WorkWorkWork.

Üben Üben Üben - Basel, 12.09.25 (Corpus Iuris Arte by Seline Davasse / In Order To Dance Baby Dance by Johann Eggebrecht and Noah Rees

WorkWorkWork. No, kidding. ÜbenÜbenÜben. I was forbidden to talk… not true. I got scolded for talking too much about the weather all the time. Now I have to come up with something else to fill the gaps. Right now a Barbie is sticking her butt in the air at me, basically just made of legs, the rest fell victim to the neighbor kids. Also, we moved. I’ve got a new walk now. Probably won’t even make it to the Rhine before I’m done here. Better head on the table than head through the wall. That was the motto of last night’s hosts. What I also learned yesterday evening: stilettos get stuck in tartan. And real improvisation works.

Yesterday was another great evening. Started with a linguistically very impressive performance. And performance not in the sense of a show, but almost economically: you perform well, you work well. It was so impressive, how much one can remember and how precisely learned text can be delivered. In theater not really unusual, but yesterday it hit me hard. Maybe because I wasn’t expecting it from that aesthetic, from the actually quite classical-dramatic tone the first part of the evening had.

I even wrote something down in my phone notes for the first time. But I had… maybe I help myself here, to get a bit more into content, but what it says is: Artworld has breached contract, adulthood, meritocracy and empty gesture of tolerance (in brackets: institutional critic). Well, that’s very helpful.

The art world was put in the pillory yesterday. And the pillory was a court made of three chair-pillars, which kept returning as a speaking figure… no, that sounds like the chairs were talking. But anyway – it was a one-woman-show, but with five played characters. And the characters were marked by a fixed spot in the room they spoke from and a certain kind of gesture and mimic, not extremely different, but different enough so you noticed when the character switched, even if the positioning hadn’t marked it. All five parties were held together by the uniform of a grey pantsuit.

Yes exactly, here maybe a link back to the first text or the first performance: there was a stage outfit, there were characters, somehow clearly distinguishable, which pushed the physical aspect into the background. It was more, as said, mimic and gesture assigned to the characters that caught your eye.

And otherwise it was actually very… the content was very… it was about language, or rather it was a linguistic performance. Without anything being read out, instead the imitation of an imagined trial and the figuration of the art world in one person, one entity. Which was totally funny. I mean, the drama was also humorous, through classic slapstick elements of expectation and disappointment. Like through the outfit or the presence, you expect a different kind of speech, maybe. Well, and then the absurdity of an – as I said – unimaginable but in reality happening court day or night. Intensified by the personalization of a system, the art world, compared to the single artist, the plaintiff. Which is actually that David-and-Goliath kind of relationship, small against big, and the overpowering strength of the system lies in its systemic form. And this systemic thing was broken open by portraying it as a single figure. Which, if I think more closely, is of course not unusual in legal dramas.

Two figures stand in a kind of chamber play opposite each other but never really speak directly, but through the function of the court or the judge. And suddenly you get the feeling: wow, this could be a fair trial. And I mean, those were exactly the questions being negotiated: what came first? The individual or the system, the group? Who makes the rules? Where do you start if you want change – with the individual or with the larger whole?

And all of this presented in a very sassy, hot lawyer-language, which in its concreteness and exactness and formality did transmit some emotion, but still: at certain points you feel like you can follow and you’re addressed, part of the process, actually as a member of the cultural field – and at the same time you lose yourself in the juridical-systemic speech.

And then, a dance performance. No longer linguistic precision, but physical capacity and physical language in the foreground, under observation. You could see how two bodies and two people communicate in movement, only with their bodies, following some story or narrative, but deeply improvised. Which is actually what communication or language always is: improvisation and reaction. Two bodies formed a new anchored unit, always breaking apart and finding each other again. “Hot gay sex” is a tag on the bathroom wall…

Luckily I knew someone, otherwise I would’ve been scared of being one of those audience members who get approached way too closely. This way it was fine. I always get nervous at performances when I suddenly realize the audience is being played with as furniture – or not furniture, but like space-altering elements. Yesterday, like I said, I knew the people, so I could dodge that fear of having to perform along.

Anyway also the – Jakob called it the Post-Post-Postmodern in dance. I don’t know enough about theater and dance to say what that really means. There was very little music, more like the sounds of shoes and moaning. Basically vocal language used to locate oneself. And only two release moments – or for the spectator two moments – where it was like… finally letting go, a choreography happening with music. You can see it, the beautiful movement of bodies. And then again, dropped back into the rawness of improvisation.

It was… everyone clapped for ten minutes, as they were both really, in their own way, not just good but somehow genuinely impressive performances.