Backstage with Benze C. Werner

Your new piece LP, developed in collaboration with musician and producer Ley Ghafouri, will premiere at tanzhaus nrw in about a month. LP integrates dance, performance, and concert. What roles do sound and music play in your choreographic work?

Music frequently serves as the direct starting point for my work, both as a dancer and choreographically. Music affects my body in a very direct way. For one, I feel sounds like bass frequencies in my bones, under my skin, in my flesh. And, on the other hand, I have an enormous emotional connection to sound and music. These emotions, too, create a direct physical link for me. And that is where I see their potential for artistic work. Emotionality in contemporary dance is often not taken seriously – in its focus are concepts, technical perfectionism and aesthetics. I experience emotions in a physical manner and as something that ‘needs to get out’. Movement is the form in which to ‘bring it out’. Choreography, to me, is an emotional voyage, something that traverses from A to someplace else, and I do not necessarily mean that visually. Thought from a specifically dance perspective: What is the inner score? It is of no importance to me that every little movement becomes visible to the audience, but rather that is resonates with this emotion that I carry within myself and that is expressed in my choreographies.

So, there is a strong emphasis on sensual perception. In LP, according to the announcement, you create a landscape that invites drifting away. Can you tell us a bit more about the format you are developing here?

In LP, I work with a more complex spatial concept for the first time, and this opens another field of experimentation in parallel to sound. Stage decorations, lighting, movement within the space and lyrics complement each other within this space. I consider atmospheres and the comprehensive experience of situations a lot. What I find so compelling in the performing arts is to be invited, as a spectator, into a situation to experience or participate in something. That includes the social aspect of performance. That is the reason I experiment with the arrangement of audiences and performance. That started with Neon Serenade, which I developed during my studies and which I showed during 2024’s Now & Next here at tanzhaus nrw, with an arrangement in which the audience was placed in a 360-degree circle surrounding the stage space. How can we create a situation that establishes resonance between performers and audience? I personally find that this happens in intensity at concerts. With LP, I initiate a quest for formats that enable a transposition of concert aspects into a dance performance. That comes with failure and trial attached. Spaces for dance and theatre are engaged in different unwritten rules than concerts are. In every case, I try to connect myself to the persons on site, to enter a situation openly.
What I also find exciting about concerts are the differing audience temporalities that exist alongside each other: Between arrival, fetching a drink, then going to the restroom again, and standing in front of the stage again. Waiting. There might be a support band playing at the start, then the main act finally comes on, and eventually, something else entirely happens that evening.

It is a part of this experimentation with performance, to me, that you concern yourself with a concept like Relaxed Performance, originally developed by the autism community to make events more accessible for them. Relaxed Performances scrutinise well-practised and well-rehearsed rules and behaviour pertaining to performance procedure.

Exactly. I ask myself how a performance might truly enable other modes of perception. I am interested in creating a work that enables stepping into a dance performance without any bad feelings because your train ran late or during which you can visit the restroom and not having to hold it in just because you do not want to bother other people. If my main interest in dance performance is geared, for example, towards its music, it might be okay to just lie down and enjoy the performance with my ears. I would really like to have a space in which that is possible without being read as disrespectful towards the performers on stage. This creates a different kind of accessibility, other possibilities to attend a piece.

The title LP evokes albums and curated setlist of songs or musical pieces. Does this allude to a possible dramaturgy or sequence of your piece? At the same time, the reference to vinyl records resonates with some anachronism.

Interesting. This reference to historic playback devices played no role with us whatsoever. When I listen to an album on my mobile, I can leave songs out, skipping them. And there are favourite tracks on albums I listen to on repeat, and those two or three tracks, they are nice, but what I really want to get to is the fourth, because that is one of those favourite tracks again. That is where that skipping comes from. The dramaturgy therefore does not refer to a predetermined sequence, but it is precisely about finding your own way through the album. Written out, Long Play refers to associations of sex and lesbian sexuality or simply to being lesbian – just Lesbian Play.

