On Nasa4Nasa: Dance and hope in the end times

Dance with you, amazing grace

For here’s the thing about dance: it’s a shortcut to the heart of freedom.

Desire can’t fully encircle its object, all the leaks and residues and outtakes, so we move to listen into that void, to discover and encounter ourselves and our togetherness, to break the pull of spiritual stasis. The dance slits into the lack, into the real. Move defiantly, strangely, witness another body become poetry in meticulous reckless abandon, and somewhere down the road for the two of you, there might be a shaft of light taken seriously. Not that many veils to hide behind once the dance begins.

When the gloom is thick, imagining new ways of tossedness into this is heavy lifting. Reorientations of how to occupy space and mess with time and make magic are always needed as an anti-hegemonic praxis, especially poignant in years of chaos and confusion, when it’s the season of licking our wounds, you and I. How far can you go where you’re standing, all in, all there? When does art yield radical forms of seeing and political subjectivity? Can it hold our hands through the bridge of dreams, groping for the mad and beautiful, as we search for counter-realities in the trembling of our gloriously unstable hopelessness? Where do we look for hope in the wasteland? Is it unseemly to speak of utopia when we are so, so far away?

Dance’s transformations, its symbolic illuminations and longing for the new in the unclosed instant, arrive instinctive and intimate, a flock of flamingoes gliding white over a calm sea, murmuring in a misty night, analog and at odds with instrumental reason, basically uncannable (try watching a recording of a contemporary dance performance) with one eye feasting on the potentiality of presence, one staring at the maimed angel of history, sounding out a finer station, a fully, deeply, delicately lived moment, for all of us to be.

What do we become when we dance?

Have mercy on you and me

To leave your flat, wait in line (the two nights were sold out) if one can afford to spare cash, sit politely in a black-box theatre that is an endangered species in this city and worry what would happen if it does succumb and fold like much good things else, open to having the demons of others fling some brutal truths at you from a short distance, to pour their battalions across my skinscape and deep into my soul: it’s a privilege. Everyone should have the right and means to be fucked by the art they want if and when they want to. Anything short of this is failure, basically. Perhaps this criterion is what utopia looks like, when we know we’re there. Everything has to change for this one thing to happen, and, as Theodor Adorno, the critical theorist, teaches us: “there is tenderness only in the coarsest demand — that no one shall go hungry anymore.” The art fix is step two, for the hunger of the soul.

Make no mistake: for our melancholia to finally bleed into mourning or maybe even healing, for introjected abstract angst to morph into concrete action, to cut the noose of unnecessary suffering once and for all, with all the damage (inward and outward) done, to untrap, untrip ourselves, we need whatever can grab us by the shoulder and stick a finger into the wound.

