Maybe and Forever

I take it back… …kcab ti ekat I



Emotions are a complicated, delusive issue. When we are completely overwhelmed by them we are unable to perceive how naïve and harmless it all seems to people around us. Love which was brought to us by Meg Stuart and Philipp Gehmacher to the stage of Atelje 212 brought along some pain, suffering, misunderstanding, nice moments, failure… as many other loves do. A faded photo, discarded shoes, the only material proof that the love had existed. But its fragments stay within bodies, thoughts, popular melodies and they keep reminding us while they are having a conversation with the past.

Based on stand-up (tragi)comedy, Stuart links her confessions with rewind movements. This trick, present in dancing, also appears in music in which real-time voice and recorded melodies colide. Niko Hafkenscheid’s mini concert and sounds of electric guitar give the colour to the atmosphere of melancholy dominant not only on the stage but on the old photo as well. Simultaneously, the music does not follow the dance – it stands on its own, placed in present moment (which we are reminded by the musician’s comments which he gave to the audience in Serbian) reviving thus the memory of the broken love.

Is this story of love enough and/or relevant in contemporary society? This project, a mostly personal one, made by representatives of Damaged Goods & Mumbling Fish troupes, seems to push their complex dancing bodies in the background. The compromise that is created on stage between them annulated something of each dancer and created a feeling of betrayed expectation. The Belgrade audience maybe expected more from the author but also from the performance which lasted forever. The question remains how it would have looked like if they had taken it back…


Jovana Dukić