aCORdo, Alice Ripoll/REC

photo: Bea Borges

Tanzhaus Zürich, 2019

Here’s another performance that really and honestly did the thing, in a simple sequence of actions that initiated an unforgettably complicated audience-performer relationship.

Alice Ripoll’s work aCORdo was performed as part of this year’s zürich moves!, a festival of contemporary performing arts practice held annually in the Swiss financial center. Artistic director Marc Streit organized this year’s festival as a conversation between South America and Europe on questions of appropriation and exchange, tapping into the Brazilian intellectual tradition of cultural anthropophagy, which theorizes a relationship between post-colonial cultural production and the act of consuming the other. In their performance, presented on the last night of the festival, Ripoll and her company REC (all born in the favelas of Brazil) staged the complicity of some (affluent, white) bodies in the policing of others. In doing so, they also tapped into a racialized performer-spectator dynamic—the four performers were (male-presenting) POC, while the vast majority of the audience was white—that highlighted the potential privilege implicated in the very act of spectating.

The work’s first half was composed of eloquent movement that highlighted the labor expected of black and brown bodies, by giving them permission to rest and find positions of comfort together (a strategy also taken up by niv Acosta and Fannie Sosa in their recent Black Power Naps at PSNY). At a certain point, though, the performers turned their attention from one another to the spectators: specifically, they began relieving us of our belongings. At first they picked up bags, jackets, and other easy-to-reach items, redistributing them amongst other members of the audience. The gesture was playful, and the mood in the room was light and amiable. Soon, though, they began to reach for phones, jewelry, and wallets as well—and began keeping items on their own persons. Waves of discomfort, even murmurs of protest, traveled through the audience. Finally, laden down with our things, the performers lined up against the back wall of the space, palms pressed to the wall in an all-too-familiar posture of enforced humiliation. The horrible clarity of the image hit with a force that was literally breathtaking; “Mein Gott,” said the person next to me, softly, and I felt the same.

We waited, but the performers failed to stir from this position. A large portion of the audience tried to regain control by initiating applause, but they were not going to let us off the hook that easily. It was becoming painfully evident that they would not move—that we could not leave—until we physically retrieved our belongings from their bodies. And so, eventually, we did: reaching into their pockets to find our phones, checking multiple bodies because we couldn’t remember who had our wallet, prying their fingers from the wall in order to guide bag straps off their shoulders. We could only have our belongings (and our freedom) by “stealing” them back—by taking something away from the performers.

This touching in violation, the forcible objectification of the other, is foundational to how colonial-capitalist subjectivity constitutes itself. All too often, we either don’t see it happening—perhaps it’s taking place somewhere across the world, in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro for instance—or else we see and deliberately look away. But in that room, we were asked to own up to our inherent responsibility in the enforcement of this global order by enacting it, right then and there. Unable even to look on from a safe, spectatorial distance, we had do the touching ourselves.