Yeliz Pazar

The “point of no return” is a moment which changes an entire life. Either abruptly and unexpectedly, or long since yearned for. It is the point from which there is no going back any longer, at which change happens, no matter if it is steered from within or without. What marks a moment as an event of this decisive magnitude? When does this moment begin, and when does it end? In POINT OF NO RETURN, five dancers are dedicated to these questions, employing the dance style of waacking as their most important element. Waacking symbolically stands for living out and celebrating one’s own strength beyond heteronormative standards.

Waacking is a dance style that emerged in the disco era of the Seventies in the Afro-LatinX American LGBTQIA+ community in Los Angeles. Queer people were subjected to marginalisation and discrimination and had to conceal their identities; yet they could be themselves in the clubs. So, waacking became an expressive dance to fight back against oppression through racism, sexism, and homophobia, downright lionising exactly those elements perceived as “weak”, even to this day: Femininity, vulnerability, emotionality. Typical movements are rotating arms, posing, and an emphasis on expression, everything in conjunction with disco music.

Yeliz Pazar aka Yeliz Manuka is a dancer and choreographer from Düsseldorf and co-founder within dance collective nutrospektif (2020-2022 tanzhaus nrw Factory Artists). Her work encompasses the task of giving visibility to urban dance cultures such as, for example, waacking within a stage context, and promoting those cultures within the dance scene. Among her choreographic works are Dschinns at Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, Get Together at Cologne Opera and NUTRO 10 - Eine nutrospektive at tanzhaus nrw. Additionally, she has been among Germany’s first-generation waacking dancers since 2008. In 2018, she set up Manuka Waacking Flowers, a waacking crew from North Rhine-Westphalia. During the same year, she organised the genre’s first ever international event in Germany, THE WAACK OFF, at tanzhaus nrw. For POINT OF NO RETURN, she collaborated with waacking dancers Enting Zhang, Kristina Kunn, and Kevin Claudio Ponge Kassoma.

Duration: 60 min.