Carrying the Mourning

AYLİN VARTANYAN

'The Things We Carry', one of the last works staged by the Çıplak Ayaklar (Barefoot) Company, comes to life with the powerful set-up of Portuguese choreographer Francisco Camacho and the unique performances of Leyla Postalcıoğlu and Mihran Tomasyan. Musician Berke Can Özcan accompanies the duo's evocative movements on stage with his percussion instruments. What is told is a story of migration and settlement. The moving process begins with two dancers looking at a pile of items lined up side by side in a square area. A musician appears from under another pile of percussion instruments next to them and, over time, builds a mini percussion orchestra. While the two dancers try to put the objects on the ground together by using their bodies as a carrier in the most unlikely ways, the harmony of the rhythm with the movements creates the impression that we are watching a huge living organism. The rhythm coming from the center of the stage animates the dancers' movements, like the heart pumping blood. A wide variety of objects are added to the dancers' bodies, from kimonos to floor brushes, from macrame pot holders to computer chips, from buckets to bricks, from ropes to picture frames. The objects that the dancers put on their bodies, sometimes by themselves and other times helping each other, restrict their movements. Still, the two bodies do not hesitate to carry them and set off with new walking styles, which deform their body postures. Finally they find a new settlement area. During this difficult moving process, there is no stopping, no rest, no farewell to the place they left behind. In this story, well known to those who were forcibly displaced from their homes and lands, the struggle for survival leaves no time for mourning. While those two bodies were carrying all these things with their bent bodies, they had no time to stop and ask:  "What are we leaving behind?".

The place they arrive at is a broader area. The objects that are carried find themselves in a different, more spacious place and with different functions than the cramped space where they were first collected. The rhythm still continues to come from the center. Occasional sounds added from nature give clues about the new settlement area. New functions of the objects are established step by step by the dancers. For example, an electric cable with a hook on its end is released outside the house to establish contact with the outside world. Objects that look like frames turn into table supporters. The cylinder, which resembles a metal stove pipe, is opened up and converted to a wall. We see the dancers taking photographs to celebrate and share their new lives with their loved ones. They process the films in the old-fashioned way, in their own hand-made dark rooms. Who knows, maybe this is the way they send moments from their new life to those they left behind to say the following: "We are fine, we are healthy, our new life is very beautiful." Just when we think we are witnessing a settlement process, a turning point happens in the performance. The harmony between the rhythm and movements coming from the center turns into disharmony. The established order collapses in a short time and all the objects are piled up in the center, one on top of the other. The musician goes back to the place he started, under the heap of musical instruments. At that moment, we watch the whole performance space transitioning to a ritualistic space, in which the dancers create a whirling movement around the objects they pulled apart and piled up. It's almost a state of transcendence. We see the expressions on the faces of the dancers soften as they step back and look into each other's eyes with awe.

PHOTO: Ilgın Eraslan Yanmaz

This highly evocative performance can be interpreted differently by each viewer at a time when earthquakes, wars, and consequently forced migrations take up a lot of space in our psyches throughout the world. For Armenians like myslef, who are trying to fill in the gaps of the migration stories in their family history, this performance would probably have very strong echoes in their inner world. At the beginning of the work, each of the objects is carefully collected and attached to the body, creating a playful effect. We don't yet fully understand what happened in that initial moment. When one arrives at a new place, the entire order of the old setting is suddenly forgotten. Despite the fact that the objects take on new shapes in this new place, one has a feeling that the move corresponds to the loss of loss itself. It's a place where you can't belong or exist any more. Many questions emerge that remain unanswered: What happened to that lost place? What was lost with the lost place – language, culture, sense of trust, dignity, sense of integrity, vision of the future and many more... Have the losses been recognized? Can the past be reconstructed when objects in a new space move away from the familiar language and produce a different language? The energy required for grief that comes with loss is traded for the energy required for escape. Mourning is postponed, mourning is forbidden, until the notes of the soul lose their tune. Loss is remembered as dancers re-play the destruction; While looking into each other's eyes, the whole migration story rewinds with a different momentum that comes from walking in reverse. The place where finally mourning starts is again a place of destruction.

Walter Benjamin defines the mourning process as "the feeling in which an emptied world comes to life again like a mask." 'What We Carry' makes the voids created by irreparable losses in our bodies and souls visible on stage with an upbeat performance.