In this week’s post Thomas lyrically shares his artistic research while on an international adventure.
I was asked why the city attracted me and honestly I forget what initiated it. It has been calling me so long (over 10 years) that now it is an ethos, a visceral need. Other friends reference how Berlin is “a place I am meant to be.” How have I embodied a place without having been there? How does my body weave this place into my subconscious?
In the arrival I feel calm. My body has physically flown over 3000 miles yet I feel like nothing much has changed. I could be stepping into any place. I move with a curious ease toward the S-Bahn. My 10+ year old suitcase breaks on this walk. I now fully feel the weight of my packed baggage.
Berlin is symbol: a site of possibility, connection, and relationship. I identify this trip as a pilgrimage, a puzzle piece to my (artistic) life. I venture for over two weeks throughout the expansive city discovering its distinctive spaces.
My rented bicycle gets me lost quickly. After riding for a bit too long that deep awareness kicks in: “I think I’m going the wrong way.” These acts of ‘lost’ teach me about the city. The street layout is no Philly grid as roads often curve and change names. One minute a road is heading north and then suddenly heading west. And perhaps this “wrong way,” this getting lost, is exactly where I was meant to be. I discover Berlin’s eccentricities: “hidden” monuments, strange alternative spaces, and dead ends.
I take Gaga classes at Tanzfabrik. One ongoing practice in Gaga is to keep your eyes open. A closing of eyes internalizes the movement while keeping my eyes open allows the movement to rush out of me. I send and release my roll from my hip joint, passing it across my body, and flick it across the room. These gestures are electric and in a constant flow. It cannot be contained.
I didn’t create an agenda. I have no ‘where’ I need to be. There is no one I need to impress. There are no expectations. I walk the streets at the slowest of paces taking in each shop, each brick. My paths are unusual as I spiral through a neighborhood.
I see a dance by Gerald Kurdain at the Open Spaces Festival. In their performance each audience member is offered a hard pink ball of beeswax. Told to hold it in my hand I discover a surprising active motion. The molecules in the ball speed up due to the heat my body creates. The wax softens and I am then able to reshape the ball into something new.
Who am I to this space? I am anonymous and for the first time in years feel completely myself and in my body. There is no code switching. There is no judgment. I feel wild and free. My hips open in new ways. I have lived so much of my life representing an idea of myself, aiming to impress someone and an expectation to be this or that. Here: no expectations. Pleasure just for me.
I fall into natural spaces.
I sit for an hour in the middle of an abandoned airport (Templehof). I am comforted by the sun. It feels apocalyptic as the flat land around me is populated by walkers and bikers. I roam the old runway. I sit in the grass. I stretch my back muscles (I have an ongoing tightness in these muscles). My back is the most relaxed I have felt in a long time. I can smell the baking of fresh bread nearby.
Parks are popular and appear almost as frequently as cafes. I get caught in a short rainstorm in Gölitzer Park. I scurry under a graffitied awning to stay dry. Some people continue to hang in the rain. The sun glimmered in Treptow Park. I couldn’t get over the immense yellow trees, which circled and lined the yards of a Soviet Monument. And in Templehof I notice how quiet the city could be. No animals no shuffling. Was the wind silenced? Are there fewer birds here?
Berlin cannot hide its past. It is surreal visiting the East Side Gallery where a mile long strip of the Berlin Wall still remains. Now a popular tourist site it is beautiful to see radical graffiti affirming freedom, dignity, and respect for all painted on the wall. However, it also feels like a show. It too is a symbol, a story, a catalog of a horrible moment of both this country’s and the world’s history. All this with a Mercedes Benz arena stationed opposite the wall. Capitalism seeps in. Who is this here for? What does this monument teach us now? I am amidst selfies. I take a selfie too.
I stop carrying my cell phone. The social construct of time creates a boundary, an expectation of my needs. I let go of this. I eat when I am hungry, not because it is a certain time. I associate new experiences with different times. Let’s dance. I go to the historic KitKatClub. It is the sexiest, dirtiest, and laziest place I’ve immersed myself in. I dance ecstatically in the midst of the raucous till dawn.
I visit the Schwules Museum (Gay Museum). I feel taken care of and considered, connecting to an exhibit and art works like never before. The curation is speaking to me, my identities flowing out of the artwork. I see myself in two finely dressed men sitting beside each other.
I see a show by Ann Liv Young which blurs character and real life for the audience. I feel uneasy in my seat as audience members make wild accusations at her character Sherry. But they are actually threatening Ann Liv Young. Thoughtless assumptions are made. My feet stick to the floor, but I lean in with my jaw dropped. I am depressed about how far we have to go to be generous humans one another.
I visit Bertolt Brecht’s grave. He is an artist who has inspired my work. I sit and write in the cemetery. Who is my chosen artistic family? I think about Derek Jarman, Georges Perec, Rebecca Solnit, Jack Smith, Maggie Nelson.
Space is often an experience of the past. I am seeing what has been and that gets layered onto my present body. A collective memory.
These memories my body remembers and holds. My feet catalog every step I’ve taken. My muscles remember tennis courts I played on as a teenager. The marathon I ran. The thousands of miles I’ve pedaled. These feet are always touching, always laboring for me.
Let’s dance again.
I wait in line at Berghain. I see people turned away by the bouncers. I feel the chill of the air and my nerves match the chill gently shaking muscles. Will I get in?
I am reading Carol Becker’s Thinking in Place: “One goes to know the place in the physical body, to have an experience of the place, and then to have that experience recorded somewhere on the body, so it then can be accessed as memory by the mind and the spirit.”
I am a person who loves to dance and I am anxious to dance at a place that has also been named the best techno club in the world. Berghain is infamous for its extremely long line to get in, its 3-day non-stop party each weekend, and bouncers who turn away (maybe 20% or more) possible clientele. I make it in. Here I find a home.
I dance for hours. My muscles become rubber. I perform a ritual releasing my demons with ecstatic joy. The wall of bass vibrates my body as I keep up with the heavy hooks. My hips loosen. My neck and shoulders release the tensions they hold there. I cannot hold back. I let it all go: the past, the frustrations, the opinions that I have suffocated myself with. Too often the work of an artist requires a reviewer, a granter, an audience that makes us powerless. I release this on the dance floor both consciously and unconsciously. I celebrate the movement of my body releasing these conflicts I’ve held for hours to decades. This is about release, not tension.
Who am I now? I did not go to Berlin to change this space but to change myself. Allow myself to be changed by what I experience. And I experience a transformation that I could not achieve immersed in daily life. This is a renewal.
“In art at its freest we recognize its true potential— to show us how to love the things of this life, to abhor their destruction, to imagine us how to love the things of this life.” (Carol Becker’s Thinking in Place)
I am living fully in the present. I am activating new muscles and trajectories, and initiating new artistic ideas. And I am longing for home. I return to Philadelphia with anticipation. I have lived here for over 10 years and stepping away from it helped me see the great potential of this city and its artists. These are the spaces wherein my body wants to keep making.
