Hau, Berlin
June 20-30, 2019
Veronica Posth
In a unexpectedly very warm end of June in Berlin, Hau presented The Present Is Not Enough – Performing Queer Histories and Futures. The festival, taking place from the 20th until the 30th of June, is a compendium of eclectic performances regarding the idea of queer in the future. The festival was largely sold out as expected.
The year 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising when members of the LGBTIQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/transsexual, intersex and queer/questioning) community in New York resisted constant police raids, sparking a new liberation movement in the United States and a fight for legal and social rights. This year also marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Institute for Sexual Knowledge by the German theorist Magnus Hirschfeld.
As the title declares, the present position is not enough so long as people falling from the grid of cis (a term for people whose gender identity matches the sex that they were assigned at birth) and heteronormative structures continue to be arrested, persecuted and killed worldwide. Queerness can be understood as a vision of the future, the coming time and the potential for a queer future being shaped by people and their actions.
The term ‘queer’ has a vast variety of meanings and interpretations that have been changing over the years. Originally mostly connected to alternative sexual identities, nowadays it has shifted to a new level of openness, acceptance, awareness, respect and inclusivity that appears the most sustainable way to go. Asking people what it meant to them produced a diverse range of definitions, one of the most enlightening being ‘to question the status quo’, which makes most of us are queer although just a few realise it. Whatever, at the festival it was shown through many creative forms; approached politically, personally, sociologically and ethically.
Curated by Ricardo Carmona and the Hau Team, an open call resulted in 270 proposals, from which 26 were selected for performance. It was a very international and diverse set of voices.
One of the pieces that I personally found striking was Notes from the Underlands by Romily Alice Walden, commissioned specially for the festival by Hau. In a black and white film with greenish subtitles in English and German, a synthesised voice tells what the queer future is for her (or maybe them). In an elaborate text and through 11 points she (or they) creates a broad platform to describe queer in the future.
The Manifestos for Queer Futures that opened the festival is an important step towards recognition and acceptance of what is ‘out’ from the ‘status quo’. Categories, labels, rules, structures have been and are still a big part of the system we live in, and they do need to be constantly questioned. Queer is what questions those given paradigms and moves forward towards freedom of being and acceptance of something and someone else.
The necessity to speak and be ‘outside the box’ is very much felt and expressed in Berlin but there are many places where being queer is drastically not accepted, oppressed, persecuted and punished.
It is therefore necessary to keep questioning the existing state of affairs, especially regarding social and political issues, and keep fighting intolerance, injustice, mistreatment and any kind of deplorable and unacceptable behaviour.
Read the full The Present Is Not Enough: Performing Queer Histories and Futures festival programme (in English).