LP is being developed in collaboration with Ley Ghafouri and Guests. How do you cooperate?

LP marks my third collaboration with Ley. It started in a very common manner, because Ley developed the sound for my Reverse Cowgirl piece. That was, on the one hand, a clear commission from me for Ley; I already knew what I wanted. During Neon Serenade, Ley accompanied the development process and the rehearsals occasionally, yet the music was produced from the dance material. It started with the desire for a simultaneous development of choreography/ performance and sound, in the studio, so the performance could engage with the music and not only vice versa. LP constitutes our first work process in which we work with live sound setups in the studio, and in which dance and movement emerge at the same time. Still, we also work independently from each other, to get together again later. This changed the work relationship between Ley and me. In Reverse Cowgirl, the responsibilities were clearly delineated. In the current rehearsal process for LP, I, as the person responsible for the project, provide much space for the ideas and opinions of both Elin as well as Ley. We are constantly renegotiating. I often felt lonely during previous processes and remained, in a certain way, within my own world; I knew the direction I would go in. But it is so exciting to hear the ideas others have in reaction to your thoughts, words, visions, and what they create from it. This makes an idea much grander and more complex.

And who are the Guests?

For one, the Guests are the whole team around LP. And the Guests are also stand-ins for the voices of all the various persons we met during the process and in the archives – whose words and thoughts imprinted on us, also partly shaping our work.

You conducted research in the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York for this piece. How did that come about?

I immersed myself in Joan Nestle’s essay on butch-femme culture and lesbian relationships for a while and so came across her having cofounded the Lesbian Herstory Archives. I thought it telling that I had never heard about it before. A Goethe Institute research grant enabled Ley and me to visit the archive. Apart from entering the US with Ley, which proved to be complicated, it has been a pivotal experience for me to work in this archive and to get into contact with the people involved there. The archive is situated in a former residential building, bought by individuals who simply started gathering stories there, to curate and to store them. Without pre-selecting. This lesbian culture and history archive is so inconceivably complex. There is, for example, a great part of it dedicated to radical feminist movements in the 1980s and 1990s, documenting different tendencies. Being radically feminist means being lesbian, has political implementations. There are positions, like this one, I distance myself from, or which I critically oppose. I talked extensively about this with Saskia Scheffer, one of the archive’s coordinators, about, for example, separatist women’s groups in the 1980s that are problematic from today’s perspective because of their exclusion of trans* persons and also due to their condemnation of butch-femme relations as patriarchal and violent. And yet, those separatist women’s groups contributed a great part towards where we stand today, socially and legally. I learned to endure differences, this complexity, and to pay more respect to certain things, in this archive. That was a challenging and impressive experience. That split things open in me. Not immediately launching into a defensive or critical stance enabled eye-level conversations.
I believe this is especially important in today’s political and social present. Saskia and I also talked about the famous trenches of leftist movements. Within the frame of her next breath, she went on to tell me she did not understand why we argue about pronouns and self-designations. According to her, we lose sight of the grand picture because of this – meaning our collective liberation. She thought that, instead of fighting over pronouns, we should be listening to our bodies, and their material needs, and to fight for them. I remember a feeling of bucking rebellion rising within me.  I did not agree with what she said. Yet in this moment, I decided – following a difficult to explain impulse – to keep listening and wanting to understand instead of confronting the issue at hand. I understood she was speaking from a different position, with a different history and different experiences, and I wanted to comprehend what she meant. She has been fighting for women’s rights her whole life, and the things she fought for in the past have, even now, not been realised – the closing of the gender pay gap, the right to physical self-determination, and so on. This conversation with Saskia as well as the archival structure itself where a formative experience in enduring dissonance. Because, like any other history, lesbian history is contradictory and multi-layered, too. Joan Nestle described the archive as a space in which the history of all women would be allotted their respective place – lesbian feminists, sex workers, S/M women, separatists and many more – so, very diverging positions and perspectives. She wanted to create a space in which desire would never be cause for exclusion or judgment. This tension and complexity evoked a multitude of emotions and reactions within me: Irritation, incomprehension, connection, distance, closeness, and many more, which we brought into the LP work process.