It’s Downtown Cairo, spring 2022. The first act of the performance begins mellow and mournful, then charges up fast, openly, bluntly sexual to the point of exhilarating discomfort: it wasn’t hard to gauge the temperature of the audience. These two women are doing whatever they want, pretty much, it soon becomes clear. Are you okay with that, they’re asking, mockingly. You really want to see where they’re going with this. Noura Seif and Salma Abdel Salam, the always refreshing duo behind the Nasa4Nasa dance collective, are clawing, with their witchy oversized fake nails, at the walls of the prison. And they’re fearless. They’ve grabbed all the power right this moment, and they, rest assured, will use it. The performance cuts, goes for it at its neurotic abject best, when it’s a chilling mirror stuck into the tissue of our contemporary planetary condition, a gruesome body-art middle act, a fecund interruption, communication turned all the way up. Listen to the feeling when you know you need to stop but you can’t, when I’m hurting myself badly and there’s nothing I can do about it, when you know you’ve crossed the line but it’s too late to turn back. It’s all there as they descend on a table brimming with ingestion commodities and eat and eat and eat and gag to the edge of retching. We get their mouths in close-up on the screen behind them, broadcast from their “smart” phones. This is a challenging intervention, a libidinal stranglehold, an affective dissonance. We get their bulging veins, the sweat, the agony, the almost unpaid labor, the ASMR sounds in the beginning weirdly sensual before excess joins the clown-scary parade, the very spirit of end stage capitalism on display (exorcised?) at its very real, more and more and more dead flesh and carbs and sugar and KFC stuffed in, and we’re choking with them in this orgy of “comforts of slavery” (Mark Fisher) smothering us in our disfigured compromised desire, our isolation and fracturing, our fear of transformation. Their eyes are getting wet: it’s all too much and no one really needs this insanity, but this is where we are, good folks. Spoiler alert: don’t plan on having dinner if you’re going to see No Mercy. The urge is to look away, yet you’re drawn, like passing by a car-wreck on the side of the road. And how can we fix it if we can’t look at it? There’s something being torn apart here, and so it is in our psyches. Performance as seeing evils, hemorrhaging out the macabre and the dangerous and the stupid, where they are in reality, and shoving our faces in them. There’re hints of violence, experimentation, endurance, commitment, disruption, convulsion, reinvention, persistence, style, destruction, suffering, energy, planning, extremality, direction, risking, daring, depolicing, defetishizing, grace. All of these are conditions for utopian being to break into the world, the desire and disgust without which we are forever trapped in our old traumas, in the bathos of a deeply antagonistic and insecure status quo. The theatre, for a moment, is an autonomous communal zone, a micro resistance. No Mercy is critical art, tongue out on cheek. Critical art is, at root, utopic in orientation, a venturing beyond. There’s a catastrophe on loop, and this is a postcard from the trenches. What happens to the performers is what happens to us when our consumption is our tragedy and the hollowness is bottomless and unfillable, addicted to the scam bleeding us dry. There’s coercion and consent in a social that’s in a bad way, yes, but also bleak resignation, the perverse stability of total despair.

And we’re undancing life. Culture sure does look like it’s running out, so let’s not waste the chance, and No Mercy isn’t. It surprises in its unapologetic undomestication. When bodies are heavily policed, infiltrated, flattened, mechanical, the choreographer’s task is cut out for them: to stir and disturb the ruins of now. No Mercy is also an attempt at unsettling subjecthood and the veneer of normality and false sublimation, to touch the real with no gloves on, seeking the cracks in the symbolic order, a shock to activate reception. Who’s being amused here?

But in the end you feel a note of carny affirmation, though unreconciled, but a nod to life, I suspect; an ode to lust, a celebration (maybe more than half cynical) of some Dionysian faith that you have to go through the fire first to wake up, an intimation of a pop-Warlholian promise.

Music is key in this piece. The Prodigy (we had gotten a sheet of paper with some of the lyrics for this track on the seats): I'm the bitch you hated, filth infatuated, yeah / I'm the pain you tasted, fell intoxicated / You're the firestarter, twisted Firestarter / I'm the self inflicted, yeah. 1997. O, the innocent days when history seemed in play somehow, right? This sound/sights are infectious, the equivalent of finally hitting fed-up epiphany, that incendiary rush when you’re about to lose control, and then you get up, nice and smooth and blind with bile and with a manic sagely grin across your face, pick up whatever machine you were slaving on, and you smash it on the nearest boss’s head — thanks for nothing, will be on the street if you need me. By now the slow eroticism of the intro is well behind us, and it’s a high dark bedlam on stage. The light is flashing, epileptic. The music hardcore and peaking. Your heart is beating fast. The artists are on opposite sides toward the back, facing us on all fours, heads down and in violent pendulums with the long red wigs whipping rough and trancelike. To the right, Salma gets up, crunches down with one hand on each knee, and lets her head and fake hair loose in a grip of subterranean influence. To the left, Noura heaves up from the floor, runs toward us, and, just when she’s about to plunge into the crowd, she shifts her center of gravity a little to the side, the sound shredding, the lights are then cut off and the house goes pitch black and the music is screaming. The crowd is in a frenzy. And that’s when the forced feeding part had come in, with the queen of sultry postmodernity herself up for aural duty, in a taut loop: Britney Spears. They keep watching, keep watching / Feels like the crowd is saying gimme, gimmie more ... I just can't control myself / They want more? Well, I'll give them more.

