Berlin Piece for Voice and Tap Dance

What role do art and culture play in a city shaken by local and global crises? In her 6 channel sound installation, Luzie Meyer turns to poetry and rhythm as tools for reflection in a dystopian present. The words in this sound piece are drawn from notes she took in her daily life over the past few months, reflecting memories of political gatherings, exhibition openings, Senate debates, and moments spent engaging with German and international media. The artist distils these “annotations” of a present charged with emotional tension and conflict, transforming the material by means of repetition, rhyme, homophony, or alliteration into sound poetry. Meyer’s work also subtly references the history of its site as a meeting place of Berlin’s workers’ movement—the former clubhouse of the Craftsmen’s Association, where figures such as Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Erich Mühsam, and Clara Zetkin once spoke. At the same time, this was also a place of celebration—where people ate, drank, and danced.

No voice without a body: Vocal space can be understood as a direct expression of physicality and a potential place of subversive agency. This is how it connects to dance. Tap dance, as both a form of dance and of music, requires intense concentration and bodily discipline to create possibilities for improvisation. The history and ambiguity of this dance form—its heterogenous associations ranging from workers’ resistance to popular entertainment—can also be read as a reference to the equally multi-layered history of this venue in Berlin-Mitte. Meyer’s sound installation is complemented by a maple board, on which tap dancer Cristina Delius created the percussive sounds that served Meyer as the rhythmic foundation for the piece. — Kito Nedo