delighting

performance 
2024

A look of delight. Trying to grasp was never a part of the plan; he admires the swift movement of hands, he moves around his gaze, he names. He sees them as beautiful in a way one weaves hierarchies. A beauty of other that ensures the fullness of one’s being. A beauty to climb on; perhaps to pity. No zig-zags, no languages one doesn’t grasp – just a language other’s failed to learn. 
In his new performance, Daniel Kotowski is referring to a video work ‘Wonderland’ (2016) by Erkan Özgen. The Turkish artist portrays a deaf protagonist, a small boy describing his family’s brutal experience of war in Syria and the process of fleeing. In an interview about the work, Özgen expresses delight over the boy’s bodily expressions, at the same time not realizing he is using a home sign language; instead the artist merely expresses his fascination with its aesthetics. He delights over the artistic trait of the movements while simultaneously closing them within the realm of what’s primitive; using the boy to produce as if an expressionist painting, or a colonial anthropology, defying a possible translation. 
Daniel Kotowski is thus deconstructing the seeming innocence of aesthetic delight dripping from legitimised culture, which softly and swiftly romanticises and disavows the legitimacy of “other” – bodies, languages, worldings. The delight and violence are not a coincidence but a colonial gaze paired into culture, simultaneously disavowing the vulnerability of the one watching. Kotowski acknowledges performance as the space of shared dis/comfort and vulnerability and refutes of margins co-constructed by the very stage – or rather – appropriates them, twists them, shifts them, (de)lighting what’s peripheral, exposing the facade of the seeming centers – a delight to confirm one’s status quo, not less within the arts. 

text by Weronika Zalewska

performance: Daniel Kotowski
costume: Paweł Włodarski
choreographic consultant: Alicja Czyczel
co-production: Pickle Bar Berlin and Festival Theaterformen

Realised as part of the “Sturm and Slang” programme organised by Pickle Bar Berlin

photo credit Rina Nakano