For cracking egg III: dance performance

Teresa Hackel and Irene Schröder [dance]
Judith Hohensee [video]
Tobias Herzz Hallbauer [sound]

Treibhaus Katharinenstrasse, Dresden; July 2009

The performance started in a former greenhouse by projecting images of three women wrapped in transparent plastics on the wall behind the stage. Isolated from each other and from the world by the foil, each woman lived a life of her own.
 
Teresa and Irene were leaning against a wall on the side of the stage. They looked absent-mindlessly over our heads as if they were waiting for their turn to come. Occasionally one of them stretched her hand out, curled the fingers, closed and opened the palm. Not a single glance did they spare at the audience or the movie. The trick made the audience overlook that the performance and not just the projection has already started. Only after the dancers entered the stage, the exercise of their fingers, which were the only active parts of their bodies, revealed that the performance began long ago.

The two right hands found each other and synchronized their movement, keeping a close distance without touching. Then they grasped an imaginary object of the size of an Olympic discus. Teresa's hand held it from the bottom, Irene's from the top. They carried it around and started swapping the hands: Teresa's hand on the top and

Irene's from below, then the opposite. During this exercise both dancers were ostentatiously looking away in reminiscence of the time before they entered the stage. The challenge was to keep the (imaginary) object from falling without visual control while the hands were swapping positions. Is it not a brilliant idea?

The parallel movement of hands extended to whole bodies. Without touching each other, in a distance too close to look comfortably while avoiding contact, the dancers stretched, bowed and bent in smooth parallel movements as a fish couple. After shifting the axes of their bodies by 90 grades, they exercised similar parallelism on the floor.

After they parted, Teresa performed a solo which gave the piece its name. She was reciting permutations of a sentence about her desire to break an egg on her head while performing a ritual with yellow-painted weights, which draw her words into absurdity. Tobias Herzz Hallbauer joined her voice, using a looper (device for the multiplication of sound samples) and creating a dense acoustic web resonating by "crack", "egg" and "head".

It would take too many words to comment on all ideas presented this night. Photos above show part of the performance with a lot of body lifts, during which the dancers supported themselves by grasping the fabric of their clothing. The photo below shows a video projection by Judith Hohensee, who struggles to penetrate the surface of a jelly-like material with her hands and face. She is conquering a space which has not existed before. In contrast, Teresa is helping Ireen to support and stabilize her body in what originally was a free space but what became constricting and corseting her after the yellow weights were put in place.

It was an intelligent and charming performance. The ideas unfolding around shared space were balanced and mature and Irene and Teresa have not given up being dancers, in spite of the performative character of the piece. It is comforting, and it does not happen too often in the arena of dance-performance fusion to encounter a thought-through, abstract piece that makes so much sense and fun.
 
As a side effect we discovered Treibhaus Katha-rinenstrasse, another art asylum-turned-backyard in Neustadt where people produce and consume art for noting but its own sake.

Photos and text by Petr Karlovsky