Maddy Costa on work by Asim Abdulaziz, Mele Broomes, Solange Pessoa and Two Destination Language at Dance International Glasgow
If I had read in advance the background information for 1941, a short film by Asim Abdulaziz screening at Tramway as part of Dance International Glasgow, I might have watched it quite differently. It opens with a typewritten question, white letters on a black screen: “What has war made us become?” War here refers at once to modern conflicts in Yemen, where Abdulaziz was born in 1996, and the second world war, and maybe all wars ever: war as a near-permanent state of human existence. In the copy that appears online, we’re told that the film grew from Abdulaziz’s fascination with how “knitting was a significant way for women in the United States to participate in the war effort” – whereas “in contemporary Yemen, knitting as an act of solidarity in a time of war would seem entirely absurd”. The copy goes on:
“The repetitive nature of the hand movement guiding the needles and stitching the wool thread distracts one from pondering the past and future, locking the knitter into a timeless present. By staging the practice in Yemen, Abdulaziz draws an embodied metaphor around the quotidian experience of war—captive to the logic of survival—that inhibits projecting oneself into a future of self-realization.”
I watched the film four times in a row, locked in a timeless present of my own, and while I recognise it in the online description, that text doesn’t quite capture what had me so rapt and discombobulated. Here’s what I saw:
What has war made us become?
An old man, face and shoulders gouged by age, hair curling white, shoulders rigid, skin trembling.
Eight younger men – let’s say they’re the age at which young men might be seen as optimal performers as soldiers – lean and taut, moving in rigid formation through an otherwise empty building whose crumbling, pock-marked walls might bear the scars of bullets or arms (an unnerving word for weapons, no?).
One man stands beside blood red balls of wool that hang from the ceiling. Wavering in the air the way a body might dangle, dead. This formation too neat for the deaths to be indiscriminate. The precision of systematic attack.
The same wool wrapping around faces, over eyes, mouths, noses, so that nothing can be seen or tasted or smelled but this blood blood red.
One face lost – concealed – behind a slump of wall. An unnerving decapitation.
And wherever they are, walking down stairs, across an empty courtyard, through an open door, the men keep knitting. They knit without looking, knit without thinking. Continuing the work at hand, never deviating, whatever the difficulty.
Perhaps each stitch is a life counted in loss. The old man knits a scarf already as long as his body. Its end curls at his feet like a cat.
The strain of shoulder blades as young men try to knit behind their backs. Because in civil war there’s no knowing who might turn against you. The need to be watchful, constantly, from every angle.
Women are absent. This is a place of absence altogether.
(As I read this back, it occurs to me that the absence of women is itself an answer to the question “what has war made us become?” A patriarchal society that promotes masculine power, masculine prowess. Among the triumphs of feminist co-option has been the entry of women to the military in the name of equality: so much easier to achieve than dismantling the military and the cruelty it necessitates.)
The men pass by a row of iron bars, march down hidden stairs, descending through prison into hell.
And as I watch these images – so slow, so evocative, so elegantly composed – I think about the task of knitting, its demands. How knitting insists on being held in a state of tension.
Just as I have this thought, the screen claps to black then illuminates again with the final image: a small square window beneath a gable, and in the window a boy, very young, less than 10, legs folded, spine curved over wayward needles. He’s learning how to knit. Learning how to live in a state of tension.
1941 has a running time of four minutes and 43 seconds. It is one of the most eloquent, devastating works I’ve seen this year.
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It’s odd, this relationship with artists’ copy and website explanations. I like to see work knowing as little as possible and afterwards read as much as I can. I appreciate deeply this piece of writing about 1941, by Farah Abdessamad, because they phrase things differently from me in ways that invite me to see different, see further. “The film poignantly reasserts a form of slowness in various propositions on temporality as a form of solace, necessary acceptability, and torture,” they write. “In this rhythmic white noise of percussions and buzzing, the film reinterprets aerial bombardments and the commotion of war.”
