Backstage with Elsa Artmann

In A Change is as Good as a Rest as well as in previous works, you keep tackling the issue of work on stage. What would you like for the visitors to take away from this exploration?

A Change is as Good as a Rest concludes our multi-part examination of working conditions in cultural capitalism that began with A Voice of a Generation in 2022. In that piece, we examined our own embodiments of neoliberal concepts within our own dance techniques as well as ways to possibly spit them out again. To do this, we practiced letting go of things whose downsides we know while they are simultaneously rewarding us. Take, for example, the pleasure in one’s own fitness: we had workout songs transition and segue into requiems or burial chants.

In Service und Gefühl (Service and Emotion), we dealt with emotional work as a service, specifically in a spectrum set between hyper-identification and alienation, in performing arts professions on the one hand and in the field of care employment on the other.

Langes Wochenende (Long Weekend) took on the romanticisation of work and the relations happening therein, especially in precarious work. We wanted to uncover romantic promises that the work itself would quite possibly not even fulfil.

To us, A Change is as Good as a Rest is a final chapter within this discourse that we take as an opportunity to  ask ourselves: From what we have fostered as a work culture over the last few years, what do we want to continue? And what do we stop?

When I think of an audience and their experience with the piece, I wish certain forms of interruption, which are hard to imagine at first, to become more palpable or more of an experience, and that others, which pretend to be a break, might lose their thrall. That the play invites you to think through or possibly even carry out exit scenarios that may be taboo or difficult to imagine.

Lena Brüggemann, an artist and curator from Leipzig, once said of our works that they were exercises for different conditions. What I wish for the visitors is for them to play through or feel the possibility of being able to relate differently to the conditions, or that the conditions themselves could be different.

During one showing of the piece we received feedback saying that it felt like an invitation to fall. In other words, that people watch us crash in one way, and in another way, they felt invited to witness this crash, or that they would even crash themselves. I relished that this was an experience that was made.

The title of your piece, A Change is as Good as a Rest, plays with the idea that change can be a form of recreation. Is a recess replaceable?

I believe that A Change is as Good as a Rest is a seductive and, for some time, effective exhortation to hold out that often seems to be true in my life as well.

For example, if I work one job during the week and another one on the weekend, I feel like I am recovering from the job I do during the week.

A similar idea is to replace regeneration with stimulation or to make regeneration itself productive.

In our SANFTE ARBEIT collective, we are currently playing with the idea that we conceive A Change is as Good as a Rest as a regenerative piece, because we all urgently need to recover right now. I do not believe there can be a regenerative production as such, but I still help myself with the idea. Therefore, I do not perceive the title A Change is as Good as a Rest in the sense of, is the sentence true or not? But rather in the sense of, can I make this sentence productive for myself, can I successfully assert it to myself, and what are the consequences? I do not believe that taking a break can be substituted. But I am extremely bad at taking a break. That is something you really need to practice. But can I practice this while at work? I think the circle closes with the piece’s title already.

Your works are marked by a tight interplay of text, sound, and movement. What is of particular importance to you in this artistic practice?

To me, dance shares many traits with language. Even at the training level, it is about you as a dancer receiving visual, tactile, or verbal information, and then you transform this into your dance. In this way, we physically absorb a lot of language in dance. The intertwinement of language or text and body corresponds with my way of thinking. And it also corresponds to the rehearsal culture that has grown in our ensemble. Currently, for example, we often do an exercise called "A dance that is just right for this moment in my life". During the exercise, it often so happens that we stop and continue talking instead of dancing, because language is simply the better vehicle for this dance. Or a situation arises in which talking and dancing accompany each other.

What I appreciate about the collaboration with Annie Bloch, the musician, is that we work together on similar issues and in different media. That is why, for me, sound is not necessarily a retelling of what is happening on the movement level, but sound reflects similar content-related concerns in another medium. And at the same time, I like that working with live music makes it possible to react strongly to each other.

What I like about the interweaving of spoken text, singing, and sound is the possibility of accumulation. By this I mean that something can be presented dryly, objectively, or reduced at first, but then, subsequently, it keeps gaining layers. There are often moments in our plays when everything falls into place. At first, the layers run, more or less, in parallel, or one layer is only very subtly perceivable in contrast to another one. And then there are moments in which, in a musical I would put it like, "they break out in song". And with this, it leads to a kind of entanglement or condensation or even solemnity, something playful and pleasurable. In Long Weekend, we employ Mel C’s song I Turn to You which we, first of all, simply celebrate and quote a lot. And there is a choreography in the piece set to this song, which is sung live by us, and then interrupted several times to insert footnotes. Through the footnotes, we transferred this love song upon our love relationship with work to express this: What do we mean by that, here? Or: How should this actually be phrased? Or: Is that true? Is that not true? So, on the one hand we have all this fervour and this melodrama in the scene, and we have the footnotes that scrutinise it all and put it into perspective.

