Issues at Stake: ensemble | zusammen

Issues at Stake

What effects does the coronavirus pandemic have on real living conditions worldwide? How does the global function in the local? Under the title Issues at Stake and in cooperation with the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, the Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World, ADKDW) brings together texts on the worldwide situation since early 2020 written by its members.

The ADKDW is a Cologne-based non-profit cultural institution that moves beyond the Eurocentric doctrines of cultural history; it initiates, produces and organizes events in various artistic and discursive fields. The members – national and international artists, curators, authors and scholars – function as a think tank and provide the framework for the ADKDW‘s artistic program.

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ensemble | together Text: MONIKA GINTERSDORFER Translation: ROMY FURSLAND

Monika Gintersdorfer with Gregor Zoch at Tegel Airport, Photo: Knut Klaßen

Over the past year the dance and theater group La Fleur has developed a piece that deals with the connection between sex work, deadly disease as well as national borders and gender boundaries. We, a transnational team of 15, combined Émile Zola’s Nana, Virginie Despentes Les jolies choses, and Paul B. Preciado’s Un appartement sur Uranus in this performance called Nana kriegt keine Pocken (Nana doesn’t catch smallpox). At the beginning of March 2020 after a performance series in Paris we left each other tired and happy and everyone went ‘home’.

Some of us only had to take the next metro, others boarded flights to Abidjan, Berlin, Bremen, Vienna, New York, LA, and Mexico City.

We said our good byes – bisou bisou La Fleur – and were not all that sad since we were supposed to be in Bremen with the next Nana performances four weeks later.

But what actually happened were cancelled performances, shelter in place, and travel bans.

And consequences: residence permits couldn’t be extended on time, they lapsed exactly like the already booked flights to the performances. And just like that, some of us became paperless and jobless all at once.

Where are we now? What has happened to the transnational group that we’ve built up over

MONIKA GINTERSDORFER is a theatre director. She is a founding member of the performance collectives Gintersdorfer/ Klaßen and LA FLEUR, whose work is situated at the border between drama and dance, club and theatre, Europe and Africa. Her work has already been presented in over 25 countries and has received numerous awards and grants.

Photo: Monika Gintersdorfer

the last four years? It is splintered by various national regulations that have come into force everywhere, at least temporarily. The coronavirus measures make us very aware again of our interdependency and the fragility of our circumstances. We are used to dealing with restrictions; we’ve sometimes not gotten visas and titre de séjour on time and had to find someone to replace a disappointed left-out performer.

But it was only ever one or two, not all of us at the same time.

If in the foreseeable future we can’t travel, then our lives between continents – the core of our work and what has also become our artistic and personal self-concept – collapses.

It is an unpleasant vision that ruptures this construct upon which the relationships and financial securities of not only individual artists but also their families and chosen families depend. A return to a ‘local’ existence is a nightmare for us; we want to continue our transnational work using our many voices to counter

Issues at Stake

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Monika Gintersdorfer with Gregor Zoch at Tegel Airport, Photo: Knut Klaßen

a Eurocentric worldview and cultural perspective – not just in theory but also in every moment of our being together. We are an ensemble, an ensemble with no fixed venue. No one is in charge of us, no city, no institution. We can only be together when we are able to travel, and we can only travel when we have work and the borders are open.

So far this text sounds like a manifesto, but that is perhaps my lifestyle, manifesto-like.

There is something personal behind it: a yearning for those who are not there, perhaps age-related panic attacks in a half-asleep state, a maternal and artistic affection for our cause and desire to rupture something again, that is, not to keep going exactly as we are but to get to the next level. But this next level doesn’t actually exist for an independent transnational ensemble.

You first have to invent it, so that you can get there. In these times of corona the formal and conformist prevail: those who are married, who have permanent employment, the taxpayers, those who are registered in Germany, and those enrolled in artists’ social insurance can be recognized and in the best case be supported. For many of them it is still difficult, but what about those who are in-between? Those with two or three identities without recognizable status, those who cannot be categorized? They have a second home on planet Uranus, as Paul B. Preciado says, since there is no place in the world that isn’t racist, sexist, homophobic. You could also add ‘fascist’ and ‘capitalistic’. But is anything changing right now? Without the most intense engagement, probably not very much.

We have Paul B. Preciado in our heads – we read his latest book Un appartement sur Uranus together in three languages for Nana, before a German translation came out. And how close

Preciado gets to us with his critique of the border regime, national borders, and the boundaries of gender. The performer Alex Cephus was happy to escape from New York for a couple months; for a Black queer man, a butch queen, the New York of Trump’s America is no longer a good place. And now Alex is again in New York, in Brooklyn. And the kicker is, there is no place that is safe from corona, but there are places that are better off than others. Alex wanted to come back as soon as possible, and now I have to tell him that the work we had planned for fall has been postponed to 2021.

