Being on the edge of a form

Andrea Rodrigo – Can you delve into how Malign Junction (Goodbye Berlin) relates to the political, social, and cultural context in which it has been created?

Alex Baczyński-Jenkins – The work is mainly about capture, the breaking of a promise, loss, and movement in relation to power, as we find ourselves at a disorienting historical juncture. This piece was developed in the Gropius Bau studio in Berlin at an intense junction of manifestations of power and violence—specifically, after having witnessed 16 months of the German government’s unconditional support for the genocide of the Palestinian people. Close to the Gropius Bau is the Anhalter Bahnhof from where Jews were deported during World War II. Next door is the former Gestapo headquarters, the remains of the Berlin Wall, and further down, the Axel Springer media complex, which has consistently manufactured consent for the genocide in Gaza and smeared anyone who speaks out against it. There is something about living in this place—working in such physical proximity to state-sanctioned violence. The piece is a reflection on an encounter with something deeply sinister.

We have witnessed the shattering of Berlin’s, and more broadly the West’s, facade of liberal democracy. Its promise has become obsolete. Signs begin to estrange themselves from their referents—for example, when the accusation of antisemitism is weaponized as a tool of silencing. This is not the first goodbye to Berlin. The city has undergone many endings.

Your work has been described by writer Maxi Wallenhorst as ‘casual sublime’. How do you relate to this description?

The way I understand it is that my practice has an understated matter-of-factness to it, and it’s raw about it’s procedures and also has an intensity and stripped-back precise performativity. It is through this intimate matter-of-factness and also how it draws on everydayness that gives way to moments that go beyond themselves, beyond the everyday.

In line with this, I’m interested in how the formal elements of the work trace relations between sensation and sociality. The physicality and composition that you propose in many of your works elaborate material ways of feeling time. How would you describe the specific texture of this work?

There’s a sense of unfolding, time suspended which is specific to my practice that creates a sensation of non-linear temporal experience. The writer and artist Jalal Toufic speaks of the dancer as a time-traveler. This specific work leans even more into the sense of weirding. I’ve always been interested in the theatre of the absurd with its existentialist foundations, which also usually involves living under conditions of restriction, a trap of sorts. A choreography of the absurd manifests in both vocabularies and the sensual dramaturgy’s unfolding rhythm. I’m interested in staging affective complicities between performers and between the materials themselves, creating a transtemporal archive.

How does citation work in the piece? Is it a way to place the work within a history of dance?

The choreographies are somewhat like essays or poems, and citation or invocation places them in transtemporal and transnational dialogue. And so my work is frequently intertextual, in this case, the longer quote is of the film Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972); which is to say, the showgirl dancing in the midst of fascism. A circular formation dance emerged during rehearsals, which we began calling matisse, a dance somewhat consistent with an idyllic representation of togetherness. Though in this piece the collectivity dwells in the negativity, capturing moments of falling out, forces tearing us apart in a time intentionally driving divisions between us, an aesthetics of dissociation and fragmentation. The work ends with a dance in groundlessness, a danse macabre, a Totentanz. There’s something of inhabiting the surreal of loss and of loss of meanings, and simultaneously the urgency and the necessity of continued resistance.

The set features an element resembling a golden dead tree, a menacing presence that simultaneously invokes Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a flower of mal, a root of mal. Malign Junction (Goodbye, Berlin) opens with figures between Charlie Chaplin’s silent figure, the mime, and a marching presence obsessively checking the time. I was interested in opening with anti-naturalism, a grotesque quality of caricature reflecting the social theatre we’re currently subjected to.

Following the silent figures of the beginning, the work delves into a brief moment of referencing the Giselle hands, a kind of dance-historical gesture. The story of Giselle is one of a troupe of dancers who have all died of a broken heart.

In this piece, Krzysztof Bagiński’s music and Jacqueline Sobiszewski’s light design are composed live alongside the performance. Rather than having music and lights provide a strict structure for the performers to follow, how does this live composition create a different kind of adherence or connection between the dance and these elements?

Krzysztof’s sound supports the sensation of immersion. There is also an emphasised play on the relation of sound and movement in this work, especially in the beginning with the “white noise”. The sound with the cabaret phrase creates a kind of unsettling, weird sonic space of both pleasure and foreboding. It also supports the feeling of extended time. With Jacqueline, it is our second collaboration, the first one being in 2021. Jacqueline has an immense sensitivity in responding to choreographic material, the most ethereal of materials, it’s the lights that amplify certain perceptions and affections and support the world and imaginaries that are unfolding in the performance. The lights, sound, and performers are in a danced exchange.

In your practice, scoring is a vessel for relationality. The sociality of the work is mediated through the choreographic vocabularies and the agreements the performers negotiate live. Can you talk about the role that the notion of emergence plays in the compositional techniques of the work? I believe it can be connected to the notion of “formless formation” devised by performance studies researchers Hypatia Vourloumis and Sandra Ruiz as a politically charged ecstatic form of plasticity, namely the dissipation of form, being on the edge of a form.

Some of the formations in the work are agreed upon, others happen in negotiation between the performers, others still are open or even contingent, meaning that my works frequently have emergent properties. When the work is working it has a sense of effortlessness, and things falling into place at the perfect time, kind of the way when one feels in love. And yet this effortlessness is indeed a lot of labour and practice of attention to one another. The choreography happens in the density of the performers’ presence and the forms find meaning in the intensity of exchange of the vocabularies between them The practice allows forms to emerge through this collective negotiation and listening. This produces a palpable sense of feeling through form, it’s about being with and dancing with others on the edge of a form.

• Excerpts from an interview conducted by Andrea Rodrigo in April 2025 and commissioned by PW Magazine

Andrea Rodrigo is a curator and researcher in the field of contemporary dance and choreography. Her research focuses on the potential of form for the production of aesthetic and political sensibilities, the transmission of somatic forms of knowledge and the body as a site of emergence and ideological inscription.