Dance ambassador Valeria

Completely at the mercy of dancing

The Dancing Public by Mette Ingvartsen

Valeria Golderer is one of five dance ambassadors who explore Berlin's dance landscape on behalf of Offensive Tanz. At Tanz im August she saw for us the solo ‘The Dancing Public’ by Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen in the Sophiensälen. According to the announcement, the piece mixes “ecstatic eruptions with stomping beats and is party, spoken word concert and expression of physical madness all the way to exhaustion in one”. Find out how it worked for Valeria here.

No chairs, small pedestals distributed in the room, loud techno music, the crowd and a dancer. Full of energy. Obsessed with dance. A single person who drags them all along. The urge to move spread to the crowd. Some people danced right away, most of them rocked to the beat and got involved in the dance over time. But even if some people just stood still and watched, in every face I could see the tension and curiosity for every next move. Every step, every twitch in your arms, just every movement was new or surprised you anyway.

She danced through the whole room, between all of us, her movements wild, unpredictable, actually obsessed and almost inhumane. Her body was driven.

The loud music and the light made everything even more exciting. It was as if the rhythm of the music, the beat, was pulsating in their veins. And when she danced to individual people, they were immediately swept away. In between, when one of the pedestals, as presented, was completely spent, I thought she was almost at the mercy of the audience and totally devoted to us. But later I realized that she was completely at the mercy of dancing, not us.