Yeliz Pazar: POINT OF NO RETURN

In the organizer's words:

The "point of no return" is a moment that changes your entire life. Either suddenly and unexpectedly or long-awaited. It is the point at which there is no turning back, at which change takes place, whether self-determined or determined by others. What makes a moment a decisive event in this way? When does this moment begin and when does it end? In POINT OF NO RETURN, five dancers address these questions, using the dance style of waacking as the most important element. Waacking stands for living out and celebrating one's own strength beyond heteronormative norms.

Waacking is a dance style that emerged in the disco era of the 70s in the Afro Latinx American LGBTQ* community in Los Angeles. Queer people experienced exclusion and discrimination in society and had to hide their identity. In the clubs, however, they could be themselves. Waacking thus became an expressive dance to defend themselves against the oppression of racism, sexism and homophobia and to celebrate precisely those aspects that are still considered "weak" today: Femininity, vulnerability, emotionality. Typical elements are rotating arm movements, poses and an emphasis on expressiveness, all combined with disco music.

Yeliz Pazar aka Yeliz Manuka is a dancer and choreographer from Düsseldorf and co-founder of the dance collective nutrospektif (2020 - 2022 Factory Artists, tanzhaus nrw). Her work includes making urban dance cultures such as waacking more visible in the stage context and advancing them in the dance landscape. She has choreographed Dschinns at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, Get Together at the Cologne Opera and NUTRO 10 - Eine nutrospektive at tanzhaus nrw. Since 2008, she has also been part of the first generation of Waacking dancers in Germany. In 2018, she founded the Manuka Waacking Flowers, a waacking crew from NRW. In the same year, she organized THE WAACK OFF at tanzhaus nrw, the first international event of the genre in Germany. For POINT OF NO RETURN she collaborates with the Waacking dancers Enting Zhang, Kristina Kunn and Kevin Claudio Ponge Kassoma, among others.

Duration: 60 min.