They gave us more. Once the performers are thankfully done with the gorging, they arise, push the table and chairs to the side out of the way, and snap back, two oiled half-naked male bodies joining them, as though manhandled by fate and then presented with a strong upper out of the blue, into hyper dancey mode, embodying the contradictions of our reality formally. Negatively harmonious. But one of the chairs hadn’t been flung far enough. Salma is striding in a wide circle. When she comes to the chair she gives it this slappy side-kick, so fierce and swaggerish I held my breath in awe.

There’s fight art, and flight art. It matters.

Barbarism and its discontents

With the apocalypse in full swing and only getting started, hope and utopia, two dying notes on the Left and two impulses so tempting to smother to be frank, are kind of super urgent.

The utopian is a mode of being, a stream in and of and against history, a whisper and agent of what might be, whether grand political and social visions or great art or stray bits of the everyday, the small things fine-tuning our desire, pointing at a world beyond themselves, concrete fantasies of blooming life, life beyond bleak labor and precarity, life as art, lines of flight from the margins, gestures toward unfinished wishes, transcendences barely touched in the folds of the present. A useful, indispensable daydream of a better world. It’s the outside-in gaze, the images that reveal the falsehood of the whole in which we struggle, the instinct to do something about our troubles. It’s the moments when the ideal and the actual merge. Some say no one positive category can sum it up (freedom, happiness, peace, etc…) However, some ground negative terms apply: “no more exploited, dominated, degraded, humiliated people,” as Ernst Bloch, the hope philosopher, wrote. Without this itch for the plausible and impossible other, the perfect becoming, nothing will happen in short, politically speaking.

Bloch didn’t believe the utopian impulse could ever be wiped out of the human condition. Hope, the door of deception and failure and disappointment, crushable but rarely fully defeatable, is what keeps today alive, our wishful-images, the “..unassuaged, explosive hunger of the life force,” desiderium, the only honest quality of human beings.

If one feels, like most of us do at this point, I presume, down to the dust of my bones, that tomorrow will actually not be better than today, that there’s just more of this on and on, wondering what the point is of having to try to handle destiny or fitful action, the allure of this particular strand of negative rest that beckons the broken, the sedated calm of noiseless suffering extinguishing the restlessness, to lay on our backs and drop ourselves, scarred limbs limp by our sides, into a grey serene acceptance, whispering, asking, what-were-we-expecting: what’s the antidote to this funk?  The score or the improv? Maybe critical dance’s paradox can give us something here: the potentially happy marriage of planning and anarchy, art as probably the last fortress of our precious little refusal to take reality as is, splashing across the utopian imaginary, holding its core, safeguarding its dreams — shocking, intervening, rupturing, searching and stretching out alternative forms of things. 

Meet me on the dance floor when I’m gone.

“How big your ripple is”

I meet Noura and Salma to chat about the performance and dance on a blaring-white, scorching early summer afternoon. They had just finished a No Mercy rehearsal, taking it on the road soon. Their studio, Feryal, gets a lot of light. The main room’s floor is shiny and smooth parqueted, beneath mirrored walls with a warm warning not to lean on the glass, and ballet-bars — a ribbon of wood wrapped around the space — a large black and white vintage photograph of two dancers sitting on chairs in an empty stage, in synchrony, head thrown back and to the side, one arm stretched above the thigh, palm turned down, one arm held up to the waist and pulled out a few feet away from their bodies, palm turned toward the camera. It’s a graceful moment snatched out of the river of time. A spray-bottle on the floor. A phallic cactus by the window. The windows open out on the junk-yardy roof of the building next door, open sky above.

