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A dog bites a man, and there is no story about it. A man bites a dog, and there are a hundred phone screens to record it. This could summarize what Erika felt when we were watching La Ribot’s Another Distinguée. People are so conditioned to move closer to a surprising or titillating thing to be able to capture it on their phones, and likewise the audience was goaded to close down on the two bodies cutting pieces off of each other, not letting others to watch by simply forming a big circle. I hear her, and I agree that this is our recently-acquired form of social choreography. But I also felt that this desire to get close (to see better as if they were looking at it with the mediation of a screen) is the expression of a shared need for intimacy.

This is the beginning of the evening; we first see the colossal “Sonia”–a giant installation covered by a black plastic–under dim, angular white light, standing tall and sexy like the negative image of a glacier mountain. This chase between two bodies is the second negative image, equally sexy and dark and inverted. They are covered with skin-colored transparent tights, and taking turns to rip and cut pieces off of the layers. There is some sense of animosity, but it is also an expression of desire. One runs towards a thick group of audience members, then kneels and raises his or her hip suggestively. The other comes rushing in, gets so close that their entangled and faceless bodies create the image of a monstrous, multilimbed, animate blob. One hand moves fast to cut a layer, the other hand pulls the piece forcefully, yet another hand holds on to the leg of an audience member to keep balance. I hear a guy voicing his admiration in a French-inflected “sexy!”, his girlfriend approves in a similar mutter, as if this exchange necessarily revealed something. Is it our hungry way of watching and closing down on it that makes this scene so obscene? Maybe that’s why Maria loves how people rush in around them and obstruct each other’s view in the process.

But I had another revelation. In our first morning, we saw Francis Bacon exhibit at Centre Pompidou. [They made a thing about the texts that inspired him for some of his triptychs, but it completely eluded us. The installation of the images and the plates was also quite confusing.] The biggest take away was his Studies from the Body, which I hadn’t seen before. Hours later, as I was watching the translucent skin being ripped from the desirous flesh by the sense of fleeting time and reality (or by the photographic force, if I also throw the iconic poster of Antonioni’s Blow-Up into the mix) I couldn’t unsee the similarities. Not only the colors or shapes, but what motivates or animates this disfiguration of human form felt the same.

(Caption’sız bilgisiz bambambam)

And then:

“Dark practices” in (what Maria beautifully coined as) “devorations”

With my witch friend Erika, Paris was between Bacon and Another Distinguée, walking in cold weather and inside catacombs, sailing in the dark and finding occult bookshops, all the while devouring great food and wine. Somehow all of these actions mean the same thing, and it was what I was starving for. I let go of some dead weight, apparently six months is all you need to shed skin.

Which makes sense. All through the seven hours of flying all I could think of was to fill the bathtub and lie in it like some bug who just left the chrysalis. This is something Audrey taught me in our Brussels home (Audrey, my teacher in Taurian pleasures of being alive).

I can’t believe this was just a week ago. The insane pace here sends it light years further in the blink of an eye. I already had a depressive meltdown and extreme anxiety about not being able to write (which still continues, and this blog post is proof). Yesterday, hangover guilt-tripping and wet from the rain, I was walking up from the Herald Sq subway station on my way to the library. I first felt the vibrations, then heard the music. This band really shook the sadness and paralysis of the week off of me. The subway station became a jungle:

This trip has been more fruitful and easier than I anticipated. I was cautious and a bit too lethargic before taking off—I had reserved tickets months in advance and in the meantime a lot has happened. It also meant I had to stop writing for another 10 days. I still don’t know what the research-related outcomes are, but for sure it has been an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual restart for the last few days. My Paris “home,” Nadine and Ben, are always extremely generous and making it easy to land. I met Nadine’s parents, both of which have a very refined taste of contemporary dance. Her father’s passionate way of talking about performance renewed my faith in what I am studying; her mother has an amazing memory of shows from 20 years before. I wish there were more people like them.

