way, we are woven together, performer and audience: fragile and filled with shyness, but trusting that we are seen and looked after, we can hear and take in Mariblanca’s final statement: “I AM REAL”.
The practice of freedom
In contrast to Mariblanca’s last stagings with different groups of performers, where care for the performers has been a guiding premise for the design of performances, the solo performance The Basement gives Mariblanca a completely different opportunity to challenge himself physically and test the potential of the performative moment. It is rare in the Norwegian context to see a dancer exercise such a range within one performance, from raw physicality to free flow, lightness, and warmth in close encounters with the audience.
During the performance’s roughly 70 minutes, we are witnessing cinematic imagery, and both an expressively raw physicality and a kinaesthetically sensuous movement articulation, which moves from a ritualistic frame with a movement language based on bounded flow and a dance theatre expression via a bodily breath and spatial flow, to direct meetings and interaction with the audience in a participatory post-dramatic setting. The performance moves effortlessly between genre and stylistic expressions without losing sight of the performance’s intention as described in the program text: “The practice of freedom … requires work, courage and the will to exceed the imposed limits of what is acceptable, legitimate and beautiful.” As audience members, we must make up our minds about what is unfolding. For some, the performance will be demanding because the performance pulls the rug from under the feet of those who take the binary perspective for granted. It makes it nearly impossible to maintain simple, stereotypical categories. You must go with the flow of thoughts and impressions that The Basement insists on. Still, because the performance is presented with warmth, deep-felt passion, empathy and love, it feels safe to join in, let yourself be changed and allow yourself not to have easy answers to everything
This review is a paid commission by 71 Bodies. The author has been free to make his assessments.
The text of Oliver Sale is from «This house would rather be feared than loved», which Sunniva Rørvik Moen refers to in her choreographic project on Dyke-Camp. It is cited here with permission from Oliver Sale.
