ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE

Not only for sale, but a la carte. In the menu: about 20 varieties of solos, duos, or little phrases with up to four dancers.  The principle is simple: those who pay, can get inside the tent and watch what they paid for. The rest stay outside. Both the “inside” and the “outside” are located in a public space: the Mauerpark in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin.

DANCE FOR SALE plays at the interstices between public and private spaces, between the logics of the state and that of the market.  Where is dance located?  Who decides what is to be shown? What stages does a piece have to go through before it gets to the public?

This project not only poses such questions. It was born out of an attempt to give a (temporary) solution.  The solo project REGISTER by Ricardo de Paula and Grupo Oito was approved for public funding. However, in 2009, the Pankow and Prenzlauer Berg districts saw their budgets reduced and many small projects like REGISTER were affected.  Forced to find other ways and means to keep “the show going on”, the question faced by Grupo Oito was: “What does a dance cost?”.

Without the money to produce the piece, the backing of a big institution or the mediation of a cultural manager, Grupo Oito chose to produce directly with the audience.  The product and the process are entangled, as well as the artists and the spectators. The aim is to go beyond the aesthetic experience of each individual piece presented in the tent.  DANCE FOR SALE is a manifest: making art is making politics.  In a refusal to be silenced, the artists make an appeal and keep dancing, despite the current politics of culture.

This is a work in progress. The tent is symbol of autonomy from the institutional art spaces. Lacking the support of the state, which should guarantee the right of everybody to participate in the cultural life, Grupo Oito didn't give up and delivered the show. In the park, the audience is both the citizen with cultural rights and the customer with freedom of choice as to what to see. DANCE FOR SALE calls attention to the (insufficient) answers given by the market, which treat dance as a product, or by politics, which subject dance to arbitrary decisions.

The artists dance what they are paid for. During a crisis, dance prices drop to a euro: dance is not  simply for sale, it is on sale. Yet, the artists have to dance to make a living.  The money raised in DANCE FOR SALE is little. Nevertheless, Grupo Oito choses to make a political statement and expose themselves in this vulnerable situation.  How long and with which means will this work continue? The answer is unknown, the only certainty is the feeling that the show must go on, with or without the help of politics.

SHOW PLACES