I saw Mette Ingvartsen’s Moving in Concert the night I arrived. I was jetlagged, but it oddly helped me appreciate the piece more. I had another jetlagged Mette experience when she was in NYC with 21 Pornographies and I came back from Ghent to see it, another “spinning fluorescent light” piece and probably a segway for her to the new series she is now embarking on. I was probably more receptive to the light and sound vibrations, my body more permeable to the subliminal manipulations because I was tired, sleep deprived, and out of circadian-sync (plus, the attack of memories from the time before I was at Pompidou to see Mette’s 7 Pleasures). This is a more concerted and distilled way of using the ordinary stimuli we are subjected to everyday: the LED billboards, bluelight screens, city noise, wireless signals, and policed motions of human bodies-rendered-populations. But this kind of interpretation is the easier way out regarding what’s happening. What is always baffling to me with Mette’s works, and here too, is how she manages to create an originally sensual corporeality and imagery out of these minimalist choreographic principles and material tools, all the while driving a critique about them and through them. I can’t think of anything more arousing than the image of burning bodies in volcanic ash and lava after this.

Next up, I visited Mirza and Hicran in their Koln home. They are bored out of their heads and want to move to Berlin soon. Our exilic condition never rules out our vulnerability to loneliness, if anything it multiplies that. And then we exile ourselves further, never knowing where to land. No Protestant soil can soothe our starving Mediterranean souls. The dinner ended with youtubing Hicran’s uncle’s band and some traditional wedding music that uses clarinet (rightly) instead of zurna.

As soon as I got off Barmen-Wuppertal train station next morning, I headed to Pina Bausch Foundation. Ismael and Alen were already waiting for me; they saw me walking in the courtyard and smiled from the window. Those smiles were my reassurance that everything would work out. Both of them remembered my visit from last year (and probably with an appropriate giggle at my clumsy attempts to break in to “THE ARCHIVES”). They kindly shared the background on the archive work they’ve been doing for the last 9 years. I found it necessary to repeatedly tell them how important it is for folks in so many parts of the world to see her work even from video renditions. They will launch an online archive in June 2020. Just last week they have released Palermo Palermo to test the waters.

The first day I had a blast with Blaubart. The whole idea of DJing with Bartok on a record player on stage is crazy for today, let alone for 1977, and this is the smallest praise I can give. Nelken is of a different phase of her experiments, which I didn’t know and was positively surprised about. Komm Tanz Mit Mir feels much earlier, ultra theatrical in comparison, but one can already see her main compositional strategies and the bittersweet tone that only she knows how to strike. 

It is one thing to read about her dramaturgical paths that alter in time or drift synchronously. It is a whole other thing to experience it as an all-round change of her expressive universe. Even from grainy videos this tectonic shift can be transmitted under the skin.

My selection from Foundation and Tanztheater Wuppertal was based on my readings and Pina’s stage designer Peter Pabst’s interview with Wim Wenders. I wasn’t sure what exactly I’d find, and I can happily report that I didn’t find what I’d assumed to. In a not-so-clever way I picked pieces eclectically divided in time, and it was interesting to see ruptures, continuities, undercurrents, modulations across her phases of exploration. I knew of the two major trajectories in her aesthetic, what I will call the early tragic-choral phase (terrible shorthand but bear with me, I am thinking of it compositionally), which she is better known for (Cafe Muller, Rite) (Turk arabeskligine de en cok hitabeden donem bu *swh). The other trajectory is the episodic city pieces she did through the 1990s and 2000s. The signs were already there for me to see, but only now, with the accumulated hindsight of pieces across decades, do I have a sense of her punk-blues that feels very pre-1989 Germany, that out-Brechts alienation, that ruthlessly divides the core of every motion and emotion to the nth degree to see how any human expression can be possible.

This vision completely changed the way I could grasp Wuppertal as a place and what it might have meant for Pina’s artistic discipline and focus (as well as her fellow artists’). It was powerfully illuminating about what it means to form a pack and make a pact, to retreat from crowds and centers, to endure limitations, to choose a home and not fidget. Just 4 days with limited Internet and human interaction reminded me so much about what it was like to pay hardcore attention and stay with an intensity with my whole being and not seeking low-level, meaningless, even sensationless diversions. This also relates to the question of exile, boredom, and creativity, but I can only draw lessons for myself here.

