In today’s world, we are all constantly and increasingly exposed to misplaced events. For instance, it was in Brockport (NY, USA), in between lots of snow that I who was born and grew up in Brazil had my first cont-act with Afro-Brazilian capoeira; and it was in Berlin, that I had my first contact with the Brazilian (traditional, native, authentic) Karaja Indians, at a workshop they gave at the InTransit Festival 2002. Strongly stepping on the ground for 20 minutes with people from my own country (actually, I am from their country) reminded me of the tattadavus of my Classical Indian dance classes – the first exercise done in different variations for about thirty minutes, consisting of strong stepping to mathematically ordered rhythmic patterns. On that same morning, I took the remarkable workshop given by Aida Redza, on different types of walking, derived from Asian styles (daily life as much as stage dance forms).

These intercultural experiences reflect the displacement and overlapping of cultures in the contemporary world. Today, we find ourselves beyond the dichotomy between local authenticity and global homogeneity. We refer to hybrid cultures as a third way between an authentic (pre-colonized, resisting) culture and a non-authentic colonized culture. This third choice - Hybridism - is not the only contemporary possible form, but it is also a quite strong one. Hybridism changes the understanding of colonization as a one-directional domination process, from dominating towards a dominated (Bill Ashcroft 1994, 183). This third via redefines colonization as a mutual process, constantly creating remarkably resistant and critical new forms, as Redza’s works.

A native from Penang, Malaysia, Redza “explores and re-interprets the multi-ethnic aspects of Malay culture and art from the perspective of a Muslim woman” (Knopp and Odenthal 2002, 21). Her photos at the program do not dare to show, what really goes on in her astonishing performances of Quasidah (An Echo of a Chant), Menjingkit-Jingkit Telanjang (Naked on a Tip-Toe) and Stirrings/Berkumandangnya. Although alone on stage almost all the time, Redza manages to fill the entire stage area with the most various characters through her de-construction of body postures and behaviours, from a traditional Balinese dancer through a prostitute to a jumping child. Versatile and nearly unrecognisable in each scene, she plays in unpredictable rhythms and directions with a pair of fans, surprisingly glides along the aisle hidden inside a mattress down the stage, erotically uses the mattress after the audience has seen a film of the sixties with well-behaving (à la Hollywood) Asian couples, she plays with a bucket full of water or simply with a corridor of light in a breath-taking crescendo of dynamics.

As much as Redza employs these accessories, she interacts with the unpretentious and sensitive musician Benny Sokkong. Redza uses her femoral joint (and, in result, the entire body) in all possible variations to portray and strap human beings down to their desires and hopes, dreams and frustrations. The result is not like those of choreographers such as Rajyashree Ramesh (Bharatanatyam trained dancer and choreographer from Bangalore, India, who has been living in Berlin for the last 25 years), who brings classical Indian dance into perfectly harmonious contemporary dance compositions, or that of Meg Stuart’s (American avant-garde deconstructive choreographer working in Zurich, Switzerland) end-of-the-world aesthetics. Redza’s work breaks tradition into irreversible pieces of female identity which are nonetheless coherent and flexibly interrelated (Peggy Hackney 1998). Her work is a visible example of the tight bound between tradition, deconstruction and contemporary dance. It confirms transgressive feminine methods and references, such as asking questions rather than positing final truths, emphasizing process rather than product, in a connecting method in constant change or flux, in a state of becoming. It is the feminine revenge, of that which connects through fluids, of that which has been labelled as mad and marginalized other, void, lacking, and hysterical. In her intensity, Redza openly questions female identities, those Elizabeth Grosz has named “Volatile Bodies” (1994) – a burning fluid element present in many feminine deities around the world, including the Candomblé from African diasporas, such as the Afro-Brazilian.

