Untitled (Nostalgia, Act 3) or Ghosts Seeking Bodies to Inhabit

1. Repetition – nostalgia

Tiran Willemse takes off a sweater, emerges from the audience and walks onto the stage as if on his way to the gym. T-shirt inside out, holes in the gray wide trouser legs, he enters the undecorated, austere space and starts exercising. Ballet and, repeatedly, arabesque, a quote from the Romantic ballet Giselle, which serves as Willemse’s starting point for this piece. – Nostalgia, like someone being nostalgic as they remember a form of movement that has been deeply ingrained in their body through years of training.

Giselle is about girls who died of a broken heart and have since appeared in the night to take revenge and claim the lives of men in a wild dance. Spirits that are caught in repetition in their own way, that cannot (or don’t want to?) fade into nothingness, but instead take revenge night after night for the hurt they have suffered – nostalgia, like the painful attachment to a past that keeps being evoked by repetition and prohibits those suffering from moving on.

2. Rupture – frenzy

Little by little, the body on stage breaks from the mold. The long, clear movements are replaced by twitches, tongue hanging out; you don’t know whether you are looking at a maniacally laughing or crying face, witnessing an act of liberation or an excruciating dissolution of the self. Willemse borrows some of the movements from the Angolan dance style kuduro, which became popular around the early 2000s during the time of the civil war and originated from the suburbs of the capital Luanda. It’s a style that doesn’t shy away from ugliness, imitating frenzy, physical impairmentand racist stereotypes too. Just like Tiran Willemse, when he laughs at the audience while wobbling his head like a performer in a US American minstrel show. And, driven by whichever ghosts, dances himself into a frenzy.

3. Homecoming – Fanon

But those who believe the frenzy are mistaken too: the break is never complete. No matter how out of bounds Willemse moves on stage, he keeps returning to classic poses. As if constructing an image that clings to him like an outer shell and keeps him upright, this Black male body in ballet – or, much more generally: this Black body in a white society structured by racism. Frantz Fanon describes the psychological state of colonized subjects as an expulsion from their own body, which has become an object, defined by a racist society. And he describes the desire of colonized subjects to acquire a body that doesn’t become set in the position assigned to them but instead“moves, runs, jumps, swims and uses all its muscles”.[1] – Nostalgia for a body that is a home. Not unlike the dancing spirits from Giselle, who, stripped of their bodies, cannot let go of the desire to move.

4. Gaze – the audience

Tiran Willemse engages in an attempt to inhabit his body on a stage that, being a dancer, always turns him into an object too. He gives it room to squirm, spit, sweat, climb over the audience. At the end, he stands there naked, and we are all to blame. Because it is also the objectifying gaze of the audience, and Willemse throws this not-at-all innocent gaze back, using ballet and kuduro to pull one over on the stereotype. A hint of unease remains as he ties the sweater he removed at the beginning around the hips to the audience’s applause and bows most elegantly, ballet-style. Being a dancer is not unlike being a Black person –both are objects of external projections. Appropriating the narrative and exposing the dynamics of the gaze holds everyone accountable. Somewhere between the ghosts from Giselle and the performative frenzy of kuduro, there just might be a space opening up to inhabit one’s own body.

Teresa Awa is a performatively inclined theorist, translator, editor and researcher dancing around Vienna. Somewhere between dance practice and philosophy studies she is working to reconcile the body with the mind. She writes, dances, draws, and dabbles in all sorts of methodologies, in order to grasps a glimpse of the knowledge that shapes us as well as the ways in which we can shape ourselves.

[1] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated by Constance Farrington, Grove Press/New York 1963, p. 52.