Melting ice, dissolved landscapes and a dance in between:
deep eye sea by Jasmin İhraç

(Uferstudios, Berlin, April 9, 2024)

by Stefan Hölscher, July 11, 2024


The work deep eye sea by Berlin choreographer Jasmin İhraç is both a dance solo and a multimedia spatial installation with a temporal duration. It was created for stage spaces, but could also be shown in museum and exhibition spaces. Video recordings of Arctic ice are projected onto a screen that takes up the back wall of the stage, in front of which several blue mirror foils are placed, initially covered by cloths and transforming the stage into a patchwork quilt, blurring dimensions and coordinates as a blue sky is reflected on the screen in melted ice, which in turn is reflected on parts of the stage floor. By means of continuous movements, pans and zooms, the images show expansive landscapes in the process of dissolving. They correspond with the stage set in front of them, which, in addition to the mirror foils on the floor, consists largely of large cloths that İhraç, who is both author and solo performer, constellates in different ways over the course of the piece and transforms as a textile territory.

Sometimes individual textiles are piled up behind them like masses of ice or discreetly folded, sometimes they become a bedspread or a veil. Then, as if moved by invisible forces, they are pulled up on threads towards the trusses under the stage ceiling, where they refract the beamer light like a kaleidoscope or become a projection surface themselves. Or they form a glacier, which İhraç wraps around with her hands like sound and on which the light from the projector fed from a laptop makes flowing water appear. Then again, they are formed into a sling on which the choreographer climbs up briefly in a prominent position, almost like a reminiscence of Simone Forti's Slant Board (1961), as if she wants to leave the surrounding landscape, before disappearing completely like the Arctic ice that spreads through the space over time. The scenery is acoustically accompanied by synthetic soundscapes, boots stomping through snow, the sound of breaking floes, water in various states, the diary of a journey into the ice and, in several places, interviews with geophysicists and oceanographers, among others, which revolve around the climate crisis and the melting of the planet's polar ice caps.

İhraç's installative solo, influenced by so-called postmodern dance and dance theater, repeatedly approaches the non-human bodies on stage, which are projected as video images or formed from textiles, in a mimetic way, standing next to them on an equal footing without relegating them to the background and degrading them to a backdrop. On the contrary: in some moments it seems as if this one and only human body on stage is embedded in it as one of its elements. In deep eye sea, İhraç relies on sculptural movement sequences in which, in line with André Lepecki's concept of minimal dance (inspired by Judson Dance Theater), almost imperceptible shifts of her body take place, as if the individual body parts were tectonic plates that change their position and relation to each other on the threshold of perception. Or she references the performance art of the 1960s and 1970s when, sitting at the front of the stage, she smashes small ice cubes with a hammer to cool a cocktail, while the screen behind her shows a mosaic of ice crystals and a voice from offstage tells of melting glaciers and the future disappearance of continents into the water. Then she herself appears on the screen again, dancing on a rock by the water or swimming like Ophelia in the ice. She also repeatedly steps out of her function as a dancer and becomes a spectator when she kneels at the edge of the stage and gazes from there at the liquefied masses of ice and dissolved landscapes behind her.

I was part of the audience at the performance on April 9, 2024 at Uferstudios in Berlin Wedding and was thus able to observe the extent to which, in addition to the performance, the space itself in which deep eye sea is shown also contributes to İhraç's work. The installation dance solo was shown that evening in Studio 1, which at the time when the current Uferstudios were used as a workshop by Berliner-Verkehrs-Gesellschaft (BVG) contained a cooling basin and is still tiled with white tiles on which reflections appeared throughout the course of the piece, and not just from the projector light. It would be interesting to see deep eye sea in other places with an industrial history, such as the former Stadtbad Lichtenberg in East Berlin. In spaces that are not theater spaces, but manifest a history in which people believed they could conquer 'nature', while their actions ushered in an epoch that some now call the 'Anthropocene' and in which climatic tipping points and ecological chain reactions increasingly elude human control. What remains of humans in the end is their dance in between.