How do you transpose your archival research into the artistic process? Which aspects of queer-lesbian history can be found in the piece? Or do you rather transmit the organic genesis, the Lesbian Herstory Archives, into LP?

Apart from specific themes and found motives, like dog and mouth, we transpose the emotions and reactions I just described that we encountered during the research process. Our archival research initially functioned on resonance and intuition. Which materials speak to me? Where do I recognise myself, or where do I recognise my current political, social context, and where do I not recognise it, too? ‘Not knowing’ proved to be the motor of our research – this generally shapes my work method. Do I feel connected? Is there any tension? A resistance? Why do I feel in resistance to certain topics or to these materials? Why do I want to look at this and not at this? Where does this dog suddenly come from? Why did this pop up at the studio, as a motif, as a material? What is this connected to? We try to retrospectively comprehend this. I would like to describe the transposition into artistic practice as processes of remix and collage. Because even the songs, which we all wrote ourselves, always came from this dialogue with other materials. So, everything emerged in dialogue or came up as a reaction to something. And I hope this will again be remixed someday. The Lesbian Herstory Archives requested sending them a recording of the piece to put into the archive. Maybe someday a person will take a piece of it and create something new from it. I like the thought of that very much.
And I would like to get back to the music: I find it so intriguing that songs can still evoke something in me, songs with their melodies and lyrics that have quite possibly nothing to do with me per se, that are not anchored in my reality. At one point in LP, we reference Pitbull’s song Hotel Room Service: “Forget about your boyfriend and meet me at the hotel room / You can bring your girlfriends and meet me at the hotel room.” When you transfer these lyrics, sung by a cis dude, into a different context, they tell a totally different story all of a sudden, gaining a completely different meaning. What I find interesting in the work on LP in general is the experience that we found something of other people’s stories within ourselves. In stories that were very far from us, or strange, at times. And a large, important aspect of LP is longing – triggered by the passing on of other people’s stories, but also by the sharing of personal stories.

You emphasised the importance of emotions at the start of our conversation. I get the impression that this aspect of emotionality and that of the just mentioned longing, too, weaves like a thread through your work. Can you confirm that?

Yes. The yearning to become something else, and the longing for another world, a different future compared to the now – that is what pushes me forward. In Neon Serenade, it was the longing for somebody else. That concentrated very much on this capsule of couple’s relationships. In Lavender Cowboys, we dealt a lot with nostalgia and the emotional states it evokes. The longing for a home that was once there, or for one that is not yet there, too, what one still hopes for. Nostalgia is an emotional state that many can share yet it simultaneously remains very different or personal for each of the individual people involved. Now, with LP, it is a yearning for unity, for connection – a connection to other people, and especially to others’ fights and stories. Ultimately, my works correlate with and build upon each other, and they contribute new aspects, new tiny fragments to this great thing, longing.

During the recent open rehearsal for LP at tanzhaus nrw, I noticed playful moments that carried a seductiveness, almost seeming like flirting with the audience. These spontaneous forms of intimacy and interaction were very fascinating.

