Dinner with Claudia, breakfast with Cheburashka

[imomus]

I had dinner on Saturday night at my friend Eric's apartment in Prenzlauerberg. Anne Laplantine was there with her partner Xavier, and Eric's wife Antonia had invited fellow Portugese Claudia de Serpa Soares, who's a dancer with the Sasha Waltz company. (I actually first met Claudia through my New York friend Hiroshi Sunairi when I visited Berlin in 2000.) Over Portugese oysters, pork and chips I asked Claudia questions about dancing -- a bourgeois profession that works with the body! Dance fascinates me, not only because the body is so repressed and neglected in our culture, but because it's hardly the ideal communications medium. Every contemporary dance piece, to some extent, has to start from scratch in the way it assigns meaning to gesture. But I guess the body, even if what it communicates is hard to pin down, is powerfully expressive precisely because something so emotive is so repressed in daily life: because we hide and 'armour' the body (in Wilhelm Reich's sense), we build up pressure, and dance is a way of releasing that pressure and directing the resulting energy.



Claudia told me about the constant bruising dancers get all over their bodies, slamming into each other, demolishing props, being lifted and swung through the air. They're the kind of bruises we all had as kids, but most of us stopped getting when we stopped playing. She told me about the way a dancer's body is always changing, depending on the piece being performed and the demands it makes. She said that although Sasha Waltz isn't interested in commercial choreography like the kind seen on MTV, she -- Claudia -- is a big fan of Michael Jackson's dancing and recently went to see Justin Timberlake's show in Berlin, because she thinks he's a great dancer. She said the show was spectacular, but gave an impression of deadness, as if nothing had been left to chance.

It turns out that Claudia and I will be in Moscow at the same time later in March. She's doing two performances of Korper, Waltz's piece about the Holocaust, while I'm there for my concert. I don't think I'll be able to see the show though (it's one I've only seen on TV) because the Russians have added a second show for me in the Udmurtian city of Izevsk, near the Ural mountains. I'm pretty happy about the chance to get out of Moscow and see another part of the Russian Federation, though.



To promote the show I was asked to write an essay about my impressions of Russia for the Moscow magazine Private Time. I ended up saying that I hoped Moscow would be like the place in cult children's animation Cheburashka (click the photo above to hear him sing). I first became aquainted with this cute animal of indeterminate species in Japan: Cheburashka became a major cult there a couple of years ago, with his own exhibition, book, DVD and film. I got a rather excited e mail back from a Moscow DJ called Tim Ovsenni, who told me:

'At the moment in Moscow there's a dance party movement made of people who consider themselves to be Cheburashkas (or, Cheburashki, as the Russian plural sounds). Their main (and perhaps only) principle is "You can't divide cheburashki into cheburashki and cheburashki". Cheburashki's slogan is "We Have The Ears" and they get together every Saturday night in a small club for a dance party featuring Moscow's best intellectual DJs and free oranges.

'The idea behind the cheburan-parties is simple: good people get together to listen to good music and have a good time... not to show how much money they've got or how cool they are. On the other hand it happened so, that among cheburashki there are many musicians, designers and journalists. It is not only cheburashki who go to cheburan-parties. You can be a crocodile, or a rat, or a ginger-bread man, or just a cheburashka's friend. You don't have to dress up - it's all inside the mind.

'The latest party preceeded a national holiday "The Day Of The Defenders Of The Motherland", or "The Soviet Army Day" as it used to be called. OUR holiday was called "The Day of The Defenders of The Crocodiles", since crocodile is Cheburashka's best friend. There are other famous cheburan-holidays, e.g. "Dependance Night", celebrated on Russian "Independence Day". The invitations to cheburan-parties are printed on active carbon pills. As you may know, it is a universal absorption agent used in medicine, different filters etc. Its importance for chebursahki comes from its ability to effectively cure chemical and alcohol intoxications extracting toxins from the alimentary canal. Active carbon tablets are also known as "Cheburashka's Breakfast".'

(You can download mp3s of Cheburashka here.)

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

if you don't like the way capitalism is kept going, then talk revolution in terms of change of world government or of drastically cutting back on the things you consume

I don't have a car and I don't have children. I have moved to a country -- Germany -- whose policies on ecology and war I find enlightened. People who think 'liberal' is a dirty word and that liberalism is destroying the world strike me as particularly misguided. John F Kerry has proposed a 'Manhattan Project' to come up with alternatives to oil (and oil wars) as fast as possible. He will also get the US back into the Kyoto process when elected.

Cheborashki

[(Anonymous)]

Hello Momus,
I am David, a Swedish expat-student teenager in Moscow, googled to your thread in a search for DJ Tim and his Cheborashki-themed parties
It would be great if you could supply me with the DJ's e-mail adress!

- David_mockba@hotmail.com
ps. Liked your show at Art Garbage!
Btw, have you seen the Che Borashka T-shirts by some Siberian artist? They show the Cheborashka posing with a beret and an AK + a a well trimmed beard