Offering What We Don’t Have To Those Who Don’t Want It  2016
Offering What We Don’t Have To Those Who Don’t Want It is a work on love as a physical and mental activity. It draws from lateral ways of thinking and making love to fantasise about the politics of tenderness and desire, companionship and alterity. It approaches the unfinished, uncertain and fragmented as a strategy for unconditional love and love driven performance making. The performance was inspired by Ania Nowak’s ongoing research on love.
The final part of Offering What We Don’t Have can be interpreted as a play not only upon binary structures, but also with the concept of dominating and being dominated in a relationship. One performer proposes a movement imitated by the two other performers. Though one person is always leading, the situation is fluid, and the roles of leader and imitators are interchangeable. The performers pronounce subsequent definitions of love, as if the impossibility of creating one definition could be overcome by accumulating many definitions and expanding their meanings. Here, the power is not centralised, but nomadic – it is shifting, which means we are dealing with a structure devoid of axis. An attempt to build a non-binary situation without centre is not coincidental. It is also found in another Nowak production, Don’t Go for Second Best, Baby! […] There is no naming gesture in Nowak’s production. Instead, there is direct work on definitions. The piece is not reduced to representing only one model of sexual relationship, but its structure remains open to various patterns. It multiplies them. […] In other words, the choreographer is queering definitions.
Agnieszka Sosnowska Polish Theatre Journal
Idea, choreography, performance Ania Nowak
Creation
, performance Xenia Taniko Dwertmann, Julia Rodríguez/ Roni Katz
Dramaturgical advice Agata Siniarska, Mateusz Szyman
ówka, Siegmar Zacharias
Light design
Gretchen Blegen
Sound design Martyna Poznańska
Styling and costume
Melanie Jame Wolf
Premiere Sophiensaele
Production Tanztage Berlin 2016
Photos Dieter Hartwig, Marta Ankiersztejn for the Institute of Music and Dance