For sure it’s helpful going into Mele Broomes’ through warm temperatures knowing that it “affirms castor oil’s legacy as a natural remedy, an elixir, and a historic source that transcends boundaries”. But as the work shifted from its first half to its second, this information was counterbalanced by the ways my whiteness and my ignorance got in the way of my watching. The opening and unfolding of the performance are exquisite. Cello from Simone Seales seeps across a space divided into defined areas of movement. Close to the audience, stage right, a figure – Mele Broomes – dressed in regal red has her arms, shoulders, back, massaged with oil. The scent carries through the room as two, then three, dancers describe growth with their arms and bodies, moving towards the back of the performance area then turning, turning, whoosh, back to where they started to begin the cycle anew. I can feel nature in action here, thought unfurling as a plant might. Words begin to enter the space – “seed, plant, oil”, a mantra – and it’s so clear that the BSL interpreter, Salma Faraji, has a movement practice of her own: it’s as if her arms have become the fluid she massaged into Broomes’ back, her entire being glistens as her hands speak.
Although there’s language there’s no narrative, rather a progression through space. In the notebook I was using in Glasgow I rediscovered this from choreographer Gillie Kleiman: “People think choreography is about stories – I think that might be theatre! Choreography is about systems.” In through warm temperatures, the choreography embraces natural systems, considers how the interaction between humans and more-than-humans enables –
And then I got stuck. Sensing something, feeling something, but also knowing that something eluded me. A gap opened in my mind and unhelpful memories snuck in, of seeing performance art represented in television (Spaced) and on film (Sorry To Bother You), where it’s absurd, overwrought, that dreaded word pretentious. This is emphatically not how I’d categorise anything in through warm temperatures! But as I watched a sequence conveying pain I felt disconnected, that there was something impenetrable to me, something I wasn’t appreciating, which meant that I also didn’t fully connect with or appreciate the release reached at the work’s end.
There’s a clue to that something in this interview by Claire Sawers from 2024, in which Broomes talks about her journey of building trust with age-old remedies for physical problems: castor oil specifically as natural wound healer, which she used not only for knee pain but fibroids on her womb. Despite having a body that experienced menstruation, I was in my early 40s before I knew fibroids existed, and in my late 40s before I learned that fibroids are more commonly experienced by women of African diaspora than white women. No prizes for guessing how little the historically white-male-dominated western medical profession knows about fibroids, nor how quickly they are identified, nor how effectively they are treated. Deep in its roots, this is the profession that took power from the burning of witches – let’s call them healers – and the relentless destruction of many-gendered, many-rooted cultures of knowledge, developed through a deep understanding of the environments humans inhabit.
Castor oil as healer. It was there in the copy, but connecting to this, thinking through this, brought a self-realisation that pains me in a different way. To grow up with and through whiteness, even to parents from a colonised country who received their own portion of prejudice, also means growing up with and through racist thinking – absorbing it, like an oil, but not a natural one, a toxic oil that harms. In the interview, Broomes also talks about building community during the making process “with 15 black women, including nurses, artists and youth workers … finding connections and commonalities in our politics, work ethics or experiences. We discussed obstacles created by whiteness and found solidarity and friendship.” I saw that in the work, and also didn’t. A useful reminder to myself to soften the obstacles I bring into a performance space, to listen closer, let go of unhelpful associations, open further to what’s being shared.
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Is it trying to let myself off the hook to ask whether the performance space itself might have worked against through warm temperatures? It was staged at Platform: visibly a community hub, a building that also houses a public swimming pool and a library. But once inside the auditorium all Platform’s distinguishing features disappear: because the venue itself is a black box, nondescript, generalised, “empty”. Not a space that connotes or invites natural systems; not a space where more-than-human lives might survive without anti-environmental intervention.
I thought about this back at Tramway, walking through Pilgrim Fields: a senses-delighting exhibition by Solange Pessoa staged in the light-filled main gallery. Spread across the gallery floor are island clusters of natural materials: kelp hued green, peach and pink; brown composting leaves; sheep’s wool, raw and ragged; flowers dried and crumbled, the colour of wood shavings. Some of these materials are the nest for small sculptures shaped like gourds; others fold against the wall like blankets, soft spaces of rest: how delicious it would be to roll around in them the way my dog rubs her back into everything from rabbit droppings to a stick of celery in the grass. (She genuinely did this! I have no idea either!) As you weave amid these materials, the different scents enfold you, transport you: outside, over and into the earth, to the soil and plants and beings pushed aside, covered over by the arts buildings and industrial buildings and shops and houses that define human progress.