In your plays, the audience encounters different figures or characters on stage. How are they developed, formed, and brought to life?

Some of these characters have already been accompanying us over the duration of several pieces. Freelance Lover, for example, is such a character, who inhabited both Service and Feeling as well as Long Weekend. In Service and Feeling, we began devising archetypes of cultural work. There were The Artist, The Expert, Freelance Lover, and Smooth Operator.

On stage, we then embodied these characters, and we also personally identified with them, while these fictional characters simultaneously each bring out a certain logic that is complex and may carry its dark sides, which is, therefore, ambiguous, and with which we do not have to agree.

Freelance Lover is such a character who creates himself, above all, through their relationships with others. Freelancing means working for more than one client. This means that Freelance Lover is a character who is linked to many people, suggesting many commitments, even suggesting romantic devotion, while also, at the same time, always going on to state: "I won't need you too much." In Long Weekend, for example, there'sthe sentence, "If I ever give you the feeling that I need you, it’s really only to give you the feeling that I need you." The sentence shows that this dedication always leans more toward service, and Freelance Lover suggests about themselves that they actually operate totally independently. In this tension between establishing relationships while simultaneously not making oneself dependent on anyone, Freelance Lover leads an impossible existence that induces fitness and anxiety. In Long Weekend, Freelance Lover transitions into Tired Slut. We find Freelance Lover at the beginning of the piece and Tired Slut at the end. In one way, they are different characters that we often address in the third person. Something then happens to these characters. What happens to them is often an amalgamation of a variety of biographical references but also of moments within our own experiences that we consider generalisable in one form or another. They can often be so embarrassingly specific, maybe more specific than we would tell in an I-position, at that moment. Take Freelance Lover, Tired Slut: That, to me, is the same character over the perpetuity of continued time. Well, Tired Slut is mellower, a little bit more tired, still performing. In A Change is as Good as a Rest, Rock Bottom appears. For me, this is another continuation of Tired Slut.

In Long Weekend, Tired Slut explains, "Tired Slut can actually have it all. The fact that she will be tired of everything is a price she is willing to pay for the abundance of her experiences." And in A Change is as Good as a Rest, there are even two revelations about these two fictional characters. The first is: Freelance Lover has miscalculated: "Freelance Lover actually really needs you, needs all of you. Freelance Lover makes a list of which friend is available for calls at what time." So Freelance Lover is now catching up with all the friendship services that Freelance Lover can find. And I would state that Tired Slut has also miscalculated and is unexpectedly no longer gentle and tired, but hard and really down. She can no longer soak her way through everything but has fallen into an inner cramp that transforms herself into this brake block or this braking device that we fantasise about in A Change is as Good as a Rest. What would it take to stop here, to halt?

I would describe our writing as a form of everyday documentary writing. It is often task-based, collaborative writing. In Long Weekend, for example, there are lists of promises from us to work, from work to us, and from us to our colleagues, which we have written in a certain form before accumulating them. Or there is a very long list of recalled consent. A rant in which I reveal things collected by all of us that we actually rather do not like that much.

Your artistic work occurs within a collective. Many work contexts outside of art are either strongly hierarchical or individualised. What importance does collective work hold for you?

I would definitely say that we work collaboratively and that there are elements of collective work. At the same time, we also have a hierarchy in which I am the artistic director. This is mainly due to the freelancing context in which we find ourselves and in which each of us also pursues other things. This also results in a division of work in which, for example, the conceptual work that prepares the project is leaning more towards my side. A big difference between our project work and other project work that I am acquainted with is that we think much more strongly and much more continuously about substantive topics together. This is possible because our works so steadfastly follow on each other. Virtually, writing, or in smaller formats, we gather regularly and can bridge the gaps that arise when we rehearse together for six weeks and play a few shows each year. Each person is still working on their own projects. But I get the feeling that everyone, especially in the core team, already brings a lot of their own interests, language, and practice, so they are very generous with their own artistic person within our collaboration. And that we, I increasingly feel that, have developed an artistic practice together that also belongs to us all. Each individual can adapt and take this with them into their own work. There is a great level of friendly connection in our constellation. The ensemble is also, in some form, a social close field.

In your pieces, there is a remarkable quality of great tenderness and care in dealing with each other and with the audience in effect. What role do these qualities play in your work?

