Scene from performance work, Tub © Bodycrisis / MG (IMAGE 21)
This important question also provided the background for most audience reactions to the project. We performed Bodies of Crisis for festival and academic audiences in London and Coventry (UK) as well as Bremen (Germany) with 30 to 80 people attending at any one time. In different organized feedback formats as well as informal conversations, spectators reacted to aspects of the performance they deemed well-suited (or not) to creating a transcultural understanding of historical experience. German audience members tended to refer to the relationship between memory work and nostalgia, a good reminder of enduring discursive parameters. Some were pleased by the emphasis on quotidian experience, even though it might not lend itself easily to political ideologization. Others were concerned that the performance offered no commentary framing the particular historical experience of GDR women in a socialist dictatorship, since this provided the main material. These viewers wanted to draw out the dangers of nurturing a possibly nostalgic view on the past, in contrast to UK spectators who could identify with images, quotidian behavior, and the depicted conflicts. The latter felt encouraged to become engaged in a transcultural conversation of crisis experience. Yet, since the performance work had been the collective creation of performers from multiple cultural backgrounds, it ceased “belonging” to a single cultural meta-narrative. As such, talking about nostalgia, for example, a main driver for memory discourses of German and anglophone publics, proved meaningless to Arab spectators, who were instead eager to discuss the necessity to re-perform the specific politics of the body on stage, displaying unshaven female nudes.