Hannah Beilharz:A Moment in «Perform to Live»
Hannah Beilharz writes on the occasion of «panch – Resonance in speech» on thursday 10.02.21 at Haus 24 in Birsfelden.
I am standing at the threshold. The doorway is a non-place for the uncommitted. A possibility of leaving or staying is still open.
Other members of the audience are gathered at the walls of the gallery space, sitting or half standing, focus all directed at the bodies towards the end of the room. These bodies, these performers, are making synchronized movements, but the specificity of these fail to emerge clearly in my memory. Perhaps loosely of being together, not choregraphed but in a kind of awkward harmony, a being alone and then coming back together, in the rhythm of waves. Waves imagine they have their own direction, desire, and impulse, but they all eventually meet the same determination of sand, the same end point. These performers seem that way to me, in my unclear memory.
I remember mostly the vulnerability that I feel these bodies impose on mine through their presence. I am resisting this folding in pressure of the event. I think I am always crawling, uncomfortable in my own skin. I can’t be a witness, my body refuses that. At this particular moment, I don’t have the emotional strength to be vulnerable with them, as audience, or witness, or participant.
My body at the threshold refuses. But the moment I remember completely is when one of these bodies leaves the room. This performer suddenly heads for the door, in a light-footed run. As they run past me, the walls of myself against this wall, edges on edges and separate, unseparable from all the other audience and this shared moment of bodies in a room, dissolves. It is not only their passing by that dissolves my separation. It is this body, this performer’s moment of return. They reach again the threshold, and pause there, one metre from where I stand. Lightly stepping on each foot but not yet taking off from their place, they drum their chest with fingertips and palm of their hand, a flight rhythm in concert with a short, sharp breathing. Their gaze is directed back into the room, to the other performers. Perhaps there is a mimicry happening, or the drawn-out tension of the paused desire to join again their crowd, their belonging. Standing on the threshold, in that pause, I feel my own breath, maybe even my own heartbeat. Somehow, now, I am waiting too, in that paused desire, in vulnerability. Despite my objections, my fear, my misgiving, I fall back into a body existing in connection, breathing the same air, landing on the same beach.
«Perform to Live» was part of the exhibition «Propose Do Zeig ZackZack» at Hoschschule Luzern, Switzerland.
