Gintersdorfer / Klaßen
Not punk, Pololo
Past dates
3/10/15
8:00 PM
3/11/15
8:00 PM
3/12/15
8:00 PM
The performance centres around John Pololo, a mythical persona from Cote d'Ivoire, who lived his life in the nineteen eighties and nineties as a high-class contract killer and thief, working for the top echelons of Ivoirian business and politics. His life soon became the stuff of legend, which morphed into a vehicle for the creation of a stylised and trendsetting artificial character. This stylish rogue created new idioms and dances, which were turned into blockbuster rap-hits by Ivoirian group R.A.S - and which are still firmly embedded in the minds of today's Gintersdorfer/Klaßen dancers and performers. Abidjan's Pololo movement feeds on street culture and the rogue styles of the criminal underground of bad boys, muscle men, body guards, bouncers, and thugs, who populate the capital's dance floors, doing the Zighuei and Logobi in rampant self-celebration. They define Ivoirian show biz until today, just as Gangster Rap does in the US. However, the African gangsters sound comparatively cheerful and soft, particularly when contrasted to the hard European Punk of the eighties and nineties. But »doing without practising« as a subversive strategy against the middle-of-the-road mainstream works for both Europe and the Couper Decaler approach of Cote d'Ivoire.Styles and Attitudes Ted Gaier (Goldene Zitronen), Thomas Wenzel (Goldene Zitronen, Die Sterne) and Franck Edmond Yao (Gadoukou la Star) are all known for their uncompromising stance, and in their own way embody the original spirit of Punk. They reject psychology and the blatant mind-and-body- searching authenticity of the hippy era, and instead proudly sport a do-it-yourself attitude and a healthy distrust of easy-to-digest commercial music. And as part of this deluxe pop culture clash we investigate how compatible a punk attitude might be with boucan (the sophisticated bravado swagger of Couper Decaler), and what sort of codes are employed to win points in each respective system. With his harp, guitar and singing Hans Unstern defies categorisation, anti-authenticity is his artistic principle. His attempt to debunk heteronormative white privilege ends in tagging his own shame. Dancer Cécilia Bengolea adds her extensive knowledge of contemporary club and Internet dance culture emanations such as twerking, crumping and especially voguing to the trans-cultural melée. Voguing originated in the nineteen sixties in the LGBT communities of New York City, was brought into the mainstream in the nineteen nineties by artists such as Madonna, and is currently experiencing an astonishing renaissance. »Drama is everywhere, and everyone's existence is dramatic. It's easier to cope with drama if you stay on the move«, says Songül Cetinkaya, who organises Berlin's Voguing Ball. There's more to voguing than just a re-enactment of fashion scene antics: each pose carries attitude. As far as a sensibility for style and attitude goes there are many parallels to be discovered between voguing and Couper Decaler. Of course fundamental stylistic differences exist, too: whereas for instance Couper Decaler extolls the positive forces of life, voguing revels in verbal denigration through »reading« and »fiercing«. Cécilia Bengolea has herself taken part in many battles and masters the art of light-hearted partying like no other. Richard Siegal from the US, together with Franck Edmond Yao, has created their »if/then« methodology, a reciprocal sequence of dance movements, whose codes are easy to familiarise even outside the club environment. Paula Sanchez' dance language derives from her twenty years with Nederlands Dance Theatre under Jiri Kylián, and thus forms a contrast to Cécilia Bengolea's physical repertoire, as does Magali Sander Fett, who combines club styles with a classical modern repertoire. Singer Shaggy Sharoof imbued Couper Decaler with his mother's milk. All he needs to transform a theatre into a club is a microphone. Gotta Depri has been a member of the Gintersdorfer/Klaßen ensemble for many years, and her dancing makes her a regular darling with the audience. Our divine singer Skelly astonished us immediately when he enquired about the fiendish nature of pop music during our first studio sessions. He loves challenging conventional notions with his capacity for mind-boggling association and spontaneous emotional impulse; he is perhaps the real punk amongst all the assembled performers here. Jezzeline Preach is here in her second second collaboration with the ensemble and it is another opportunity to witness her breathtaking stage presence in a performance art context. And there is erstwhile actor and Bremen Theatre ensemble member Karin Enzler, courageously taking her first time out with the G/K troupe.Varietoscope as deus ex machina Formally this show takes its cue from the popular Ivoirian all dancing entertainments known as varietoscope. These varietoscopes aim to achieve maximum effect with simple means, with fast changing choreographies following the equally dizzying speed of the changing set. Not Punk, Pololo presents a wooden deus ex machina on the stage of Bremen's Kleines Haus theatre, against which intricate mechanics unroll, between object and dance, music and attitude, and in which the individual elements react in direct dialogue as if prompted on each others' orders. It's the dancers, who transmit song into movement, which wouldn't work without the accompaniment of Hauke Heumann's dramatic interpretation and translation to carry them along. It's Slavoj Žižek's method applied to choreography: cleverly interconnecting a pop cultural context via a wide-ranging web of synapses, and thus exposing new links and respective values behind any system. The result yields a kind of performative mobile, a self-choreographing pop-cultural universe, which creates space for associative speculation, and which discloses unconscious cultural differences. Gender is a cultural construct, but the body and body images depend just as much on cultural and societal influences. Different human bodies yield different body languages, just like there are different languages - resulting in the same number of translation errors. Not Punk, Pololo investigates and analyses these pop-cultural (mis)-understandings and unearths new associations, which would not confirm what is forever our same received knowledge, but instead produces unexpected parallels and derivations. Timor Litzenberger has created perfect new beats for the exercise, which also ultimately draw you straight from the stage onto the dance floor. Nadine Jessen, Monika Gintersdorfer