Next year will be a big year for us as so much has been postponed until then. It’s difficult to get up right now, in 2020; let’s do it later! If only we could hibernate through the summer – sleep for three months and burn off the flab.

And then in mid-May suddenly there is some movement in the scene, almost simultaneously we get requests for outdoor performances in June and July 2020, as performing outside is more feasible than inside. It was our first practical work since the beginning of March. We are thinking about how the performers from both Gintersdorfer/Klaßen and La Fleur who can’t travel can take part in our performances with research tasks and live transmissions. We are against digitalizing our work; we want to be in public space, but we don’t want that only those in the group who are present in Europe can be a part of it and profit from the jobs.

After Nana Arturo Lugo did not travel back home in March like the others, he stayed another six weeks with his boyfriend in Berlin, and then went back to Mexico City in order to avoid any difficulties that even such a short overstay causes. He had already once gotten a two-year EU entry ban. If the flight had been

canceled this time it wouldn’t have been his fault. But the flight went as scheduled, and with sadness he went into quarantine upon arrival home. Before he left he gave me this text: “El deseo de conectarme con otra personas depende de mi decisión, practica y ejercicio de encontrarme con una diversidad de cuerpos y aprender de su aporte cultural y su reflexion multicultural para organizarnos juntos en un tejidos sociales fuerte y creativo: estar en constante tránsito.”

The desire to connect with other people depends on my decision, my practice. I want to meet with a diversity of bodies and learn from their cultural practice so that we organize together as part of a strong and creative social fabric: to be in constant transition.

“Desde hace dos años, realcionado a mi problema con la restricción de entrada a la EU, considero de suma importancia defender nuestras afectividades ante un sistema opresor que maneja nuestros cuerpos bajos sus legalidades, esté sistema hace que el amor , la amistad, el cariño , la empatía y el deseo de estar juntos como cuerpos se vea afectado con sus políticas que nos sistematizan y violentan.”

For two years I was banned from entry in the EU, since then I think it is the most important thing to defend our affinities, our loves, from an oppressive system that brings our bodies under the provisions of legality. This system makes it so that love, friendship, affection, empathy and the desire to be together as bodies are determined by politics that systematize us and do violence to us.

Issues at Stake

Annick Agbadou und Franck E. Yao in the Ivory Coast and Chris and Lydia in Kinshasa keep us updated on their observations in both places: Franck in the hospital with malaria and not because of corona, in Kinshasa Lydia noticed collective rage only once, when it was said that new vaccines would be tested on Africans. The contact ban has just been extended to May 26.

Annick experiments right now with a home production of delicious dégué, a yogurt millet couscous, to secure a small income. The bars are supposed to be open soon, until then she wants to have a new song for live performances.

Good to know, since in Europe I often read scary articles with headlines like “Corona – Africa on the Edge of the Abyss”, entirely in the European tradition of presenting Africa as a uniform disaster area. These are again the categorizations that we want to be rid of. There is now a discourse on the topic: Read Felwine Sarr, who addresses Africans when he writes that with Corona it is a chance to banish Europe as a utopia and “to develop an inward presence and to let this manifest what is usually stifled through hyperactivity and the noise outside.

We have postponed an encounter with ourselves.” ANO Ghana, an art institution in Accra, writes: “ We have been trying to determine at ANO how we can best contribute to these unprecedented times. In 2018, we did our first tour of the country, meeting people from all walks of life asking them what culture is to them. Many of them spoke of our traditions, our herbs, our ways of knowing that had been cultivated for years, but are now largely disregarded, and have not been contemporised. When we spoke with Knowledge Keepers during this crisis, they spoke of two approaches, one being the importance of self-reliance, of people growing their own food, whether it be in small boxes, or gallons on the side of the road, they stressed again and again the importance of building our immune systems through what we eat. Secondly, they spoke of the importance of plant medicine and holistic wellness, which have been used for centuries to treat illnesses, viruses and build the immune system. In countries like Madagascar and Zimbabwe, traditional healers have been

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called on to treat symptoms and find solutions alongside doctors and scientists. Over the coming weeks and months at ANO, we will do our best to draw on local wisdom and knowledge and make this as accessible as possible.”

And La Fleur? We are calling each other, wishing each other happy birthday, giving each other language classes over the phone, movement classes via video, we want to come together soon in a place where we can lose this restlessness and be an ensemble again.