At 6pm on a warm evening, sound artist Manuena Schininá spins tunes, while two men are moving like tigers around each other. A child imitates their moves. A young mother joins them with her baby strapped to her back and dances. It is an unusual dance floor – a privileged public space in front of the historic building Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, among lush greenery, nearby Berlin’s Parliament. Slowly more people begin to fill the dance floor.
A few minutes later, a woman approaches me whilst I am still hesitant to step on the dance floor: “Would you like to dance?” she asks. I get up and smile, she introduces herself and says: “Let’s dance ‘The Gift’.” I agree, but then she asks me whether I would rather “give” the dance or “take” it. When I tell her I’d rather “take” it, she explains: “I will do a dance for you, and to ‘take’ it, you must copy me. I will be your ‘souffleuse’, while you enjoy the dance. Then you give it back to me.”
She moves expansively and I react to her movements. We both end up laughing at our increasingly silly movements, at ourselves and at the awkward moment; we laugh so much that it hurts. When she says goodbye, I realize that the ripples of our dance can still be felt. It has created some kind of intimacy, connection.
“That is exactly what I want to achieve,” acknowledges French choreographer and dancer, Alice Chauchat, when we talk during a small break between dances. Since 2014 she has been conducting choreographic research on human togetherness amid all our differences. The result are several choreographic scores that activate paradoxical relationships: distant intimacy, attentive autonomy, impersonal engagement, pleasure and unknown play.
Chauchat’s work takes place in dance studios, in exhibition spaces, on stages, as printed works across Europe, and increasingly dance gatherings in public spaces in Copenhagen, Barcelona, and of course Berlin, sprawled across the neighborhoods around where she lives. Strangers invite each other to dance as a practice of being with oneself and being with one another “without thinking about dance as self-expression, but instead thinking of dancing as relating.”
For this year’s Berliner Festspiele, and as part of the “Radical Playgrounds” event, Chauchat made an open call to dancers and dance enthusiasts who wanted to activate her ‘Dance Gatherings’ in the public space with a repertoire of six dances: “Doubles in Parallel Lives,” “Prepared Space,” “The Gift,” “Adriano’s Wheat Field,” “Future Unison,” and “Telepathic Dance.” They are simple, don’t require previous experience or physical contact and don’t prescribe any specific steps.
Twelve participants met with her three times to practice the dances before they could prompt spontaneous encounters with people during the Berliner Festspiele this July. Well attended, Chauchat’s Dance Gatherings explore distance and proximity between strangers in public space, and proposed “dance as telepathic communication, social activity, collective process, and untried encounter.”
***
After I dance “The Gift” in the “Radical Playgrounds” event, I step aside and watch other people. Dancing has spilled out of the dance floor. Two women are dancing with each other on a haystack. In front of the haystack there are children drawing something with chalk on the floor. Two other dancers take a bit of chalk and mark a space to dance next to the kids. The adults dancing are not paying attention to the kids drawing, and nor do the kids get distracted by the dance. A rare moment of transgenerational togetherness and otherness arises in a peaceful coexistence. The scene seems like a small utopia of inclusion.
Another woman is asking me if I want to dance the choreographic score “Future Unison” with her. She explains that each of us should picture the future of the other and dance to it. She starts to make movements as if she is swimming. Her vision of my future appears to me like big waves that I have to dive in. Sometimes they push me down, but finally I dance and ride the waves of life.
Then it is on me. I don’t picture anything concrete; I am just moving to the beat and to the vibes I receive from the surroundings. Without speaking about our visions for each other’s future, we part. I stay on the stage and dance on my own, until somebody else asks me if I would be up to “Doubles in Parallel Lives.” I quickly run over to read the description of the choreographic score, displayed with all the others in bright colors on a sign on the side of the dance floor: “Two or more persons dance together. Their dance does not resemble each other. They don’t move the same way, but they know theirs are one and the same dance.”
My dance partner starts making angry faces and stamping her feet. Puzzled, I copy. But then I start making even wilder faces, stamping my feet more aggressively, and letting go of the bad energy from a hurtful experience just some hours ago. Afterwards, I feel sort of relieved. The experience reminds me of something I have read about the dancer and teacher Marian Chace, one of the pioneers of dance therapy, who wondered why people who were not wanting to be performers continued to take her dance classes. She ended up advocating and lecturing on the therapeutic benefits of dance and body movement.
I ask Alice Chauchat if she has integrated therapeutic exercises into her dances. “I don’t have any relationship with dance therapy, and I don’t know the field very well, but I have a strong connection to somatic practices which are very important for dancers,” she says with a smile. Somatic techniques focus on the personal and physical experience with dance rather than the visual aspect. Chauchat’s dances are about imagination and attention, the attention to the other as well as the attention to oneself at the same time. It is a kind of communication via telepathy: “What one does and what one feels.”
She is offering me to try out “Telepathic Dance” with her. We move to a space next to the dance floor. “One will send energy, the other will transform the energy into dance. Just like we take and give energies in our daily lives all the time,” she says. She sits down on the dance floor, I step outside. I look at her expectantly for a moment and she waves me off laughing: “No eye contact!”
The music playing is without lyrics. With my eyes closed, and somehow robotically, I dance to the beat, first slowly, and then faster and doing absurd movements. Afterwards, I’m not sure whether I was moving to the music or her energy. She smiles: ‘I have seen a lot of me here.”
***
I ask Chauchat what dancing means to her. She is thinking for a while: “Dancing is a space where we can practice life. Because dancing is observing and being active at the same time. You perceive a situation, and you take part of it. I chose to see dancing as a form of relating. So for me it is never just dancing but always dancing with.” She sees dance as a way to offer something to someone, as a form of productive confusion, as a structure of unexamined trust. The dance gatherings, she says, give people a frame and therefore a safe space and opportunity to experience what dance can do: “You are not exposed to being a great dancer or a bad dancer. You are busy with something that relieves emotional pressure.”
She remembers a moment during The Special Olympics World Games in 2023 when the team of Egypt was just passing by one of her dance gatherings in the public space. “They started dancing like crazy,” Chauchat smiles; “The format lets people in.” Her dream would be to regularly organize dance in the public space, at least once a month.
At 8pm, when the “Dance Gatherings” event is officially finished, Alice Chauchat asks everyone to dance “Adriano’s Wheat Field” together. She explains that everyone will be on the dance floor with their eyes closed, planting their feet on the ground and imagining they grow towards the sun. Their roots search for food beneath them like blades of grass or wheat straws do.
The dance ends when the last person opens her eyes. Schininá is playing the sound of rain. I am moving my arms slowly and starting to feel more and more grounded, letting go of all my thoughts. When I open my eyes, the others still have theirs closed. I am sneaking away, hoping Alice Chauchat will get funding to do her dance gatherings on a regular basis in the streets of Berlin.