Such fluid constitution, associated to the female body can be better understood by analysing how Redza uses “flow” to connect the wide range of her movements. According to Dr. Judith Kestenberg (1977) and Irmgard Bartenieff (1980), flow (and its fluctuations) is that what every movement consists of. It is the movement’s first quality to develop, followed by the other three effort factors in Laban Movement Analysis (LMA): space, weight and time. In the same manner that flow has two tendencies – free or bound –, the other three factors can be indirect or direct (space), light and strong (weight), sustained or accelerated (time). The important thing is that none of these qualities are still moments, but rather increasingly becoming this or that. In other words, concepts such as becoming, connecting and being fluid correspond to the very technical terms of LMA. For instance, expressive time qualities mean a change that slows down or fastens. Effort, or the way one organizes one’s energy or inner attitude in relation to the four factors – is about gradually moving between non-dualities. And this change of intensities is precisely what one can see in Redza’s work. In a total control of her energy going in and coming out of her body in all possible combinations of the four effort factors, Redza portrays totally different characters and imperceptibly breaks them down, turning into something unpredictable at each moment. She is constantly representing and dismantling images in her screen-body. And the centre of its energy – the pelvis – is a powerful site of the most various dis-locations.

In her last piece, Stirrings/ Berkumandangnya, Redza uses a bucket full of water and a little piece of cloth to clean imaginary windows, the floor, and everything around her. She does that by alternating a functional and a playful attitude, half-servant, half-child. Suddenly, in the middle of her high effort variations, we start noticing that she is washing herself, but we can’t quite confirm it, because she keeps coming back and forth to her previous activities. She is simultaneously the one who washes and the one who is washed, subject and object, self and other, cleaning servant and its instruments, playing child and its doll, writer and text. She embodies the parts and she is the whole.

Don’t ask me how or at which point she started washing herself – there is no trace of beginning or end: things start small, imperceptible, and suddenly transform themselves, become each other, go back and forth, and take immense proportions. At one point, she is washing herself wildly, wetting the whole stage. At the end, guiltless, she calmly walks out in silence, in a dim diagonal. In her contemporary deconstructions, Redza reaches – both concretely and metaphorically –, the key concept of Nātya Śāstra:

In Rig Veda the word, rasa, is found occurring in the sense of water [...], Soma juice [...], cow’s milk [...], and flavour. [...] In the Upanishads rasa stands for the essence or quintessence and self-luminous consciousness [...] In Sanskrit other than the Vedic, the word, rasa, is used for water, milk, juice, essence, tasteful liquid, etc. [...] In the context of Indian aesthetics, rasa is understood as the actor’s and especially the spectator’s aesthetic experience. (Meyer-Dinkgraefe 1996, 85)

In other words, a concretely liquid substance (as a juice) receives the same name as an abstract fluid concept, such as the spectator’s enjoyment of a theatre scene. The fluidity of Redza’s compositions are constituted by this tasteful liquid, connecting different levels of concrete experience and abstract understanding. Her work constructs/colonizes, reconstructs/recolonizes, deconstructs/decolonizes female, human and social bodies. It deals with gender, scientific and political issues. From a decadent prostitute to a blank walking creature (after billions of years developing out of the sea into the ground), Redza criticizes the sale of wet female bodies overexposed in big-sized advertisements in the streets of Berlin and other metropolises around the world, and frees us as Brahman in a crossing border rebirth.

Excerpt from the German book (in press) TANZ ALS KOMMUNICATIVE PRAXIS, ed. Martina Leeker and Antje Klinge.

Ciane Fernandes is a performer, choreographer and tenured professor in the Performing Arts Graduate Program at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil and an associate researcher at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies (LIMS), New York. She received a Ph.D. in art and humanities for performing artists from New York University (1995) and a certificate of movement analysis from LIMS (1994). She is the author of Pina Bausch and The Wuppertal Dance Theater: The Aesthetics of Repetition and Transformation (New York, 2001 and 2002) and The Moving Body: The Laban/Bartenieff System in Performing Arts Education and Research (São Paulo, 2002). She is currently developing a comparative study between contemporary dance theatre and the classical Indian dance style of Bharatanatyam at the Rajyashree Ramesh Academy for Performing Arts, Berlin. Her website can be found at www.cianefernandes.pro.br.