Suddenly Everywhere Is Black with People by Marcelo Evelin (review)

“How do we encounter the Other?” asks Marcelo Evelin in his dance piece Suddenly Everywhere Is Black with People. The first step, it seems, is to remove the distance between self and stranger. At the beginning of the piece the audience was led inside a square theatre—Berlin’s HAU 2. A few feet from the wall there was a square rail with tube lights circling the area at hip height, resembling nothing so much as a boxing ring. As we entered the space, the five nude dancers were running across the floor, holding hands in a circle around a central dancer, who changed in and out every few minutes. It was as though the outer ring of bodies careening across the ring protected the central dancer from the throngs of audience members. Already, this was marked as a space of confrontation. The audience was ushered inside this ring, although a handful of spectators remained outside, backs pressed against the walls of the theatre, unable to see clearly.

The critical force of the piece, then, was not only this confrontation with the naked bodies of dancers, but with one’s own fear of contagion and craving for safety. At one point, the group of dancers moved my way—invisible through the crowd but for the heavy sound of their footsteps. Invisible, for the dancers were painted black from head to toe— their scalps, their fingernails, the insides of their mouths. Indeed, only on reading the program did I learn that this de-racinated, de-individuated mass of loping bodies was an international ensemble, bringing together artists from Teresina, Kyoto, São Paulo, Ipatinga, and Amsterdam. Nudity and blackness, then, served to remove individual traits from the dancers, creating a swirling, featureless mass.

This blackness seemed, as advertised in the program note, to connote a loose cluster of metaphors for abjection, subalternity, or bare life. The title of the piece is taken from Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power in which the metaphor of the black hole signifies the magnetic pull of crowd consciousness. Yet the title—and the context of the piece, a dance festival most comprised of white performers and audience members, taking place while weekly xenophobic PEGIDA demonstrations grew in number throughout Germany—seemed to invite a deliberate misreading, mapping this metaphorical blackness onto racialized bodies. Suddenly, everywhere are black people.

Rather than erasing racial or cultural difference altogether, the black paint exaggerated the difference between the dancers and the almost entirely white German audience. A tall blonde woman drew closer to the dancers from the circle of spectators in order to peer over the dancers as they entangled themselves on the floor. Why did she feel entitled to inspect these naked bodies, statuesquely obscuring the view of the circle of spectators around her? Yet, my awareness of her voyeurism made me question my own. I had been moving through the space eager to be seen (as the audience was indeed more visible than the dancers) as a “seasoned” spectator of provocative performance. Yet, sensing in many of the spectator’s piercing glances a sense of ownership, I felt only a powerful condemnation of my own desire to collapse into the black mass of the dancer’s bodies.

Spectators look on as the ensemble moves to the ground in Suddenly Everywhere Is Black with People. (Photo: Sergio Caddah.)

The ensemble moves as a single mass in Suddenly Everywhere Is Black with People. (Photo: Sergio Caddah.)

The critical force of the piece, then, is not only about confronting one’s willingness to encounter the Other, but about confronting one’s willingness to encounter, even be marked by, blackness. During Suddenly Everywhere Is Black with People I stood in the darkness being hit, repeatedly, by blackened dancers, the impacts leaving thick marks across my

A soloist moves through the crowd in...