Tenderness and care have been very present in our recent works, especially in Long Weekend and A ______ __ __ Good __ _ Rest, yet in different ways. In Long Weekend, we explored the romanticisation of work, inspired in part by Sarah Jaffe's Work Won't Love You Back. It describes how specific "love models" are ascribed to certain forms of work: romantic love for artistic work, for example, while care work is more of a minding, almost parental form. Both are associated with modes of sacrifice and isolation. We were interested in what happens when such romantic promises are transferred to employment relationships.

The focus on consensus also comes from other practices such as working in the Queer Lapdance Collective (of which I am a part), where the negotiation of consent is a matter of course. In sexualised contexts, the necessity is often more obvious; we have transferred this practice to the rehearsal and training context. At the same time, we notice that this form of tenderness or caring is not exclusively received positively; it can also be irritating. This irritation may have to do with the contrast to the social conditions in which we move. We experience our workspace as privileged because consensus-based practices are possible there; those are often lacking in everyday life. On the one hand, you are right in criticising this, as a space that seals itself off from the outside in order to be able to function that way. On the other hand, we also see it as a kind of trial space: an attempt at making it possible to experience what a different way of dealing with each other could look like. This is a fragile practice full of contradictions.

For us, however, caring is not only an aesthetic tool but rather a fundamental part of our work. Without mutual support, it would hardly be possible for us, as A Change is as Good as a Rest tells us very explicitly. At the same time, we try to permit ourselves, time and again, to be there with everything that this dependence means. It is important for me to emphasise that we do not perceive ourselves as a model for a "perfect caring" practice, we try and we fail.

What are your current working conditions in the collective Elsa Artmann / SANFTE ARBEIT?

Our working conditions have long fluctuated greatly, and we are still in a process of adapting to them. We produced Long Weekend with only two funding commitments. Financially, this was anything but gainful for us. At times, I made a very conscious decision to see the play as a kind of gift: to the scene and to ourselves, also as a means counter or reinterpret the precarious production situation.

I had the privilege of being able to work as a dancer at the same time and thus finding myself in a position to cross-finance myself, in a manner of speaking. At the same time, this phase was followed by a series of developments in very short order: We won an award, were invited to Tanzplattform, and I received a concept grant. This happened shortly after a health breakdown, during which it was questionable if and whether I could continue to work at all, at times.

At this moment, while many other groups are struggling with great financial difficulty, we are comparatively secure and are set to receive three-year funding for the first time. This is new for us, as we have been working exclusively project based since 2018. This now results in the need to find structural answers: for example, how we can deal with the increased attention following Tanzplattform?

So far, our work structure outside of rehearsals has not yet been consolidated. There is support, for example with production assistance, but overall, we first must find ways to expand these structures in such a way that they prove sustainable in the long term. I am very grateful for the current visibility and recognition, while simultaneously feeling that we are not yet fully equipped for this in terms of organisation.

At the same time, I am aware of how fragile this situation is. Subsidies and grants may be discontinued; conditions can change quickly. This knowledge keeps me from taking the current situation for granted or from relying too heavily on it. A lot of things are in the making at this moment, and we are trying to find out, step by step, how we can deal with them.
 

Elsa Artmann is a dancer, choreographer, and artistic director of the SANFTE ARBEIT ensemble. In dance pieces and publications, Elsa Artmann explores themes and formats of coexistence. In addition, Artmann works as a freelance dancer for various choreographers and ensembles and teaches drawing and movement.
Elsa Artmann studied painting at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig and dance at the Center for Contemporary Dance in Cologne. For Artmann, movement and language are closely intertwined. In both, Artmann seeks ways to make time-specific aspects visible based on everyday experiences while simultaneously proposing “exercises for different conditions” (quote: Lena Brüggemann).

Ensemble Elsa Artmann / SANFTE ARBEIT works dance-based on interdisciplinary formats that also include, apart from choreography, audio play and book publication, most recently developing in a direction of contemporary musical.
Themes are viewed in movement, text, and voice; topics that initially leave us feeling powerless – like the nuclear family, living, nationalism, work. Since 2022, Elsa Artmann / SANFTE ARBEIT have been dealing with (emotional, care and relationship) work in culture capitalism through different formats (apart from stage plays also in audio dramas, a short film, and with a digital platform for collaborative writing).
They understand their practice as documentary in a combined inspection of everyday experience and (medially) attested current affairs. In the transitions between language, sound, and movement, the Ensemble addresses the accessibility of their own work from different senses and perception levels. 
In addition to its production work, the group runs the Arbeit und Liebe (Work and Love) laboratory, where artists and people in care professions come together every two weeks for a shared writing and movement practice.

The interview was conducted by Philipp Schaus, dramaturge at tanzhaus nrw.