Accomplices Across Borders 3 – Zwischenzeilen | Wechselspiel

Collective Performance with Thomas Bratzke & Joshua Hines,

Hole of Fame, Dresden, 2017

Thomas Bratzke (sculptor / performer, Berlin), Joshua Hines (singer / songwriter, Buenos Aires / Dresden) and Antje Dudek untersuchen im Zusammenspiel die Übersetzung, Umformung und Verfremdung eines Textes als Ausgangspunkt künstlerischer Komplizenschaft in und zwischen verschiedenen Medien.

Das Experiment pendelt zwischen Improvisation und Formfixierung, Spiel und Choreografie und mündet in eine Performance.

I’m sitting in an alcove in the back of the room, my gaze fixed on Thomas resting on a chair closer to the audience. Waiting. In my peripheral vision I see Joshua crouched on the floor in between his set of instruments: a microphone to his left, a loop station and a charango in front of him. A few more objects are scattered in the space: a flattened cardboard box sloppily painted in white, a big white enamel washing bowl filled with water, a low chest of drawers that is placed almost in the center of the space close to the audience. A few markers are lying on the ledge of the other alcove in the back of the room, which shows also a white poster with blurred grayish contours resembling script.

We rest in stillness until Joshua starts moving towards the washing bowl, and carefully taps it, creating a muffled sound. Thomas joins him after a few moments. I wait and observe. I go to the chest of drawers, open a drawer and remove a thin sheet of plastic foil and tape to make a bag into which I start breathing. The moisture of my breath gathers on the inside of the bag. Joshua joins me after a while, and touches the bag, feeling its volume decrease and increase monotonously.

We go back to our initial positions. Again we rest in silence and stillness. I believe it is Joshua who reinitiates action by experimenting with his instruments and my plastic bag. I hear him humming. Thomas takes a marker and starts drawing blue lines, moving forwards and backwards in movements that echo Joshua’s sounds. I jump off my ledge, take a hoodie that has been hanging on the back of Thomas’ chair and put it on back to front, so that the hood covers my face. I climb on the other window ledge and move my hands over the lines of grey shapes on the poster.

Fragments of what happens in the following half an hour:

I remember returning to my initial spot, and observing the scenery, the walls that become filled with lines in vivid colors.

Joshua plays the charango and creates twisted soundscapes that gain a melodic quality at times and become interrupted again.

I see myself unfolding the cardboard and holding it in front of me like a mask, and I feel how Thomas wraps me in it and we start to move between struggle and dance. I hear and I feel the felt tip of a marker on the surface of my cardboard shell.

I see Ben, who films our actions and interrupted projections on the side wall of the performance space.

I don’t remember when the first words and word-like sounds were uttered and when the word “leaves“ appeared next to a now colorful drawing that covers the left wall of the space.

I remember spilling salt that draws a temporary white vertical line through the air.

We all gather around the chest of drawers and draw and paint on slide frames and index cards. Ben and the camera watch us intently. Thomas lifts a frame in the air, and this gesture is projected behind Joshua, who turns his head to face the camera. I remember his eye viewed through this the slide’s tiny window – all blown up in size by the projection of Ben’s camera.

Silence. And again: regained movement and dynamics.

Thomas starts jumping frantically.

I fill the washing bowl with a load of words on magnetic strips. We rummage through them. Holding up individual words and showing them to each other. Writing on water with the blue marker.

I remember how the sounds become a song and the walls filled with traces of rhythms that are no longer audible.

Until we go back to our initial positions in our three different spots in the space, and the performance ends.

Text: Antje Dudek

Photos: Eric Vogel