Pina Bausch? I can do that too!

Joana Tischkau, congratulations on winning the Tabori Prize, the most prestigious award in Germany for the independent performing arts! George Tabori, after whom the prize is named, is hailed by the Fonds Darstellende Künste as a “border crosser” – especially between the independent scene and municipal theater. Can you connect with this motif of crossing borders on an aesthetic level?

Joana Tischkau: Perhaps in the sense that my approach is generally an attempt to think beyond bounderies. After all, boundaries are usually not defined by oneself, but dictated from the outside. For me, even my studies, which had a dance focus, were fundamentally connected to the idea of opening up to other disciplines, to performance art, acting and so on. 

In your work, you also break down boundaries by cleverly deconstructing stereotypes and demonstrating how cultural, ethnic and gender attributions are constructions. Your current work “Ich nehm dir alles weg” (I'll take it all away from you), which recently premiered at HAU Berlin, is subtitled “A Schlager ballet” and draws on an early work by Pina Bausch. What interests you in particular about this icon of dance?

Tischkau: What interests me most about Pina Bausch is that she established a canon that is strongly perceived to be within the context of “German” culture. That always makes me prick up my ears and ask: “Ah, interesting, what is that actually?” – and I quickly meet with contradictions: What projections and constructions are in the background, when Pina Bausch's ensemble, which has always been praised for being incredibly “international” and supposedly “diverse,” stands for an artistic product that appeals so much to a “German” audience? My team and I particularly enjoyed clashing these questions with the genre of Schlager, that particular type of pop music that could also be described as “German culture.” However, in contrast to Pina Bausch, nobody likes it and everyone distances themselves from it, at least in highbrow culture.

What exactly does the title “Ich nehm dir alles weg” refer to?

Tischkau: It refers to the gesture of a strategically naive and unabashed appropriation, along the lines of: Pina Bausch? I can do that too – even though I obviously can't. Or: dance theater? No problem, let's do it, even if there are actors in the ensemble without any special dance training. And then let’s see what happens and where it takes us.

Racism, cultural appropriation, discriminatory practices: The topics you deal with are often treated in a rather theoretical way, even in the theater, for example in the form of discourse insertions or lecture performances. You, on the other hand, confront the discourses with something very elementary and, to a certain extent, unavoidable, namely with the body, and thus create different access points for perception.

Tischkau: I believe that it’s one thing to see through something theoretically, to make it rationally explicable and to take it apart intellectually, but to be able to deal with it in everyday life, you actually need something else – which is often a bit lacking in the world: you have to develop a strategy that comes from practice. That's why I believe that you have to trust practice – including artistic practice – because knowledge is generated and processes of understanding are set in motion in the execution, in the doing. And you have to allow the images you create in the theater to be read differently and to work on different levels. Of course, it’s possible that you end up realizing: Oh, that didn't work, we failed here! But I think it's always worth trying.

Dance and theater critics are always emphasizing that your work, despite all the knowledge it conveys, is not pedagogical. How important is it to you to avoid didactics?

Tischkau: I have nothing against pedagogy and didactics, but, as I said, this trust in artistic practice is actually my top priority. Sometimes performers ask me during rehearsals: But will it be understood at all? Or: How will the audience react to this action or that joke – especially because my works often deal with race and discriminatory practices. But these are questions that I don't really want to ask myself in advance because I can't answer them. That only becomes clear when the work is confronted with the audience.  
I don't want to use this as a free pass to say that you can do anything on stage, that's not what I'm talking about at all. My point is rather that with our artistic work we can provoke something in the audience that we ourselves hadn't expected. 

For example – ideally – an enlightening insight.

Tischkau: Exactly. And that's why I'm against saying: OK, we'll explain what we're doing first, because then you miss out on that possibility. Of course, it's also a very personal thing. As a member of the audience, I don't like it when I'm sitting in a performance and thinking: Hey, why don't you trust your body, the practice and what you've come up with, and infantilize the audience? The audience is not stupid; just because you don't know something doesn't mean you can't learn it – a lot of it has to do with different reference systems. When I first saw “Macbeth” with my class as a student, I didn't understand anything either.

Despite the seriousness of the subjects you deal with in your work, it’s often possible – and indeed encouraged – to laugh heartily at them. What role does humor play for you as an instrument of insight?

Tischkau: Humor is essential for me! I’m always looking for things that I enjoy and that make me laugh; for absurdities, contradictions and phenomena in the world that somehow don't quite fit together and that are therefore often particularly good at exposing constructs. Recently, the director Kieran Joel described humor as a strategy for gaining insights, and I can really go along with that.

Your artistic practice also includes evenings that focus less on deconstruction and more on making specific biographies visible. Your piece in Zurich, “Last Night a DJ Took My Life,” for example, deals with the Black singer Lori Glori, whose voice has been used by producers and DJs to earn millions – not only without paying her fairly, but without even giving her adequate visibility.

Tischkau: Interestingly, someone has placed this piece in the context of Milo Rau's theatrical tribunal and trial formats – which I hadn't even thought of myself, but which I find very inspiring. Not just because a court hearing actually takes place at the end of the evening – which remains completely abstract though – but mainly because Lori and her story actually became visible many decades later through this “trail” and these 15 performances at the Schauspielhaus. In any case, the evening attracted a lot of media attention, and there was a lot of coverage about Lori Glori. Of course, that doesn't make up for the career she was denied, but the fact that theater has the inherent power to spill over into reality and bring about change there at least offers hope.

What role does the biographical play for you personally in your work?

Tischkau: During my studies, I dealt intensively with the literary technique of “autoethnography,” a form of auto-fictional writing that is less concerned with the individual moment in biographies than with opening up the field for structurally connectable life stories and thus revealing certain structures.

In the same way that Didier Eribon uses his biography to shed light on supra-individual experiences of classism in “Returning to Reims” or Annie Ernaux addresses the disadvantage of women in her auto-fictional texts.

Tischkau: Exactly – and it’s this aspect that I am also interested in when it comes to the biographical and autobiographical: How does one's own life story relate to that of people who grew up under similar circumstances? And how does it relate to those with whom there are no points of contact at all in this regard? What I don't believe in at all, however, is dance or theater as a means of therapy. The stage is an extremely artificial, constructed space that, in my view, doesn't allow for that at all. For example, I'm not at all interested in dealing with my own pain. I even find it dangerous because other spaces are needed for that.

How did you get into dance, theater and performance?

Tischkau: I started very early on, dancing and acting in all kinds of contexts. On the one hand, my mother, who was in the theater herself, took my twin brother and me to all kinds of theater clubs from a very young age, and we developed little performances for her in our living room when we were children. On the other hand, I also started dancing as soon as I heard music – but then quickly realized that ballet wasn't for me because I didn't feel comfortable among the other children there. So, I gravitated more toward jazz and hip-hop – which, of course, touches on one of those questionable misunderstandings that my work is about: that I supposedly fit in better there.

The key factor in your decision to make art your career was your studies in the UK, right?

Tischkau: That's right. Although I was already a cheerleader in the NFL Europe, which is by no means a small thing, I continued to work full-time in retail and danced semi-professionally, so to speak. In addition, I was not accepted at the various acting schools where I had applied. Studying in the UK was exactly the right thing for me because, even though the focus was on dance, the course taught interdisciplinary performance practice. So, I could decide for myself how I wanted to work with dance and how I wanted to appear in it; I didn't feel like just a tool executing a choreography. That was the key.