We sit around the kitchen table. Two traditional dancing candle-chandeliers are behind them, work-in-progress performance objects. A full-sized fake human skeleton overseeing the congregation. Noura and Salma say that early on in the conception of No Mercy, a Francis Bacon exhibition came into their life, those morphing, melting faces of angst, the juxtapositions, and in their wake the first draft scenes of No Mercy were drawn. The myths of the siren of the sea, come here, come here, let me seduce you to destroy you, were there as well. #Me Too had detonated in Egypt. Lockdown screens. The belly of our psychotic digital being, the violent cut from a Syria burning video to a dog meme in the span of a second, this strain of transitions and fragmentation, the smacking swiping, all too rough. (The unconscious structured like a stutter as it were). Hysteria. The mindfuck of choreographing yourself, as Noura puts it. Her strange vertigo diagnosis, because of which they had to delay the first show a few months. Lightly tortured parents, (and lovers, too, I presume but am uneasy to ask) in the audience — how will they take it? Marking the performance on the body, they say. Standing your ground. Britney’s badass glamour, The Prodigy’s spiraling out of control that’s somehow controlled, losing it a bit, the music of their childhood. The openness of dance, its non-literalness, the room it gives the artist, intentionally used into the grey zone as a state to be cultivated, they continue. The hypnotics and quiet intensity of a good ASMR performance; you’re hearing something very annoying and you can’t stop watching for some reason, Noura says. Excess. Nausea. Merging disparate things. The ASMR bleeding into the bingeing, a necessary slash. Stretching the visual upon the sonic as much as you can.

It’s hard and emotional for them to perform this piece, other than feeling like they’re about to throw up. They rehearsed the binge-eating 5 or 6 times. They do throw up afterwards, every time. Some people told them, after the show, that there should’ve been a trigger warning. (I don’t think they’ll tack one on, and I don’t ask; they said they were bent on finding an unfamiliar language that’s not too tightly grabbed, after all). They needed an unreferenced work (something new, that is). A piece of bread once got stuck in Noura’s throat during a performance, and she was turning blue. It feels urgent to them, owning that stage. The terror every time, though: Noura says she gets physically ill ahead of having to perform it, no fail. Playing with the permissible, the grey line, not setting out to push boundaries, really, they insist, but commenting on a frustrating position, enjoying the tension, because, in a way, that’s what they’ve been doing since they were born, they’re used to it by default, the grey zone, they say. Pushing the movement into the sexual, stemming out of rage, this they wanted. That same rage is behind the binge, the coping mechanism (the untidy phenomenology of it), not just capitalism and consumption and critique and all that, which while there, sure, is not really the aim, they explain, and now the KFC bucket has been written out of the show, and it’s simply the chicken, the flesh, the bones of it poking into your cheeks, your mouth that can stretch (Salma demonstrates with her mouth here). The violence of this sort of dancing and not to look defeated, tired, but untouched in its wake; they don’t think they’re there yet, though. There’s a desire to mess with the viewer, but justly: no mercy for the witness, no mercy for the dancers. Carving out space to explore, claiming space, making conversations: those were key to them. 

Salma says that when she first saw the recording, her heart contracted, and it was like, this is so, so heavy. (She sounded mournful when she said that, in a look-what-we’ve-done-but-what-can-we-do kind of way). The audience are going to feel something, but whatever it is, they will feel; that’s the point: we won’t protect them. You’ll have to react somehow, love it or hate it: the binary reception, it’s a decent outcome for them. But it’s a joy, they repeat.

Messing with their own movement vocab, and how their individual languages can evolve because of dancing together, sponging all the time, is there too, they add. And they say thank God they have each other, but it’s difficult to dance in twos — and two, formally, is a nod toward collective imagining and consummation; there’s something powerful about two bodies moving together, as Noura puts it. The third is what they cherish, what they can become in the honest subversions of dance.

And dance, in general, is a violent thing. For both Noura and Salma, this keeps coming up. Dance is sexy these days in the artworld because it’s potent, they say. The siren’s underworld, exposing the backstage of our lives: this is the psychological world they’re aiming for. The euphoric outro scene: you’re hit, you put on a smile, you get up and dance, and it is enjoyable, the last tail of the rage, the pure spectacle (the bipolarity of the times). There’s erasure in a way in the structure of the piece, a forgetting, they say. And what it boils down to, in terms of how a performance artwork feels from the inside, is how in it they are when they’re on stage (the quality of their presence).