As I walked around I remembered the perfume of the castor oil massaged into Mele Broomes’ skin and wondered: how different might through warm temperatures feel performed in an environment like this? An environment actually sympathetic to the bodies of the dancers, to the spirit of the work? For sure it would constrain the work in other ways: define the pathways of movement through space. But it might also set the work free: re-entangle it with the natural world that a black box space blocks out.
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Or maybe I want to remove performance from theatre spaces because I’m disenchanted with “theatre” again. By “theatre” I mean industry and landscape: strangled by capitalism (one fist) and austerity (the other), thwarted by risk aversion, which passes to artists from administrators, gate-keepers, decision-makers – let’s be kind and say all doing the best they can in a poisonous political and economic climate, but it’s not enough, because what’s needed are nourishment and care, not an atmosphere of fear. Where’s the courage, the challenge? Slumped in exhaustion, wondering how to get the rent paid.
Bottoms, the new show from Two Destination Language, is a vigorous, invigorating riposte to that landscape: a work of courage and challenge dressed up as light entertainment; a flare of love for performance and fierce investigation of how it’s undervalued. It begins with five dancers standing in a row upstage, the curtain behind them Moulin red, their gold and silver skirts shimmering. One of them, Sita Pieraccini, sings a familiar tune – a wheedling, ironic rendition of music associated with the cancan – and they’re off: high kick low kick low kick high, the stamp of their feet emphatic as they bounce towards the audience, their breath more laboured the closer they get. They’re not exaggerating these breaths, “performing” the effort: this is a dance that demands exertion. I’ve tried to dance the cancan on stage and my body echoes theirs in telling you: it’s bloody hard work.
What follows is a sequence of repetitions and variations: the dancers split and reform the line, one dancer spinning, one couple turning; one couple a weird prancing pair of rocking ponies; all of them flashing satin bloomers the royal purple colour that’s woven into the English crown; and then they return to that stillness, that panting, that evidence of work. It’s funny and weird and sets my mind whirring. I think of the exploitation of cancan dancers – weren’t they essentially treated as sex workers? When a costume tore, it was the dancer who paid. The pony figures make me think of gymkhana, show horses trained to prance absurdly because… apparently this conveys something about human excellence? But they also have the jolting movements of marionettes, and because puppets represent a “fantasy that a realm of human experience might be possible that does not depend on human labour” (that’s Nicholas Ridout in Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems), next I’m thinking about AI, the lie of technology, how every fulfilled dream of mechanisation, every advance in the tools of industry has resulted in humans working harder and more alienated from the possibility of rest, at least until alternative intelligences solve the problem of greed, tax injustice and landlordism (I won’t be holding my breath). That line from SZA’s Ghost in the Machine: “Robot get sleep but I don’t power down.” And the performers keep grinning, panting, grasping for air, as fake money cascades like confetti.
Amid all this, Katherina Radeva – who is one of Two Destination Language, along with Alister Lownie – stops dancing, sets up an easel and begins to sketch, five ink bodies on a large sheet of paper. She does this three times, at intervals, and it’s fascinating, because each work takes, what, five minutes to create? And yet might earn, in terms of money, the same amount as an entire day or evening of work as a performer. So then I’m thinking about how art is “valued”, the difference between process-based, ephemeral work and a tangible product that can be displayed and resold, how a painting that takes five minutes to create holds within it all the skill, the training, the practice of years and years. How can any of that be valued? A conversation I keep having with writer friends: it’s so impossible to make visible the work of writing, not least because so much writing happens when you’re not-writing, when you’re brushing your teeth or washing dishes or waiting for the bus, ideas nudging into being, a not-writing without which the writing is not deep, not complex, not fully lived or alive. And that’s before you even get to the emotional value of writing: what it might mean to a person (me) who reads it in the exact moment they (I) need it, and carries it around in their brain, in their heart, for the rest of their life.
