„Ride the train until it’s over“

Liz Rosenfeld im Gespräch über Berlin und New York City, #meetoo und Queerness, ihre Show „If you ask me what I want, I’ll tell you. I want everything“ und andere Körperbilder auf der Bühne.

Wir sitzen uns an einem schmalen Tisch direkt gegenüber. Liz ist sehr präsent und konzentriert. Sie sieht mir stetig in die Augen und geht mal mehr, mal weniger präzise auf meine Fragen ein. Schon auf meine E-Mail antwortete sie auf Englisch, sie hoffe, das sei okay, aber ihr Deutsch sei nicht so gut. Also Englisch.

Liz, you came to Germany ten years ago. What were your expectations?   

I was hoping that it would – which it did – provide this portal and new opening into something… I didn’t really know what I was looking for. Berlin is a city with such a visible history. Particularly as an American I had never grown up in a country where the trauma of history was so present on the surface of the city. I came right after my mom died to reconnect with my family-roots, because my grandmother had been from Berlin. I even went back to the house she’d fled from. 

Did you come to stay?

I didn’t know. I came as a second-mourning, actually. I came to re-identify with myself. I always say, I came Berlin looking for the Jewish Diaspora that was always withheld from me. But what I found was a new connection with a Queer Diaspora.  

Why was the Jewish Diaspora withheld from you?

Nobody ever wanted to talk about the stories from those times. But I grew up living with the people that experienced it. I always knew that something bad had happened, also vaguely from school. But, as history is taught in school, that was all very one-sided and at least in the US it’s not a terribly layered education. It’s more like teaching facts that are mostly not true. 

You are from New York City. How different are the two cities from your personal experience in terms of producing your art in communities? 

I love NYC, It’s my hometown, but it began to change for me a lot. I come from a very Do It Yourself, punk, queer experience in general and from early on, that was a very big part of my life. As you get older, people start to individuate and start to move into their own kind of practice. My practice has always been collaborative – and it still is. Even if it’s manifested through what looks like a solo practice, it never really is. I consider collective practice as part of the medium of the work that I make. Berlin provided me with a different sense of time and space. Leaving the US was an extremely important decision I made. I consider myself very lucky and privileged to live amongst a truly international perspective. After leaving the US I realized how my understanding of globalization really changed.

Has there ever been a point at which you thought “I’m quitting this, I’m doing something completely different” since you came to Berlin?

Oh sure. I mean, I think it is less about Berlin than it is more about the precarity of being an artist, which, frankly, I never really imagined myself doing full-time. It’s something that you hope for and I feel very lucky that it seems to be working out right now. I am definitely of the ideology that you ride the train until it’s over. But I also think that I don’t only want to do this forever. Of course, there’ll be a part of me that will always be creatively busy and engaged. For a lot of my life here I was a professional chef, I did almost anything to make money. It wasn’t only until about four years ago that I was doing this full-time. I hope it lasts. But I do also think that it’s important to not only make art or be an artist. I think that it can be a very closed-off and thus could turn into a dangerous and selfish subjectivity and it’s something that I’m very aware of. I need other things to invest in that are not related to my practice. 

© Alexa Vachon

What is your current show about, “If you ask me what I want, I tell you. I want everything”, that you show at the Performing Arts Festival?

I was particularly interested in making a movement-based piece. It is about how the reality of climate change and queer relationships work together towards a future. I am asking what happens between bodies when sustainable recourses and energies are exhausted and all we are left with is flesh. What is potential of the material of flesh? How can we work with it? One of the methodologies I worked with in creating this piece was that I invited my friends into the studio with me, whether they were movers, dancers, performers, whatever, not even all artists, to have an exchange. That is how I started to choreograph the piece. 

But in the end you’re alone on stage?

This is the first time I’ve done a solo. It’s actually really not a solo. I’m alone but I’m not alone. It starts with me getting tattooed for example. While I am getting the Berlin weather of the day tattooed, the audience witnesses a conversation between me and Fercha, the tattoo artist, about our memories of the weather. Mika, who is doing the live sound, is performing the whole time because she’s reacting to my movements and singing live. And Sondra/Eva, the light designers, come out on stage with me where we are moving lights around together. I really love seeing transparency and process in work. 

Would you label your work queer?

Yes. 

And how then, in your words, would you define queerness? 

It’s hard now because queerness is such a homogenised, plastic, almost-fake, overtly canonised term. It’s hard to know what it means anymore. For me, queerness is about the way things are made and lived. And the economies that we create in order to live and make the things that we want. It’s not only necessarily about identity politics. In fact, I think we need to acknowledge that the ideologies of representation and identity politics are at a place where we need to move beyond the simplicity of how they are used by a collective cannon. They have been so exhausted and in many ways just taken advantage of by mainstream politics and thereby destroyed. I think that queerness is really about this constant state of finding ways of living and doing things differently. But also for people who are forced to exist outside of dominant ideologies and dominant recognitions. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily all about gender or all about sexuality. 

