With a Background in Bharata Natyam, Sara Mikolai develops experimental work. For the Julius-Hans-Spiegel-Zentrum she conceived a hidden ritual - inspired by a Devadasi photograph - that interweaves elements of the Devadasi tradition, various trance practices, objects of archive space and sound.

 

The Julius-Hans-Spiegel-Zentrum is an itinerant research center, which investigates the connection of dance cultures since modernity. Starting point of the investigation was an archive box from the photo collection of the Lipperheidesche Kostümbibliothek in Berlin: Kasten Nr. 942n Exotischer Tanz. The classification logic of this archive box, which strongly discriminates between modern and traditional, foreign and familiar, makes the mechanisms of exclusion in modern dance visible that still are at work in contemporary dance. 

 

The developed  performance deals with the gaze relations of colonial photographs from India and Algeria, as well as with the tensions of visibility and invisibility. The costume was based on the same photographs and refers to the veiling and at the same time eroticization of the "exotic" woman's body. The costume, which is only held by cable ties, partially dissolves in the course of the physically intense performance. The material latex and lacuer fabric emphasize and reveal the fetish nature of the white gaze.

 

CONCEPT, PERFORMANCE Sara Mikolai
COSTUME Nadine Bakota
SOUND PERFORMANCE Tara Transitory

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Julius-Hans-Spiegel-Zentrum
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: Anna Wagner, Eike Wittrock

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Video © Walter Bickmann

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