We create ambivalence, a game of nearness and distance, between being addressed and not being addressed at the same time, in LP. This back and forth is also inherent in flirting. You want nearness, yet you want to stay cool and keep your distance. We create specific moments that confront the audience with little decisions about how they would like to react. Is something too close for me? Do I want to leave? Or would I like to touch the dog? A tongue is presented to me – do I grip it? Do I want to grip it? This creates interaction, even if it only happens in the mind.
I find singalong moments in concert formats very intriguing. There are always concert visitors who sing along or dance along. And that, in turn, causes something in the artists on stage. It is an exchange of something, so it is not one-sided. In any case, it creates energy. That is the direct result of the participation. In concerts, the audience is most often addressed as a group or a mass of people. Whereas in LP, we deliberately want to play with individual interaction. We dedicate much to the connection and the intimacy with the audience in the rehearsal process. We have already offered two public showings, at Quartier am Hafen in Cologne and most recently at tanzhaus, and these were precisely about that.
Interestingly, spectators afterwards reflected back that they crave interaction – even to the point of us throwing the tongues at them. We imply that in a scene in which we throw tongues. When we rehearse between us, it often revolves around ensuring consent. How can we call for consent for our actions? Am I allowed to simply throw a tongue at a person? This wish by the audience, shared with us, signalling a willingness to be spoken to or, respectively, to be approached like this, quite surprised us. During the showing at Quartier am Hafen, a person threw the tongue back onto the stage in turn. This mutual probing has something to do with the spatial set-up. How is the room structured? Who knows the etiquette and codes? Who is currently in whose room? Are we in an event space at tanzhaus nrw, or is the audience situated in our (fictitious) space? We play around with the feeling of entering a space one has never been to before, in which there is a pre-existing community one does not yet know. Audiences need to get involved with that at first, observing, comprehending, before they themselves will be able to carelessly move through this space.
Those flirtatious modes you mentioned, those I find especially intriguing. Apart from the playful aspect, this ‘I will not fully show myself’, there is an inherent aspect of power in LP. Elin and I know how we are ‘allowed’ to act, we know the unwritten rules, we know the codes. Yet the audience finds themselves in a rather more precarious position. And it is those moments that I find especially fascinating in performance. Thus, we consciously play with feelings of insecurity. Insecurity and this constant consideration: How do I act now? What do I wear? How do I move through spaces, how am I read, those are part of queer experience. Or rather, it is an almost universal experience had by marginalised persons.

The fact that I can relax as (relatively) rapidly as I did as a member of the audience in LP – despite those moments of insecurity mentioned – has surely to do with the situation, with the atmosphere you create. You already mentioned the stage design – the announcement promises a textile landscape. What does the space look like?

The space is an oral cavity, a mouth. That is such a strong, important image for us, a physical referral to the piece’s topic. The mouth as the entrance point into the body of another person. I ingest something through the mouth; I dispense something through the mouth. Through the mouth, I can encounter another person very closely. When I pick up the saliva of another person, I partly become this person. The saliva remains in me and changes something within me. Within this mouth cavity, we will encounter three giant tongues, each featuring different textures. This immediately opens so many textures, haptically and somatically: Moisture, warmth, hardness, cosiness. I want to go into some of those mouths. That is due to desire and sexuality. Other mouths I would like to avoid. That has to do with disgust, with aversion. It has ambivalence. Additionally, there is also the tongue. The mouth and the tongue are connected to the voice, to singing. The voice as a tool. And in some moments, the tool becomes a weapon. And tongues are indispensable in lesbian sex and desire. We found strong forms of rejection of lesbian sexuality in the archive. Enter Joan Nestle again: Butch-femme relations were the ones to lend visibility to lesbian relationships in the first place. Because women were not allowed to wear ‘men’s clothing’ in the 1960s, these couples were subjected to a different kind of discrimination that was marked by sentiments such as disgust, aversion, and aggression. The mouth is the motif wherein LPs different topics meet, where they happen simultaneously. Aversion and desire exist here at the same time.

When you cited this affective rejection of lesbian sexuality, during the 1960s, as it became more visible, it reminded me of the current ultra-conservative backlash in the US. How did you experience this there, on the ground?

