The Wondrous Story of the Artist Twins deufert & plischke

The piece currently being rehearsed at the city’s Uferstudios there is called “Niemandszeit.” It is a participatory project, meaning that whoever shows up can join and become part of the ensemble. And what an ensemble: Meg Stuart, Christina Ciupke, Wanda Golonka, Helena Waldmann, Alain Franco – the biggest names on the scene. Joining this who’s who of the dance world are festival organizers (Florian Malzacher), theater directors (Ludger Schnieder), dance policymakers (Madeline Ritter), and dramaturgs (Bojana Cvejic). Together they rock the stage.
The audience members are the stars. On cue, they writhe across the dance floor. Above them, a large, German high-precision clockwork mechanism displays the time to the second. On every chair is an envelope containing five event cards: “Minute 0:30:00: Walk slowly onto the stage, find a spot on the dance floor. Bend your knees, make yourself as small as possible. Stay in this position until you’ve silently counted to 100.

”Everyone obeys and listens to the voice of Kattrin Deufert, who, shortly before the birth of her second son, sets the scene. She reads about ill-tempered Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem. She also reads that most suicides in Denmark occur on Palm Sunday. And that “Ruth” is the only book in the Bible with a female protagonist. It’s about religion. “Minute 0:53:00: Use the piece of chalk to write the answer to the question on the dance floor: What will you leave behind?”

“My corpse,” some in the ensemble reply. deufert&plischke create a dance space that the participants shape themselves. No corps de ballet represents the crowd. The dance scene itself takes on the role, pledging its voluntary service and joining. Only a crazy shaman, Thomas Plischke – who has attached little bells to his shirt with cable ties – disobeys instructions, instead freely forming the center amidst the compliant dancers, whose respect for art is always accompanied by the fear of disrupting it. He throws himself at the assembled crowd like a young Artaud, with Indian-style leaps, hidden behind the mask of a mannequin. As is customary in archaic communities, he plays the artist as a scapegoat. The victim urinates into his T-shirt and wipes the floor to absorb the community’s wishes and fears, written in chalk. Then he puts the dirty shirt back on, as if it were a religious act in a time known as the postmodern era.

In postmodernism, so they say, the old world orders – including those of religion – have been overcome. The peace of a new beginning still reigns. No chaos. More like a cleanup. The kings of communism have fallen. New dictators have not yet emerged. The bourgeois world calls itself democratic, even though it is not organized that way itself; instead, it delegates all power as urgently as if it were a hot potato. Just like in the theater. The audience delegates all power to the dancers, who hand over their power to the director or choreographer, who in turn strictly adheres to the rules set by an artistic director, who aligns closely with the prevailing politics – which, 25 years ago, simply had no intention of intervening in the culture of its time in order to control it.

This is what the Brussels-based collective BDC (for Best Dance Company), led by Thomas Plischke, Alice Chauchat, Hendrik Laevens, and Martin Nachbar, has created: a ten-day festival lasting ten times 24 hours, during which Kattrin Deufert and Thomas Plischke become a couple.

Ten days is a long time – long enough to entangle not only oneself but also theory and practice in a romantic relationship. There are workshops led by Kattrin Deufert and Stefanie Wenner on the topic of “Illegal Experience.” Meg Stuart’s brother, Davis Freeman, Martin Nachbar, and Lilia Mestre are organizing workshops. Thomas Plischke: “With so much talent around us, we were smart enough to delegate everything. Yves Chauchat curated the films, Hendrik Laevens curated the concerts, I put together the performance programs, and I also made sure to create gaps so that people could actually meet.”

A new understanding of theater is born. A theater born of the spirit of the club. A club born of the spirit of the theater. Mind meets body. Dramaturgy leaves the lecture hall and takes the dance stage. The dancing body leaves the mirrored hall and enters the train of thought. Thomas and Kattrin are a couple embarking on an uncertain path, out of love for one another.

And while we’re on the subject of love: Who or what do we love? The other person? Their opposite sex? Do we simply love a body? In other words, ourselves? It takes time to figure that out. In 2002, Kattrin Deufert and Thomas Plischke organize a 72-hour symposium, a “Queerathon,” in Ghent, together with Jeroen Peeters and Barbara Raes. This time, the Vooruit, the city’s cultural center, will be transformed into a “castle of beds” for three days, where they will delve into the concept of gender politics. What is queerness? Suppose “queer” denotes the ability to think of the world in non-binary terms: The question isn’t just “man or woman.” One might equally question whether there is only “right or wrong,” “good or bad”? What happens when the political “left or right” no longer yields any distinctions? Or when the hierarchical “top or bottom” disappears in collective action? How does the rampant attitude of being “alive yet dead” fit with the categorical distinction between “alive or dead”?

What about “normal” and “abnormal”? What is normal in theater? Would it be normal if the audience claimed, “You dance and I do nothing”? Just waiting for something to happen to them as they watch, while they observe a dancing body that “quite normally” meets the expectations we apply to the anatomy of a dancing body: to be slender and supple?

In their 2010 piece, “Anarchiv#2: second hand,” deufert&plischke perform a duet. This is followed by a nearly identical second duet by the choreographers DD Dorvilier and Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt. This duet, in turn, invites the audience to create a copy of the copy using their own bodies. “What wonderful fun,” says Thomas Plischke, because it suddenly became clear that in dance there can be no copy, only real bodies, only genuine individuality: “The four of us danced the Schuhplattler [a traditional folk dance in Bavaria and Austria], and of course: When 60 or 70 people respond with their own Schuhplattler, it’s not the same thing… but much, much better!”

It is the audience’s response that is essential to creating an event. In other words, the audience members are the creators. They are the prerequisite for an event.

“The festival is very characteristic of dance. It has nothing to do with participatory theater; it has absolutely nothing to do with theater. If, even for just the moment of a festival, people manage to forget where they are and who they are, then dance has reached everyone on equal footing. That is the function of dance. Theater, on the other hand, requires and creates a distance. In theater, even dance is forced to maintain this distance. But the wall between the audience and art isn’t cast in concrete. The event of a festival lies precisely in those moments when the audience completely takes over what’s happening.”

In 2024, the performance “Fountains” is created in a vacant outdoor swimming pool with the help of locals and artists. The body is viewed as a fountain full of fluid. The moisture of a helpless, defiant, ashamed, desiring body. This moves us, just as art moves us when it touches on taboos, lays bare longings, addresses fears, and triggers utterly uncontrollable reactions: crying, laughter, disgust. Tears, pain, emotion.

This happens when you create something with your whole being, in a process where you “engage in an intense exchange and confront each other powerfully,” because you’re not dancing for others, but rather dancing with others and through others – people you react to, argue with, are insulted by, and with whom you repeatedly dig your way through a long tunnel of misunderstandings. “Only at the very end does something excessive and ecstatic emerge with tears of joy and tears of exhaustion – like during a harvest, when you bring in the hay and are finally allowed to celebrate.”

Anyone who has worked this way for 25 years hasn’t just celebrated for 25 years, but has also, above all, experienced 25 years of confrontations and goodbyes. From Sub-Saharan Africa to northern Finland, they’ve gone through situations with their guests that aren’t easily forgotten. The next morning, though, you still say, “Bye, we’ll definitely see each other again – here’s to the next project.” But that will never happen, because while the word “sustainability” exists in the dance world, the necessary continuity does not, “since project funding apparently always ends just when things are getting exciting. So we’ve started sending the people we had to leave behind a visual letter – an artistic video documentation.”