Performative Mixtape

Christine Matschke
Dance journalist

High frequency stock exchange trading is just one example of how temporality has collapsed in today’s world: It takes experts three months to analyze transactions that computers can execute in three minutes. In his pamphlet entitled “Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?”, the cultural scholar and pop theorist Mark Fisher, who died in 2017, diagnosed a cultural exhaustion syndrome that he attributed to the uncontrollable dynamization of time: Today, the idea of the end of the world seems to many more realistic than the end of capitalism. Christoph Winkler, the freelance political choreographer who works in Berlin since 1998 with a long-standing, non-European ensemble and a continued intuition for current affairs, dedicates the performative mixtape “It’s all forgotten now” to Fisher. Together with ten performers in a live setting, and, due to entry restrictions caused by the Coronavirus pandemic, also via video transmission, he wants to take up Fisher’s associative-essayistic working method in dance. And of course (as usual), certainly not without the necessary humor. After all, the “pandemic of mental suffering” needs to be actively confronted.