Full disclosure: these questions of value came into specific focus for me a year ago, in relation to Radeva’s work as a visual artist, thanks to a particular interaction between the two of us regarding one of her drawings. I’d already been buying her work for a some years before that: a print of three women and an ink drawing of a stage with a ladder climbing out of it hang in my sitting room; a more abstract ink drawing hangs in the kitchen, bought as one of those slightly selfish gifts to another that I get to enjoy; and in the study a very simple, very beautiful, very melancholic drawing of two people holding up a weight across their bent shoulders, and on that weight the words “The world will miss you if you go”. This last hangs where I can see it every time I sit at the computer, a reminder with myriad tendrils, and I love it in a way that neither words nor money might explain. “The world…” went up for sale on Radeva’s website as part of an auction Kat calls Make Me An Offer (I’m switching to first names here because I’m also switching into friendship territory). The precise wording Kat uses with Make Me An Offer isn’t currently on her website, but I remember it being something like: for some works, an offer that would buy a few cups of coffee would be fine. For others, the expectation would be more in the region of a month of food shopping. And this seemed to me a very practical, generous way of getting people to think about what the offers they made might mean for her.
I knew the offer I made was in the coffee region. I came to it by considering the size of the paper (practical, simplistic) and the fact that I was in a period of not so great cash flow (selfish). And Kat – very kindly, very clearly – let me know that it would not be accepted. The value of this particular drawing, she told me, “is not just about the size of the image – I guess I know how and why it came about and I have connections to the works that are only really known to me. And the viewer – brings their own.” She suggested a price in the realm of a fortnight’s shopping, and it took very little thought for me to decide that yes, that was a price I would pay. When I received it, there was a small label on the plastic envelope, an asking price in pencil: more than I had paid, by the differential of the initial offer I’d made. And the real value of the sale, I realised, was that of connection, friendship, Kat knowing that this work that meant so much to her was going to a home where it would be loved and experienced as an act of care.
Even without that personal tangent, this is a lot of thinking to emerge from watching five people perform a cancan and one of them sketch. And I have just reached the point where I’m not sure what else another iteration of the cancan, another variation on this theme, is going to bring, when the show performs a kind of handbrake turn – a move of brilliant, expansive, dramaturgical audacity, through which it becomes something entirely else. The questions of price and value, the differences between theatre and visual art, the game of money and the exploitation of it: all become explicit, spicily so, acute and precarious.
Honestly: I was dazzled. Delighted and astonished and impressed by what happened next. But to divulge any of it would be to move beyond spoilers: it would lay claim to information that isn’t mine to share, make it public as though I own it as well. That part of the show belongs to the show, to the artists, to Two Destination Language. I hope you get a chance one day to share it with them as well.
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“Dramaturgical audacity”. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t written such a phrase before joining the board of the dramaturgs’ network: either it wouldn’t have occurred to me as a descriptor or I’d have worried about putting readers off. (Sorry if I put you off.) But how else to advocate for this work if not by naming it, praising it specifically? Advocacy feels necessary because I’ve lost count of the times a d’n member has said in my hearing: no one knows what we do. Or people think they do know, which might be even worse (as in this, from Michael Coveney in the Guardian: “dramaturg – that is, script-fixer”. Groan).
How to explain that dramaturgy – and I don’t say this as someone who has ever achieved this, more as someone reaching towards an impossible horizon – is work of heart and mind, concerned at every moment with how each word, image, note communicates with other hearts and minds? The dramaturgical skill in Bottoms isn’t in the script (mostly there isn’t any): it’s in the modulations of breath, the whirligig of repetitions, the way the word “can” is printed on each can of drink, creating a joke (cancan as they clink to say cheers) and also a question. Can what? Can dance as though we’re not witnessing environmental collapse? Can work until breathless in a culture demanding more for less? Can carry on regardless of genocide, or ethnic cleansing, or the dehumanising and murder of one set of people by another? (Yes, you can choose your own language here.)
“What with all the floods, fires, and wars, capitalism’s advertised suggestion of a relaxing cuppa doesn’t seem to be working any more,” runs the (excellent) copy for Bottoms on the DIG website. “Still, you’ve got to try: here we are, with the can-can, crisps and cava, gathered to defy the storms outside and work up a sweat for your entertainment.” In a society that finds myriad small and cutting ways to demean the work of artists, the necessity of art to human lives, Two Destination Language can dance and draw and ask complex questions because they insist on art’s necessity: in their stage work but also through active community participation, talking and making with people across the UK, on such fraught topics as migration and hope. Art matters not (just) because it entertains, not (just) because it soothes, but because it looks in the eye of complicity, sits deep and brave in discomfort, and brings a sense of meaning in a time that seems to have none.
Something Other 