Part I

Alexa Wilson and I met while both auditioning for a Masters Study Program in Solo Dance Authorship in Berlin in January 2018. We were prompted to critically respond to one of the 24 other 10-minute audition performances and then read it out in our interview the following days. Here’s what I wrote then:

Himalayan Fem Trash Activation: Alexa Wilson 
a.k.a. The Angry Version

Similar to the ‘trigger warnings’ given before some performances within certain ‘socially progressive’ scenes in the past few years, New Zealand-born Alexa Wilson begins her bold, funny, and insightful piece by asking the audience, “Do you want the angry version or the reflective version?” 

We said angry. 

What follows is a chaotic, entangled mashup of dance, ritual healing with objects, and personal politics on a microphone that’s too hard to hear over loud New Age and Hip Hop music. Alexa tells us from the start that the work is a Feminist Activist Healing Object Activation resulting from her recent role as curator of a 2-month residency programme in the Himalayas. Pulling from a legacy of 1970s punk-feminist performance art, Alexa performs the healer, the self-help student, the nihilist, the Colonizer, the white woman appropriating hip hop, the tourist in India, and so on.

Each object, action and text activated seem to hold both a problem and a solution. For example, as she takes off her pants the word “share” appears, written on her panties—perhaps an enlightened, empowered invitation of sexual freedom or an ironic dare to a misogynistic gaze. She invites people to write spiritual insights on paper, but it’s toilet paper and is therefore easily ripped.  She launches into a visceral modern dance—perhaps as a way to find a cathartic physical response to nihilist questions—but then the movement gets too dense and re-tangled into the growing pile of individual-objects-become-trash. 

“What are we talking about?” she asks as she sits on a yoga mat stabbing an apple to mushy pieces. Each material—object, movement, text, music—anxiously suggests that perhaps there is no way to truly purify the soul, at least for a western body addicted to consumerism, misleadingly propped up by privilege, or mostly just overwhelmed by globalized decline.

Then, a profound transformation occurs. 

Alexa gathers on her person as much accumulated mess as possible and asks for her picture to be taken. She then drops the materials and disrobes to nudity as the music fades down and she walks off stage.  The point was not to solve each question she posed or heal each object but rather to activate the materials—her stated intention from the beginning.  By stirring them up with angry energy and eventually taking ownership of the problems (or ritual objects) by literally embracing them, she is then able to shed them like a too-tight skin that she intends to be free from. 

Activation and shedding is thus proposed as a strategy for personal healing. However, the strategy has its contradictions. As a light-skinned person from an English-speaking developed country, the question can be asked: isn’t leaving the baggage behind or shedding off the muck something that the First World does already? And doesn’t this cause all the trash to accumulate in ‘away’ places or for industries to pollute third world countries? Would an Indian person living in poverty and extreme-urban density have the financial and political capability to relocate and leave the physical/metaphorical congested conditions behind? 

The response might well be an angry “no”. The performer might have shed the congesting materials, but the body walking offstage might still be clothed in invisible layers of first world privilege.

Part II

Two months later Alexa and I sit down for an interview at a quiet Kreuzberg café. It’s our first official hang out. I recall what she told me at the audition, how much she appreciated the viscerality and existential provocations of my performance presentation. I remember telling her how I loved her direct and punk approach to spirituality and world issues, also visceral and existential in nature. 

We sit on a comfortable couch at the back. I had been accepted into the program and will start in a few weeks. I’m really glad to avoid a second personal crisis this year—the first one being a major confrontation with my father while visiting home in Southern California over New Year. He insisted that my choice to be an artist is irresponsible and doomed to poverty and unhappiness. Upon returning pre-audition to freezing, lonely, burnt-out, unemployed, and gray Berlin, I just about decided that I would quit art/art-life/life-as-I-know-it and finally get a real job. Channeling this crisis became the core of my audition presentation.

​I still need a job.

We order from the barista. Alexa was not accepted into the program but she tells me that she got some New Zealand government funding for the project (called 999: Alchemist Trauma Centre / Power Centre) and she is also enthusiastic about a non-residential MPhil and PhD program in New Zealand (AUT) which she will start next year. I learn that she financially supports herself through massage and other gigs. I ask, and she gives me the website to a cheap yet quality massage certification school that she completed a few years back.

