Exhausting yet tireless

„Ein Tanzabend / N.N.“ by Billinger & Schulz in Düsseldorf is just right for the moment

By Melanie Suchy

The performance seems to be over. But something else is coming. So it all crosses the midnight border. What the choreographer duo Verena Billinger and Sebastian Schulz present with „Ein Tanzabend / N.N.“, online of course, is a piece about time. About duration, about wasting time or playing with time, playing with it, playing through it. Their last stage production in 2019 was already called „Temps,“ time. The topic now has a much more painful meaning.

The „Tanzabend,“ with the abbreviation for someone yet to be named, will be broadcast by the FFT in Düsseldorf and the Mousonturm in Frankfurt.

The renowned Billinger & Schulz have had their artistic home at both theaters for years. A room is simulated on the screen, with a film behind a photo on three walls, with a title, the duration, and the option to watch it now, “yes,” or “later.”

Once you’re through, even more unexpectedly reveals itself, like a treasure trove behind a hidden door. It’s funny, as are the doughy puppet faces that peer at the stage during one of the filmed choreographies from the cave-like „burrow“ that has guaranteed social distancing in the Mousonturm since the summer of 2020.

The humor has a bitter taste of mutant, „N.N.“, and fits in with the idling nature of the whole event. It’s annoying, but it’s fitting.

Five fit people in winter jackets push a small car around corners in a parking lot. The drone with the camera also curves and circles, casting its insect-like shadow. Neither fuel nor speech is consumed. Everyone is silent, wears face masks, and by the end, their legs are heavy with exertion.

In a stately hall in a stately state of plastic-draped renovation at the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, a dancer heaves a mirror around. Not to look at themselves, but to create images of showing and concealing for the camera.

In another large hall, dancers quote from „Temps“ at tables with cheese and grapes on tablecloths, in historicist, high-necked dresses and repetitive screaming, genuflection, sitting, and folk dance poses. The elements of doubling, of unison movement, interspersed there, are then expanded upon in the hour-long duet in the Mousonturm. Excessive.

What Jungyun Bae and Magdalena Dzeco dance seemingly tirelessly, precisely, masked, running, bending down with crossed feet, turning mid-air and leaping in the air, rolling, pushing up an elbow, folding an arm or leg while lying down, jerking fists, stamping shoes: this is choreography at its finest, fixed, built from repeatable elements. It skillfully and tediously avoids anything that could signify something that could be interpreted as a story or expression. It is: their profession. The dedication of dancers to a strange task. Art.