I made other surprise connections in this visit, with Laser, a second generation Turkish-German who works at Tanztheater Wuppertal’s management, and with long-time company member (and really a black box) Benedicte Billiet. They made this parachuting in much friendlier and enlightening in ways I couldn’t have imagined. 

I couldn’t run in the park near the place I stayed, but I was lucky to have a clear fullmoon sky. And some other rites to fulfill this pilgrimage. May we lose ourselves and find anew.

The best part of traveling to Germany (gurbet alert) is the Turkish markets and products. This will be my friendsgiving dessert for Dino (aka gurbetlik insana zehir bile yedirtir):

Too many options make you stop blogging even before you begin. This is a whole other technology of writing that dictates its own shape and logic before you are able to master and circumvent for your own purposes and goals.

Anyways, just begin. Where? Right in the middle. This is not the language I feel at ease in, and yet something tells me that this is the only way I can reach the audience I want to reach. My world has expanded so far beyond the limits of my native tongue, physically and conceptually, in terms of other actors and in terms of emotions in between.

But now I am just passing time to get over my anxiety. Why does it feel so high stakes and who do I feel the need to give all these disclaimers?

This is a blog I should have started a year ago, when my travels began, and when I had the first urge to make a record of what I am doing, thinking, feeling at each place I visit. I talked myself out of it, I chose to take it less seriously. Yet here I am, again about to fly in somewhere with the hopes of finding answers, and again the desire to both record and communicate this adventure.

Last year, this time, I must have been in Amsterdam. A few days prior I had seen Giselle Vienne’s Crowd in Utrecht. It put a spell on me, I was moonstruck by its ritual fetish (and afterwards I did regrettable things that I do not regret). The earth felt familiar, I was making mental comparisons with Bausch’s Rite. Little that I knew, it was already Vienne’s homage to that particular Rite. Further: Exactly a week after that, the fate would take me to Wuppertal, to watch Rite with live orchestra, by complete luck. My dear friend Deniz was keeping me company, Wuppertal was too much barrenness and blues, and I was so relieved to find out that the company was performing at the night we arrived there. We bought tickets from people at the door. I don’t remember paying more than 20€, that was all I got. In my “fieldbook,” the hasty and incomprehensible jots of these two shows lie side by side. Mother’s earth and daughter’s earth are conspiring.

And then the Hellas Restaurant, sweet uzo, more Bausch blues by the suggestion of the décor, our oily hands over the heavy stage design book.

Now I am preparing to go back to Wuppertal. I am already anticipating the Taurus full moon. I will be watching Vollmond on record. I will be staying near a park, and running there wishing to be turned into a wolf.

And then Paris, to see two loves of mine, Erika and Maria. Two nights of Another Distinguée. This trip will help me fill in the “gaps,” anything that I missed the first time I moved there will greet my obsessive eyes.

Paris evokes other things that must not be remembered and spoken of any longer (which is connected to a postcard mentally composed in Utrecht after Crowd‘s madness, written and sent from Amsterdam few days later). I have already created another story line in which I am in Pantin, it is June. I am talking to (and shadowing) Maria an entire day, g(r)azing and thinking over her notebooks hungrily, and having a nice walk by the river. A huge salad and beer by the Gare Lyon as I was about to leave for Grenoble. I was already anticipating the arrival of something fateful on that train ride, I was exhausted yet my soul energy was so high. My beautiful friend Özgül and our trip to the Alps carried it higher. Then, Madrid, Mara, more magic, more madness. The descend of the mighty ass in shit–but in a good way, in an it-was-a-learning-experience way!

Writing about these trips evokes the image of someone trying to unravel a knotty ball of thread, but using her toes and limbs to do so and eventually getting cocooned by it. I don’t know where I want to go with these, but I suppose it is just the movement of remembering that I indulge in.

Ironically, today I am struck by a beautiful song called “Stasis”