"F*** Me I love You" Dance Performance in the Contemporary Berlin

 Image: Dance Performance 'Fuck me I love you', photo by Vitalis Neufeld

‘This city is not place for love. The people are too fragile to be genuine, too shrewd to be open. One becomes accustomed to immerse oneself in so many vain interests and ultimately lose sight of what is real’. Heinrich von Kleist, 1800.

Fuck me I love you is introduced by this sentence, one pearl from the 19th century, so much actual and felt in the contemporary Berlin and in many other cities around the world. The piece created and performed by Julia Barrette-Laperrière, Nina Berclaz, Léonard Bertholet, Andrew Clarke, Fred Gehrig, Valerie Renay and Caglar Yigitogullari is directed by Shlomo Lieberman and premiered at the English Theatre Berlin/International Performing Arts Center on the 16th of November. The performance runs around interactions, connections, sexual appeal and approaches but most of all about commitment today in big, cosmopolitan, western cities where the possibility of having it all is so tangible and possible to displace focused intentions and driven desires. Some questions continue to resonate after the piece such as what commitment means today? Is it frightening to be committed? In which forms can we mould the idea of it? And what are the values attached to the idea of being committed? 

Dance Performance 'Fuck me I love you', Berlin,  photo by Vitalis Neufeld

The well staged and beautifully performed piece it’s about the quickness and fugacity of being involved and its nuances, about the desire of being committed, and at the same time free and available to something/someone else. It runs around the need/fear and attraction/repulsion to find someone to love and to feel engaged and the twisted, contradictory impulses within it. Generally the idea of being committed goes along with the concept of availability, reliability and responsibility but in the actual luxurious, fast, changing, multi-tasking and requested-to-be-ubiquitous society, is clear that the identity of commitment is changing and the call to new forms and needs is prompt to ride the upcoming trend-waves. Looking at the description of commitment in a dictionary comes out that this is related to responsibility, obligation, duty, tie, liability, burden, pressure, dedication, fidelity, bond, attentiveness, promise, pact and decision. Certain is that all those designations are correct but at the same time quite oppressive as demanding, therefore in a time and place where fun comes first, the idea of commitment changes getting extremely stratified and entangled in a much more intriguing and complex mesh. 

Dance Performance 'Fuck me I love you', Berlin, photo by Vitalis Neufeld

Focusing on diversified forms of contemporary interactions and fugacious commitments, the fresh and vibrant piece interrogates the idea of it in the present. Seven bizarre characters show ambiguous, fragile, funny, obsolete, sad, lonely realities within an open spectrum of parallel, improvised/staged scenes. In the intricate scenario of commitment today, particularly in Berlin but present in many other locations, the emotional displacement and therefore forced detachment and trend to easily jump from an option to another, have become a norm leading to consequences as various as bizarre. Numerous phenomena rose up in the universe of commitment due to the individual range of freedom and possibilities we achieved. At the same time there are values that are possibly common ground to everyone making emerge some questions related to the general idea of commitment with its own multitude agreements, understandings and acceptances. 

Dance Performance 'Fuck me I love you', Berlin, photo by Vitalis Neufeld

How much value do we give to commitment today? Is it necessary to be honest and trusting with ourselves and the others in order to commit? Do we need commitments to feel realised? Moreover, in a society where the human being tends to pursue its own self realisation and personal freedom, how much are we willing to compromise? If we and our priorities come always first, how to find an agreement? What are the sustainable forms to commit in a frivolous and fleeting world? Which are the rules and the ways to define what is applicable and what’s not? 

Dance Performance 'Fuck me I love you', Berlin, photo by Vitalis Neufeld

The infinite questions so as the endless answers foster a critical approach to the dynamics of our time and lead to interrogations that stimulate reflections on ongoing processes belonging to the spirit of this era. Doing so is possible to reach an understanding that enlarges perceptions and  initiate new visions. Going to the core of the complexity of defining the essence of commitment today, the clever, lively and amusing piece touches fragile and vivid topics offering interesting inputs to reflect on, as to question an actual and shared social phenomenon that vibrates and changes with the zeitgeist and that, for this reason, becomes a shared subject matter that involves everyone.