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Martin Hansen: If It’s All In My Veins. 03.06.2018, Sophiensaele, Berlin.

If Martin Hansen’s If It’s All In My Veins is a Marxist approach and commentary on the valuation of the image, then it has produced a relationship of estrangement with the dance canon – despite how all the material comes from iconic snippets – which means that the workers (performers), excluded from dance, will never produce an image of their own, and will forever be in service of. This is where for me pathos and humor collided, in the soup of desire, and the heartbreaking fact of devotion and labor for something so fickle.

On the night before this show, at a bar, my neighbor to his friend, “the internet is dying because it’s so inefficient”.

A dance career, a dance icon, a lifetime of achievement in the field: compressed, rendered, squeezed into a gif. While Hansen could engage with the dance archive in order to insert himself into a prestigious lineage, I see humility in that this lineage is presented within an entangled relationship with time and value, and though the reality presented to us seems stifling, Hansen nurtures a slick and groovy party full of theatre magic, heartfulness, and humorous abandon.