"BurkaBondage" is the passion and pain of two female dancers struggling for freedom from under the burka, total Islamic coverage, and the restraints of Japanese bondage. By the apparent antithesis of the two extremes of exposure and masking, Helena Waldmann follows the binary logic of power and powerlessness, pain and pleasure through to its culmination in a West-Eastern yearning for freedom and self-release.


Afghanistan, March 2001: after pointlessly firing guns and missiles for 26 days, the Taliban militia destroyed the world’s two largest standing Buddha statues in the valley of Bamiyan, using 3 tons of explosives. They left behind only rubble and the enormous gaps in the rock.

After having travelled to Kabul for the first time in 2007 to show her production „return to sender“, choreographer Helena Waldmann made a discovery in the following year: the young Afghan actors she works with call themselves “Generation Rain”. A generation that even without the reign of the Taliban is disoriented and stuck in the rut of fundamentalist history.

In Japan, a highly industrialised, rich country that couldn’t be further from Afghanistan in many ways, Helena Waldmann experiences something similar: young people who have no faith in a self-chosen future, bound by the oppressive traditions of a rigidly structured and hierarchical society, call themselves “Lost Generation”, and take the destruction of the Buddhas in distant Afghanistan personally.
Both the Japanese and the Afghan side recognise themselves in the forced disappearance of the bodies. And both arrive at corresponding questions. Are the empty niches that remained after the explosion the framework of something that has no right to exist? And what must we detonate in order to become free – the frame or what is contained within?

Helena Waldmann has found a virtually iconic image for the parallels between both generations, for the fight for visibility and unleashing: Burka and bondage. The burka is an Afghan gown that covers people up. Bondage is a Japanese technique that shackles them.

A challenge for two female dancers who love extremes, a video animation artist and a genius on the drums.
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BurkaBondage
is a production by
Helena Waldmann and ecotopia dance poductions

co-produced with Berliner Festspiele, Burghof Lörrach, Fabrik Potsdam, Forum Freies Theater Düsseldorf, Festival Theater in Bewegung Jena, Pumpenhaus Münster, Tafelhalle im KunstKulturQuartier Nürnberg, V.FESTSPIELE im Theater im Pfalzbau zu Ludwigshafen

with kind support by ITI Germany and Goethe Institut
supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds

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