Abecedarium Bestiarium: Portraits of affinities in animal metaphors Antonia Baehr
Antonia Baehr is a Berlin-based performance artist and choreographer whose main characteristic is the huge generosity she exhibits towards her audience.
This latest piece of work, which ran at the KFDA for far too short a period, gels very nicely with the work by Wouters and his collaborators. Baehr’s pieces are very personal and the performance works essentially through establishing intimacy with the audience as it mills around her in an open space. Her smile is warm and inviting to draw us into her world; her transvestite persona injects the performance with ambiguity.
She the perfect gentleman—immaculate suit, tie or cravat, slicked back hair, somewhat at odds with the badly chipped, bright red nail-varnish. Moreover, she is performing short works written for her by friends in Berlin, all of them about a single species extinct since 1500. Her persona transforms time and again in keeping with the scores provided for her. “Who am I?” she says, “Identity is a fable”.
So, Baehr transforms according to the various styles and moods of the miniatures she is presenting, donning a leather jacket in imitation of a rock singer for "Y is for the Yangtze River Dolphin" and even stripping to the waist and slapping her amble bosom on the table for "M is for Martelli’s Cat" by Valérie Castan, a piece of purring and meowing and text from the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland (“We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad, you must be, or you wouldn’t have come here!”).
She uses old tape recorders and a Walkman for "The Steller’s Sea Cow Sonata for Solo Performer and Endangered Media" by Sabine Ercklentz, using an overhead projector to show drawings made in childhood by herself and her friend of an extinct European horse species, the Forest Tarpan (Isabell Spengler). The repertoire of scores is as diverse and rich as the range of friends who have written them for her.
This piece was inspired by a visit to the Natural History Museum in Paris, to the deserted upper level where there are no exciting interactive exhibits but just stuffed animals staring with glassy eyes from display cases, all marked with a black cross and the date of their presumed extinction. But Baehr challenges our acceptance of non-conformity and her work breaks a good many taboos.
She takes risks in intimate spaces with the audiences switching identities and confounding those expectations we cherish so much about fixed identities. She rounded off a recent interview with another quotation from Lewis Carroll, this time from the Duchess:
Be what you would seem to be—or, if you’d like it put more simply—never imagine yourself not to be otherwise that what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.
In drawing together artists from her everyday life, from her childhood, Baehr provokes a deeper response to the subject matter. This is personal. Life is short, relationships become more meaningful when we realise how fleeting and fragile our lives are in the context of natural history of the planet.