TANZ IM QUADRAT

A few years ago, the Prague dance scene also experienced the mystique of violence. At the time, a new marginal company, FKK – Freie Körper Kultur, came up with the performance Tanz im Quadrat. In the raw milieu of analternative Prague club, they presented a summa of violence and nudity, driven to mystical ecstasy. They exposed naked bodies, first male, stripping off speedily, virtually invading the stage with their collective nudity.
And without any prelude, they presently started up a motion repertoire of violent behaviour. As though propelled by an aggressive overpressure, they ran against the walls surrounding the stage. Without hesitation, toughly, going for broke, irrespective of the danger. Leaning with his back against the wall, one of the boys took off his underpants in a flash, while another ran against the wall above, took off and bounced away.Besides nudity, another stylistic means was projection of figures on a grainy back wall and its metal door, including an image of an undressing girl, giving ahyper-realistic impression. This gave rise to the illusion that the girl was there inthe flesh, behind the door, behind the illuminated wall. And again, without an unnecessary psychological pause, the young ruttish men plunged into fighting for this projection, this illusion of, really large, naked breasts. They ran against the image of the girl, so as to adhere to it with their bodies, fiercely battling for their place on the wall, brutally pushing away their rivals, sticking to the wall. A sequence of ritualised violence ensued. The naked young men repeatedly jumped against one another, chest-bumping. And again with no mercy for themselves or their opponents.The collisions ended up with the naked loser on the ground. The falls were very real and dangerous. The audience clearly heard the sound of the tumbles, as they did the sounds of skidding and, probably, burnt skin. The falls were not beautiful. Yet what was beautiful was the entirety of the performance, the alchemy of authenticity and sophisticated detail. Beautiful was the structure, occasionally opened as a new opportunity, not yet made use of, now and then crystallised, and beautiful too was the inosculation of authentic bodies, with their hallucinogenic projections, more real than reality. – But what is it that makes these violent movements ritual? The chest-bumpings are of alargely symbolic nature. They are a symbolic test of masculinity. They are absolutely useless as a practical combat technique. A robust chest is the pride of men – something like the robust antlers of deer. An act of violence, the clashing of chests means a symbolic enjoyment of masculinity, or dreaming of masculinity. And the performers did not come to make a bow; merely a few nicely arranged bouquets flew out from the auditorium and landed heavily on the deserted floor of the stage. How arrogant and how astonishingly beautiful. Tanz im Quadrat was a (half-) opened structure, changing from performance to performance, yet both the statement and the poetics of the company were clearly found and defined. Worth mentioning is that this poetics was also the youngest theatre generation’s symptomatic look back in hindsight at the poetics of the movement theatre of the 1980s. (Lecture: Dance in the region between the vampire and the werewolf)

Nina Vangelí: Quadrature of the circle of dance

Performing: Jan Mocek, Jan Hofman, Pavel Martinec, Markéta Dvořáková, Michaela Žemlová
Directing: Jan Mocek, Jan Hofman