Berlin

The train journey to Berlin was about 22 hours over five trains and four layovers. It was actually not so eventful, other than that the train of the final leg, which stretched from midnight to 6AM, was so packed that I didn’t get a seat and spent most of the time on the floor next to a door.

Attempt at sleeping, leaning against a wall. To no avail.

At one point while taking my (third) hourly walk through the cars, I found a free seat (was exhilarated) and placed my bag on it while I sought out the bathroom, but when I returned a massive man had put it on the floor and was sprawled out. I was already feeling like the victim of the world and didn’t even consider confronting him, so I groaned and stalked away and returned to my floor spot.

At about 5AM I found an unoccupied bench, put on my eye mask back and passed out, so I arrived to the Berlin Sudkreuz station with an hour of sleep under my belt. I hadn’t eaten sufficiently since my last breakfast at Nada and Carlo’s so I waited outside a supermarket until it opened at 7AM. I bought:

Blueberry yogurt, three bananas, two nectarines, a cucumber, some cheese, some cured meat that was extremely cheap but kind of resembled lox, and an avocado. Consumed all of it.

I checked into my first of what would be a series of three Airbnbs a few hours later. Understandably, I was a wreck physically and emotionally, and I went in and out of sleep until the early evening. Then I remembered a food place that Moritz (whom I met in Florence) had recommended, Khartoum, and I was hungry again and was told that a walk would behove me, so I made my way to the neighborhood of Kreuzburg.

A very casual vegetarian North African place that used some kind of nut butter as a sauce, and tofu and halloumi instead of meat. I asked the man working there if he knew Moritz and showed him a picture, but unfortunately he did not recognize him.

It took me a few days to reach any kind of emotional equilibrium with Berlin, but I think it was an appropriate city to experience this demanded trajectory of recuperation. I think that’s suggestive even by the colors (many more expressions of the conspicuous relations/dynamics of color to come). Since I spent so much longer in Berlin than I had spent anywhere else previously, it also allowed for this kind of gradual readjustment to living, so that I was eventually able to engage in the more energizing pockets of the city — kind of like the yellow bridge in the midst of the grayness, or the green cones in the water, or the orange building toward the background. I guess the most generous interpretation of this little metaphor is that the city accepted my grayness while softly encouraging experiences of color.

A section of the wall.

Thanks to my former choreography teacher, Barry, I was able to connect with Arnold Dreyblatt, who is an American artist based in Berlin — a composer and a visual artist — and we arranged for me to help him organize his archive during my time in the city. Here is his website (with which I am extremely familiar at this point):

https://www.dreyblatt.net/

I won’t say much about him or my experience with him just because he is quite a public figure, but it was especially cool for me to see all of the programs from the past >4 decades of all of his shows, which took place all over Europe and also in New York. We also talked quite a bit about choreographing and composing — the similar methods and challenges.

It was great to have some structure to my time in Berlin and also to get a whole insight into an artist’s trajectory, especially outside of the United States. I’m very grateful that it worked out for me to do this.

On one of the first evenings I went to a dance performance at a small venue, in a small blackbox theater. It was post modern in a very familiar way. At this point however I was still suffering significantly, and a symptom can be extreme fatigue to the point that I can barely stay awake if I am not moving or talking. This makes watching a performance challenging. To try to counter it, I had to tense up every muscle in my whole body for the entire duration, which in itself is exhausting. Of course I missed a great deal of the actual dance aspects of the performance because I was expending so much energy in a disconnected direction which decreased my capacity for focusing. But watching a dance performance is probably one of the more interesting scenarios for having to deal with this issue in such a way.

The Berlin trains are pristinely straightforward, but I had not yet gotten used to the Berlin buses, and my journey back from the performance required a bus. It was dark at this point and I was having great difficulty finding the bus stop.

I was kind of wandering when I noticed two antsy groups on either side of me. One group was a family of three from Australia, I later found out, and another woman, and the other was a guy around my age and an older man. It became clear to me that we were all looking for the same bus and could not find the stop. I kind of walked between both groups looking confused, indicating that I was in the same boat. Then the guy about my age asked if I spoke English, and we confirmed that we both needed the bus, and I led us over to the other group, and another woman I hadn’t even noticed joined us, so that there was a total of 8 of us looking for the bus. We were all visitors other than the older guy, who was from Berlin but had absolutely no idea where the stop was.

So there we were wandering around like a bunch of goons looking for the bus stop, and I just found the situation absolutely hilarious. We did find the stop eventually, primarily thanks to the Australian family. It turns out the guy my age is from India, named Fahad, and had arrived in Berlin about a week earlier to study sports analysis and would be staying in Berlin for at least a year for his studies. For the last four years, directly after graduating high school, he had worked as a sailor. (His father is a sailor so he kind of stepped right into his shoes.) A lot of what he told me sounded straight out of Moby Dick — like having to deal with ropes on the deck during a storm, the waves surging above his head and crashing down onto him. Really interesting. A nice companion to have.

A very lively pride parade that I came upon:

I returned to Khartoum after a few days, and there was another man there who worked there so I decided to show him a photo of Moritz as well. Indeed, he recognized him immediately, and Moritz emailed me several days later that he had gone and had received his meal for free, all because of this great circle of connection.

Part of the Kulturforum, which is a collection of cultural buildings in what was formerly West Berlin. It was first constructed in the 1950’s and ’60’s as a response to the cultural incoherence of the city.

The Neue Nationalgalerie was the first of the buildings to be completed. Before the war the collection of the museum had been displayed in the Museumsinsel and then the Kronprinzen-Palais. After the post-war division of the city the collection had been dispersed, and so the museum was built to recompile the collection for public display.

Reunion.

Food successes:

This is a doner. I would estimate that there is an average of 1.2 doner shops per block in Berlin. This one is from the best place I found, called Baba’s. The doners are almost always 5.5 Euros. There was a span of 5 days when I had an average of 1.4 per day. (They were the huge majority of my diet while there. +blueberry yogurt and chocolate milk.)

Food failures (no matter how appetizing some may look.)

I said “what is this" and clearly the woman thought I said “can I have this,” or something.

“zucchini quiche”?

Features from the East Side Gallery, a string of murals on the longest still-standing stretch of the Berlin Wall.

From an exhibit at the Jewish Museum:

I was actually quite appalled at this exhibit. I would be interested to hear anyone else’s thoughts. The faces were made of heavy metal, and made an unpleasant, very heavy sound when walked upon (designed to be walked upon.) The sound could be heard throughout the nearby galleries, so that there was a kind of ominous foreshadowing of what was going on before you saw it. But I certainly did not expect to come upon this.

The prospect of walking across this stretch, as if it were a balancing challenge, is pretty repulsive to me. I was shocked that nearly every person who came upon this room indeed proceeded to walk across. I noticed one man who also just stood on the side, watching. I felt uncomfortable even taking a picture of the scene, but it is a provocative and thus meaningful sight.

On one of my last days I went to a talk by a choreographer from India, who has his own company there.

He also holds frequent dance classes for people with Parkinson’s disease. He emphasized how he does not even acknowledge the fact of their disabilities during the classes, and treats the dancers as if they were conventionally healthy.

I thought the most interesting part about his work is how he apparently assigns the dancers in his company to engage with non-dance activities but framed as a sort of training for dance. For instance, he is in the process of arranging for all of the dancers to spend an hour before some of the sessions farming a small plot of land which they will own, as a way to connect with something and bring that sense of connection directly to their experience of dancing. Sounds mighty utopian.

Where my time in Berlin ends is ambiguous, but for now I’ll end it with this intriguing woman.