God exists, the Mother is present, but they no longer care – Hooman Sharifi
Posted by bellanna on April 22, 2008
Photo: Anna van Kooij
As the description of God exists, the Mother is present, but they no longer care by Hooman Sharifi reads: “What are the relationships between love, violence, and language? Various texts from Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, Roland Barthes and Peter Handke feed into this distinctly physical performance. These texts have been absorbed into the movement, but are also projected so the audience can read them. They deal with love and violence, captured in a physical language.”
One of my first thoughts after seeing this performance is that it should have been an installation piece instead of choreography. Sharifi managed to create texts with powerful and sometimes confusing messages, focusing on the relationship between power and violence, group dynamics, individuality, and codes of conduct. These texts were simple prints, placed on the floor by a performer and subsequently projected on a screen at the back of the stage through the use of a static video camera positioned at the front of the stage. Multiple pauses in the performance allowed the texts, with various lengths, to be read and re-read; re-read as the pauses and stillness were sometimes too long and distracting. Through the use of poignant soundscapes the piece received an added layer of meaning. Moreover, the costumes were simply distracting, although not purposefully so. Sharifi chose black trousers and shirts – a seemingly safe choice – which neither showed nor hid the dancers’ bodies. Rather than supporting the overall frame of the performance, the costumes drew unnecessary attention by being out of tune.
However, the performance just did not work for me. The dancers’ movements were based on literal interpretations of the terms ‘violence’, ‘despair’, ‘anger’, in the sense that a virtually mimic quality was displayed. Had this been done with a healthy dose of wit or self-reflexivity, the predictability of the movements in general and the performance as a whole could have been broken. The crucial moment of my disappointment was Sharaifi’s complete denial of multiple interpretations by spelling out the meaning of the title of the performance. Not just once, but at least twelve times. In a back-tracking manner, the performance as a whole became a site of univocal meaning.
More crucially, I failed to notice and feel where the dancers’ movements originated from. They moved instead of dancing by executing the movements without expressing them in any way other than through the bare necessary muscle flows. Please note that I am in no way intending to suggest the dancers’ were incapable of executing more intention-based or ‘flow-based’ movements: they had simply not been directed to do so. This further strengthens my idea that God exists, the Mother is present, but they no longer care would work powerfully as an installation piece, combining word-projections, soundscapes, and occasional performances by a maximum of two dancers. In this way, I feel that Hooman Sharifi could blend his knack for creating intelligent theoretical and philosophical reflections on power and violence with vivid sensory input to create a coherent whole.