What’s weird to them, however, is how different the audience’s reaction has been every time. Sometimes they get flat. I ask them in what ways this piece is political. The perseverance of making art in these conditions is what’s most political about the piece, the fact that we’re there doing this in the collective trauma we’re all in, Noura says. I ask them about dance’s paradox, the freedom and obedience of it, and they say maybe what’s most disturbing is how comfortable dancers are with this aporia. (The dancer is, in a way, capitalism’s ideal laborer: underpaid and disciplined). But we’re here. One might not consciously see it, but looking back, there’s hope in the work, a desire, which translates into aliveness, Salma says. The fluidity of dance, the water of it, the opening of vessels, the seeping and the leaking, circulating differently, relating differently to the body, forcing you to become a more sensitive person, which is a double-edged sword: all of this is hope, they say. Who gets to hope though, how big your ripple is, Salma says after a moment of contemplation. Is it worth it?

And in the end, you get on stage to chase something, they say. (Utopia perhaps?)

A worm in the gut of the commodity

Dance, always already fading, is of mortality, of loss, and the specter of them. It’s a wish that does us in a particular way, the devouring it’s capable of by virtue of its proximity to transcendence and taboo. Witness how stubbornly it demands openness, how directly it dives in and out of the unconscious. Take expression and experience of subjectivity to the limit and you can almost bracket the subject, define the struggle. The eloquent body — in joy, in grief, in rage, in darkness, in animal — is an invitation, a portal, a prayer from and upon the terror and triumph of existence. An existential switch takes place when flesh pulses against the grain of the drab, a canvas of sweet intensities, a neat little Promethean trick, a momentary sublimation.

At the root of dance is a simple negation, an almost heartbreaking promise, that yes, the pain is endless and soon we’ll all be gone, but we could, we must, be gods here and there along the way, part and whole. Maybe nothing challenges the voice of the Father more subtly than a body unleashed against the tired choreography haunting an epoch, pushing the boundaries of our being, moving itself out with one hand turned upon every tangible heaven, and one drinking from the steaming waters of the dumb hell we’ve made and which we have to swim or drown through now, not so gently into the unquiet night.

An incision between a calamity and its effect: that’s dance at its best, I guess.

Yet again, drag that body to where it’s unwelcome, to the doorstep of Power, say, and there you’ll smash against the thing-in-self, so to speak.

What can a body do? What can keep a culture flowing against the relentless forces of decay? What is the value, the role, of a willed disappearance when the unwilled strain, the political one, is rabidly ruthless? With the space for utopian action dwindling like nature, what happens to art’s burden? How can and should it teach hope? “Art prefigures a future in which human energies can exist simply for their own delight. Where art is, there shall humanity be,” wrote Terry Eagleton recently. What must we dream of then, as Lenin asked? What befalls hope when this kind of terror we can simply scroll away from, time for the dog meme for me? Can art ever speak for the deafening screams? Can it save us from the jaws of death? Does mercy truly move only in moments of total paralysis? What do I do with this blood on my hands?

“Something’s missing,” wrote Brecht. Something’s dead is a more apt slogan for our times, if you ask me.

A better, brighter world is hard to find

Call me a romantic, but there’s something sacred about taking the blows of time and spitting them back out in an electric, untamable performance emanating more than itself, revealing our context, to suture for a moment where we are and where we could go if only the dust of despair stays off our eyes long enough, refusing, passionately and compassionately, to take this script as creed. To dance well is to break the barbed-wire of apathy and reification, to slip out, and, somewhere in its violence, there’s lust for life to be found and had, a belief in a better presence, in mutability of reality, an immanent trust, trying out how utopia might feel like on the inside.

The condition of possibility of dance, its ultimate unity, even when the choreography is a howling no, is a wide open affirmation, an originary yes. And that yes to life is all we have. You can grab what wants us to believe this is fixed and normal and final, and carve grooves across it to let some jazz in. A lot less Thanatos, a lot more Eros. A lot less having, a lot more being. A lot less freedom from, a lot more freedom for. Dance’s radicality is its mere existence, its stab at reintegrating art and life when the gulf is ever gaping. As long as we’re still dancing, a whole new kinder, gentler me, gentler world, is not foreclosed.

One of art’s meanings is that no defeat is irreversible. Salvation is not a given, but maybe it can be worked out. And either way, there’s a Gramscian war of position going on all the time. The less stationary we are, the less familiar, the less easy to pin down, the better able we’ll be to hear the thing when it finally snaps.