You say, that your roots are very much in this queer, punk, DIY culture. When and under which conditions did you actually start creating art? 

I think I always kind of did it. I can’t remember when I wasn’t making something. I always say, I don’t have a coming-out story, where I sat down with my parents and was like ‘okay guys, I’m a queer person’. I just kind of was. 

That’s how it should be. 

I have always lived in a non-binary body. But this is something that I’m actually just recently articulating for myself, nearly at the age of 40. It’s never been specifically about my gender but about my embodiment, in various ways. My size, the way I move through the world, my queer relationality, all of these things. I am unpacking it right now. But it’s a very – not new development at all, but kind of like an outing in a sense, I suppose. 

I found this beautiful quote of you saying “I don’t feel the pressure to be anything other than who I am.” Is that how you feel today?

Yes. Definitely. I mean, that’s the ideal. And when I do feel the pressure to be something else, I just try to think of that. You can’t really be in this field and not feel expectations at a certain point. I really try to disrupt these linear, systematic ways, like audience expectation. I am curious how to queer an audience structure, where it’s not about the consumption of ideas – but I’m not really sure of what yet either. 

How do you address this issue of queering an audience structure in “If you ask me what I want, I’ll tell you. I want everything”?

I try to make it as hard for myself as possible by setting it up in a circle, having a small audience. I can’t hide anything from the audience in this performance. You see everything, from the marks on my body to when something goes technically wrong. This performance is my first exploration into this question.

Is there anything you hope that the audience will take away from your performance?

In the last couple of years I have been very embraced by the contemporary dance scene of Berlin. I realised, that as a filmmaker and a performance artist, it was really hard, not to have this history of training and dance in my body but still desire to be a mover, amongst dancers. I want to present the visual of another body in performance and dance moving on stage and the possibilities it can present. For me, this piece is really physically hard. And even people who see it are like ‘god, I just felt exhausted from watching you’. I don’t really need them to understand what it’s about or feel like they saw the most amazing thing in the world, but I want them to feel like they witnessed a body in process. And a body working for it. I get questions a lot from the dance and performance community, like ‘What else can you do? What else can this be? I just wanted to know what more you can do?’ I think these questions are interesting, but personally, I want to know how they felt while watching me, not what I can technically do better or more of.

Would you consider your work personal – and political?

I think both very much, yes. For me, I really rely on the personal. Because that is how I connect with people the best: being really transparent and open about who I am, what my desires are, what my internal conflicts are. And in terms of politics – as cheesy as the old second wave feminist saying goes, it is true on some levels. I am really invested in emotional connection with people through the work that I do. For me, that is when space moves. When people feel things. Not so much when politics are thrown at them. But that they actually feel emotionally moved through something. Then I think that something deep is going on inside people. And that is when radical space can shift and be activated. 

I just read this morning that Harvey Weinstein handed himself in to the New York police. 

What are your thoughts on the #metoo movement?

I have various thoughts on it. I think that it’s initially amazing and super important. And frankly, I think that it’s about time that male bodies of a new generation have to think before they speak and have to think before they do and have to think before they take up space. Even if it seems overly cautious to many – I’m like: I don’t care. It’s time that female subjectivity is taken seriously. 

Yes. 

I come from a generation, where female identified people were questioning whether they had been raped or not or sexually assaulted or not. They were often made to feel that they had imagined something. It wasn’t until ten years ago that I started talking to my female identified friends about this and every single one of us had an experience of sexual assault and we felt at the time it wasn’t important enough, or significant enough, or defined enough to come out about. For fear we wouldn’t be taken seriously about it. For that case the #metoo movement is really important. 

But on the other hand?

I get just as worried that #MeToo it going to get swallowed up by an economy of neoliberal capitalism, I mean, it already is. As important as the need for female dominated structures are in mainstream economies like Hollywood, as well as in non-mainstream economies, those structures prominently consist of white, rich, ciswomen. And that in itself, this is really problematic. I would love to see white women relinquish their power to women of colour. I think that is the future we should be working towards: POC females of all genders…. They are the actual queer bodies of this world.

Liz Rosenfeld ist eine interdisziplinäre Künstlerin aus New York City. Seit 10 Jahren lebt sie in Berlin. Mit ihren Arbeiten bewegt sie sich zwischen Film, Video und Performance. Rosenfeld ist Teil des Kollektivs nowMomentnow. Ihre Arbeiten wurden u.a. im HAU, C/O Berlin und der Tate Modern gezeigt. Beim Performing Arts Festival ist sie am 9. und 10. Juni mit ihrer Performance „If you ask me what I want, I’ll tell you. I want everything” in den Sophiensælen zu sehen. 

Von Aïsha Mia Lethen Bird