When Ley and I travelled to the US, we were aware that Trump’s inauguration would be held during our last week there. To us, it felt like the last possible moment to travel to the US. The entry requirements for a number of different groups were complicated immensely, among them trans* and nonbinary persons. Trumps inauguration dominated the conversations on site at the archives. Saskia knew full well what was going to happen. The local community was prepared. Saskia’s group of friends set up a new care table, for example. Once a month, one of her friends hosts a dinner that centres around a certain topic. They invite persons from the lesbian community across generations to that. This is about supporting each other and not being pulled apart. If the state fails to look after its people, fails to care for them, then the people need to look out for each other and themselves, they need to connect, they need to confront marginalisation and oppression, they need to be there for each other.
Yet the backlash against queer life does not solely happen in the US. I come from Leipzig, Eastern Germany, and there have been protests against CSDs in cities like Bautzen for years now. For about two years now, such demonstrations also keep happening in large cities such as Leipzig and Berlin. Queer bars, associations, and queer spaces in general keep closing down. In Germany, the AfD denounced diversity and gender politics as “ideological indoctrination”. They attack cultural institutions that provide platforms for marginalised voices. The right-wing backlash is immense and yields enormous repercussions on queer everyday life.
Those are drastic images from those anti-CSD protests: The anger and aggression carved into the faces of those neo-Nazis are intense, and this revulsion becomes openly articulated. Yet I and my friends encounter this revulsion in everyday life, too. Queerphobic hostility has been increasing for years – I notice that with my friends. People increasingly become targets for open abuse and physical attacks.
In New York, it was remarkable to witness how organised people were there, and how aspects of unity and community were in focus. Without this unity, we will not be able to fight – and I found that touching and inspiring. That care table was not about devising political strategies but about dining together, about getting to know each other, about creating relations that could carry you through the coming difficult years of fascism. Ley and I were steadfastly determined to bring this energy and this idea to Cologne and North Rhine-Westphalia. That will be our next project following LP as a performance. Because we are unable to endure this loathing and rage on our own.
When one has to check one’s surroundings before every enamoured glance, every hug, every kiss in public space, when people cannot move securely in public space, when certain places are to be avoided out of fear of violence or when one prefers to take the bike instead of public transportation so as not to become a victim of assaults motivated by queerphobic hostility, by racism, by Islamophobia or any other form of discrimination – than that is a severe restriction of liberties. And this severe restriction of liberties concerns so many people out of so many different reasons, not only in my environment.

How are you, as a young choreographer, coping with the current situation? The cutting of funding and grants in North Rhine-Westphalia leads to work opportunities and contexts breaking away. What is your outlook on the future?

First of all, I took a great risk with LP. It is a very open and experimental work process. For such an artistic process, I need time, resources, accessible rehearsal space. This needs space for try-outs and – very importantly – for failure. That is necessary to develop new performance formats and to test out a new artistic language without having to focus on this one product, only to then tackle the next project. This will hardly be possible to implement with even less means. This creates a completely precarious working environment.
It is alarming to me how much culture currently disappears because public funding gets cancelled. Those cuts, to me, are another sign that we live in fascist times. It becomes clearer and clearer to me that truly independent arts and culture cannot spring exclusively from state-funded money. The Lesbian Herstory Archives are a grassroots organisation, financially and spatially independent from state funding. Art needs to be independent! Art, culture and a shared community should not vanish simply because grant money disappears. I wish for us to find different ways – ways steeped in solidarity, self-organisation, and mutual support.

Thank you for this exciting conversation!

 

Benze C. Werner is a choreographer and dancer living in Cologne. At the interface of dance, sound and live performance, they explore the affective and sensual potential of the interplay between music and movement. Their focus is on creating immersive, physically tangible situations that enable a resonance between audience and performers. 

Benzes' artistic practice combines their background in contemporary dance and ballet with queer-feminist and anti-fascist perspectives. Their graduation piece Neon Serenade, created as part of their studies at the CCD in Cologne, marks the beginning of ongoing artistic research into the aesthetics and politics surrounding line dancing, so-called country culture and the cowboy image. The piece was invited to Now & Next at tanzhaus nrw in 2024. LP, developed in close cooperation with musician and producer Ley Ghafouri, marks their third collaboration and is Benze C. Werner's first coproduction with tanzhaus nrw as a choreographer.

Lucie Ortmann, dramaturge at tanzhaus nrw, conducted this interview.