By May Ngo
I have two hours. Three hours at most. Before my six-month daughter will start crying for my breastmilk, or just my breast for comfort, for reassurance. I fed her before I left my apartment. It will take me about thirty minutes to get to the venue Ponec, another thirty minutes to get back. If the performance is an hour or so then that would be perfect, she should still be fine and my husband won’t have to wrangle a screaming baby. My body is no longer my own. It belongs primarily to another, and most of all, my body’s function, form and capacity for going without sleep… has morphed into something almost unrecognisable to me.
All of this to say, during pregnancy, and even more after giving birth, the relationship with my body has been totally been redefined. So it is that watching a performance about bodies, desire and capitalist-socialist structures initiates a particular response from me, and from my body as it currently is. Dance Floor 2022, an audio-visual and live performance work, is part of the 10th Bazaar Festival whose theme ‘Courageous Practice’ focuses on Central and Eastern Europe theatre-makers “who are choosing to go deep, become the change they want to see in the world, and whose practice goes beyond just creating”.
credits Vojtěch Brtnický
I arrive on time. We enter the theatre to a screen showing us what looks like a still image. In the middle of a dilapidated building that no longer has its walls, and against a backdrop of some overgrown bushes, not obvious at first - is a dancefloor. Three women stand in the theatre and introduce the piece to us, recounting that their production Dance Floor 2022 began during Covid and it is about a hotel with a crazy past, namely the Haludovo Palace Hotel and Casino. Built on the island of Krk in Croatia by Penthouse magazine founder Bob Guccione, the luxury resort cost 45 million dollars to build and was hosted by ‘Penthouse Pets’ models. This was in 1969, in the former Yugoslavia, which, contrary to other countries behind the Iron Curtain welcomed foreign investment, especially for casinos catering to foreign tourists.
Suddenly there is movement on the screen. It’s not a still image I had thought, but rather a video. Three women, mirroring the three in the theatre with us, walk onto the dancefloor. They begin to dance to an electronic soundtrack that we later find out was created by the artists themselves. Pulsating, the bodies move – dancing, touching, soon they are all over each other; a mass of writhing legs, white bouncing flesh, butts in faces. An erotic charge fills the screen. It looks like a simulation of group sex. Sometimes the performers, either the ones on screen or the ones in the theatre with us, speak; they ask questions of the dancefloor - what has it witnessed, what can grow from its remnants, what relationship can we have with it now? And sometimes from out of the ruins the dancefloor answers back, begins speaking through the women. Of what, I can’t hear, because everyone is talking at once; it descends into gibberish. Perhaps a reminder of the limitation of words to tell a story.
credits Vojtěch Brtnický
The dancefloor has its own story, the artists’ bodies tells another. A forceful reclaiming, re-writing of desire over this capitalist-socialist-sexist dancefloor. The women here are not the silent Penthouse Pets hostesses, whom we learn had rules about how to dress, behave and had curfews at the hotel. These women here produce a cacophony of voices. Now the dancefloor is danced erotically anew, another layer of desire written over it, one from capitalist Covid times and explicitly in a feminist spirit.
The video is made more surreal by visitors occasionally walking onto camera behind the dancefloor as the dance goes on. Presumably tourists visiting the hotel ruins and the nearby sea; there are families, a pot-bellied man, a child with inflatable pool floaties. It blurs the line between documentary and performance art, just as this ‘capitalist dance on socialist land’ highlights the overlapping boundaries that existed between socialism and capitalism.
The different types of ruins that exist: the ruins of architecture, bodies as ruins, the ruins of socialism and capitalism, I hear the artists say.
As I sat on the front row (because pregnancy ruined my eyesight and I was afraid I would miss seeing something), watching these bodies again and again on the screen dance with unmistakeable libido and teeming flesh, as my own body was squashed between middle-aged men on both sides of me, I felt something niggling at me. My body felt uncomfortable. And it wasn’t just the acid reflux, swollen breasts and extra weight that was my body now. Was it the discomfort of seeing female desire so head-on? Or that the performance was unexpectedly erotic?
credits Vojtěch Brtnický
Or perhaps it was a reaction to the idea that being horny is, in itself, liberatory. How liberatory is the libido when it is ascribed to, yet again as it always is, young female bodies? In that sense, it still felt like it was catering to the male gaze. Seeing their desire (even for each other) does not feel, by itself, challenging to the status quo. I understand these bodies are alternative avatars for, and a mockery of, the extremely sexist Penthouse Pets, but it actually feels more of the same – young, able-bodied women with conventionally acceptable bodies desiring and being desirable.
There is no doubt that female desire and its portrayals must always navigate through layers of the patriarchal gaze and capitalist systems of production and consumption. Is there a way to be female and horny without falling into these traps? Without falling into these ruins? I don’t know. But as a body that has recently given birth, in the ruins of my body postpartum, it would be liberatory and maybe even radical to see different bodies re-writing what desire can look like.
Capitalism, socialism, desire. These were all danced around in the performance. If we are talking about female bodies within capitalism, I want to also hear about the women who mopped that dancefloor, maintained the hotel rooms, cleaned the toilets - the truly invisible. Or those who were also mothers, because who knows more about capitalism than mothers? They do the invisible labour that goes into maintaining the very foundation of our society, yet are not seen as economically productive or socially valuable.
What would the desire of these bodies look like? How many of these kinds of bodies maintained and held up a place like the Haludovo Palace Hotel and Casino, and many others?