“PATTERNS” is a performance that was choreographed by Magda Korsinsky at Ballhaus Naunynstraße in Berlin. Its central premise is the biographical and political: behavioural patterns, habits, endings and reorientations.
The body stores biographical and political experiences. Seeing and, consequently, the act of looking at bodies – one`s own and others` – is an acquired social process. Other people`s gaze and the gaze at ourselves form gestures and bodies. We “function” within the field of social expectations; or: We contradict, resist and invent behaviour that is unpredictable, at times even to ourselves.
In a nutshell: How we see ourselves and each other as Black women is complex. Our views as Black women – of what a Black woman is like or should be like – are largely produced by an agglomerate of dominant, traditional perspectives: It is a biographical and political act when we make a tear in this kind of order.
Over the course of a week, we want to reflect, work on and creatively transform day-to-day gestures, actions and physical attitudes together with two groups of students as “experts of their own lives”. Whatever we learned and, in part, left behind, is intensified and focused on through repetition, transformation and modulations. A choreography that resembles a music composition comes into being, where every student has their own dance-like “voice”, but where coinciding social gestures also appear as a collective rhythm.
Project planning, introduction: Magda Korsinsky
Music teacher: Jarita Freydank
Dance teacher: Tatiana Meja
Photos: Stephanie Greenwald
