Beauty of Accident: Quarto at the Uferstudios Berlin by Nanne op't Ende

Beauty of Accident: Quarto at the Uferstudios, Berlin, on 23 August 2014

By Nanne op't Ende

Anna Mesquita and Leandro Zappala accomplish something of a fakir’s trick in the performance ‘Beauty of Accident’. For 45 five minutes, the two artists work a 600-meter rope by hauling it in – over and over again, up to a point where they become a function of the rope. The result couldn’t have been more impressive if they had made the rope stand up straight and had climbed up to disappear in the sky.

Dressed in black sneakers, jeans and hooded sweaters, their faces covered by a shawl, the artists are reduced to two anonymous bodies in motion. Initially, their sole purpose seems to be to haul in the rope, reducing the large pile in one corner of the stage to form a new pile in another corner. The first associations I had were of a critical social-economic nature: hard manual labour with little reward; insatiable and pointless accumulation; taxation and redistribution; the benefits of collaboration.

Meanwhile, the pull in the rope creates a pulse every time it hits the floor. The sound is picked up by microphones and amplified by speakers. The pulse runs through the play like a heartbeat and the rope becomes a line of life, its amplitude and pace are signs of effort and excitement. It runs faster, slows down; at some point it is even reduced to slow-motion. When the rope has a lot of slack and is pulled in with broad movements from left to right, it makes that swooshing sound of a heart pumping blood through the body. 

Suddenly it hits me that the two artists standing side by side will not haul in a loose rope any faster than one of them would: the joint effort actually reduces their productivity  because exciting new patterns only arise when both performers are working the rope at different places and in different ways. Synchronisation here merely serves to create a sense of common purpose, harmony and – why not? – choreography, that is offset by the impression that the bodies have become subordinate to the process at hand.

Each time the performers reach the end of the rope, they take it to another part of the stage and start hauling again. The physical strain becomes visible; audible in amplified panting. The hands are the only uncovered parts of the body and their gestures are like poetic annotations to the tiresome process. Changes in amplitude – the extent to which the arms stretch and swing backwards behind the body – determine the lengths of rope pulled in each time but also influence the way the rope coils across the floor.

At some point the rope takes on a life of its own, writhing across the floor, winding away from the performers that haul it in, almost as in writing. Its movements have an hypnotising effect, almost as if the snake is charming us, the audience, rather than to dance to the tunes of the snake-charmer’s flute. The performers start moving around as they pull in the rope, dropping it in gestures reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s action painting or more evenly distributed in lines or in circles. Occasionally, they work in opposite direction or hinder each other but even these situations give rise to new transformations of the rope.

Various ways of pulling; subtle variations in speed and intensity – even if the bodies seem to function only as machines that transport the rope from one end of the stage to another, they become instruments of intricate story-telling and pure dance. The greatest accomplishment of the artists is that they often appear to be the unconscious agents of the piece rather than its cunning, intelligent, creative makers and performers – thus allowing the audience plenty of slack to tell its own imaginative stories.