We receive our coffees. I know that a week ago she showed a more developed version of the work at Lake Studios, a dance residency studio outside of the city center. I press record on my iPhone Voice Memos and ask her to continue speaking…

Since January, I’m interviewing Indian artists about the exchange that occurred during my residency there and what is continuing to occur. It might come out as a video in the piece or a text. How will these contexts between India and Berlin and other places merge, especially as it’s about intersectional politics and such loaded content? The piece itself is a conversation, and I want to be present and honest through the different stages.

But something was activated during those residency months that is now fading a bit being back in Germany. The piece is becoming something different; more of a Western conversation, which is fine. It's the way it is. My friend said that he likes that the piece is more Westernized somehow. He said that if it wasn’t for one Indian New Age music track that I use, you wouldn’t even notice the link to India. It could be completely invisible despite all the object-props in the trash bags I use being from India.

Part III

It’s dark. The bottom of the grand marble staircase is adorned with now almost invisible props from India—I know there’s toilet paper, a yoga mat, a small cactus in a pot, plastic bags, a plastic water bottle. This is my third time this year seeing them activated and shed, but the messy trash ritual still maintains a freshness. Nudity has already left, returned for PART II and is now transforming with the unlit space as Alexa, hidden beneath a black cape, shapeshifts into pitch black forms: a line, a rock, a crouching animal.

​We are about 20 people, seated between two towering brewery vats in a classically-epic brewery-turned-museum-and-experimental-music-venue in Neukölln called König Otto. It’s mid-June, and the last light before nighttime glows through the enormous windows.

​Alexa’s question from a few minutes earlier, “When does black become gray?” echoes in my head. It syncopates with my own thoughts: when does disorientation become hypnosis becomes healing becomes stress becomes activation? Tenacious would be a mild word to describe the persistent onslaught of new and contradictory images, ideas and activities that the piece embodies. As a performance artist, I admire this choreography of crashing waves. As a person trying to survive and thrive as a performance artist, I fear being crushed.

​Alexa had pulled out a fake gun earlier telling us to breath deeply into our third eye. Now she lies on her black cape, microphone in hand staring peacefully up to the ceiling in the distance. Still naked, she invites anyone who wants to join her lying down for a moment of meditation. It’s a meditation on dissolving the distinctions between East and West, she says. It’s an opportunity to dissolve belief systems. It’s an opportunity to be vulnerable together. It’s an opportunity to breathe. It’s a meditation on light. It’s a meditation on foundations.  

I begin to recall the argument with my father over New Year. He somehow sits beside me now in the audience watching the performance. His presence is dual in nature.

​Frenetically…

he hurls critical words onto the stage and into my ears escalating the winds: bohemian, irresponsible, loser, anarchist, queer, complainer, punk.  I try to defend myself: How CAN I take a deep breath if you point a gun at me? I DON’T know what to answer you, especially if you keep telling Google Translate on your phone to ask me your questions in Māori. How CAN I listen to what your Indian artist friend has to say about responsibility? The hip hop music is blasting over the audio recording.

​Calmly…

my father absorbs the chaotic bricolage, softening the stormy waves to a smoother swell. His gaze steadied by a practical knowledge of the world and an intimate understanding of weather. “The storm is powerful,” his presence tells me. “It can either keep you stuck in its convulsive grasp, or you can use its force to launch yourself in a bold direction.”

​Watching the piece in its stages of development, thinking of my father as my year unfolds, hearing Alexa, and listening to my body…I feel enveloped in dualities. I feel accused yet allied, cynical yet hopeful, overwhelmed yet sharp in my mind and spirit, ready for action. Through her activation of unanswerable questions and overflowing performance strategies, Alexa ultimately offers the audience a taste of power, the energy needed to create.

​But create what? Answers are not easily forthcoming. I’m left feeling lost yet powerful but then finally softer. It’s a meditation on dissolving foundations that no longer serve us.