Zwoisy Mears-Clarke worked for two years as an engineer at a company with 50 middle-aged men who like to eat Fleischsalat (meat salad) and meatballs during their lunch break and starting from 11 o’clock greet each other by saying “Mahlzeit [meal time].” Rike Flämig, who was born in Leipzig, found this absurd. She ate that last time before the turn of the millennium. Zwoisy, however, thought “but that’s the norm here, right?”

Following this key experience they question in their production Fleischsalat concepts of normality and abnormality, stereotypes and normativity. They analyze mechanisms of “Othering” using examples from German colonial history and the German reunification process. At the level of the body, they engage with the effects of everyday colonization and decolonization as well with racisms and microaggressions.

RIKE FLÄMIG (DE) is a Leipzig-born performer and choreographer based in Berlin. She studied Performance Art in Hildesheim. Her performative tour Site eFacts was presented at the B-Tours Festival. Her short film Disruptions was shown at Cinedans in Amsterdam (NL), Loikka Festival in Helsinki (FL) and at festivals in Mexico, Egypt and Japan. Rike Flämig und Zwoisy Mears-Clarke collaborate since 2014 and performed Idiosyncrasies in 2016 at Tanztage Berlin. rikeflaemig.de

ZWOISY MEARS-CLARKE (JM) is a choreographer of the encounter. Zwoisy’s work binds movement language and storytelling and offers new environments outside of everyday life where we can move differently through social patterns that feel stuck, confronting and complicating heritage, colonial history and prejudice. He studied Dance and Biomedical Engineering at Oberlin College and Columbia University. Recently, Zwoisy was awarded by Life Long Burning a Wild Card residency at the Veem House for Performance in Amsterdam. zwoisymearsclarke.com

Glossary: Microaggression is a comment or action that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally expresses a prejudiced attitude toward a member of a socially marginalized group, e.g. “Don’t you think your reaction was offensive to others as well”, said by a white teacher to a black student who was offended that another student described a neighborhood as ‘ghetto’. “Othering” is any action which casts a group or individual into the role of the ‘Other’ and establishes one’s own identity through opposition to and, frequently, through vilification of this Other, who then becomes mentally classified in one’s mind as “not one of us”.

[Source: play bill]

TFB Nr. 1048