Gottschilds Dance to the Rhythm of Interracial Issues Performance of Tongue Cheek Color Awakens the Senses and the Mind

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"In the beginning, there was curiosity," stated Brenda Dixon Gottschild in this weekend's performance of "Tongue Smell Color," and she was right - there certainly was an immense feeling of curiosity as audience members filled the Center for the Arts (CFA) Dance Studio on Friday night. The piece had been advertised as "a movement theater discourse," but no one in the audience seemed prepared for the work's remarkable and often shocking exploration of issues surrounding race, nationality and gender.

With a set that included only nine or 10 chairs, a table and a few props and costume pieces, Brenda Dixon Gottschild and Hellmut Gottschild took their astounded audience on a journey through the struggles of an interracial couple. As the piece progressed, it became more and more apparent that the problems of curiosity and guilt, which the two people on stage were coping with, were not exclusive to people in their specific situation, but common to all thinking people.

The Gottschilds, who created and performed "Tongue Smell Color," are both former professors of dance at Temple University, and Brenda is the author of several books including "The Black Dancing Body, a Geography from Coon to Cool" and "Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts."

The piece used this research extensively as it interwove the stories of a present-day interracial couple and the experiences of Sara Baartman, a woman of color who was taken from her home near Cape Town, South Africa, in 1809 to Europe where she came to be known as "The Hottentot Venus." Her naked body was then displayed in freak shows and circuses to feed the European fascination with what they saw as her exotic sexuality. This juxtaposition of the two stories was particularly illuminating and disturbing, as a curiosity similar to the objectifying curiosity about "the other" expressed by the Europeans from the 19th century was seen in the modern European man's attraction to his African-American wife.

In this exploration of race issues, other issues came up. One of the most tense and striking moments in the work occurred when the man and woman were comparing notes about their childhood, the woman having grown up in New York and the man in a German city. The audience was laughing as the woman reeled off details about her Chinese launderer, her German butcher and her Italian baker, to which the man's response was always that for him, they had all been German. Then the woman made reference to one tradesman who had been Jewish, and the playful banter was brought to an abrupt and painful halt. The man began the action of scrubbing his hands and then his whole body as though he, like Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, could see some invisible stain on his white skin which he was desperate to erase. As a child in Germany during the Holocaust, his feelings of guilt were not confined to issues of race, but rather extended to feelings of guilt from the Nazi era even though he and the woman repeated many times, "It wasn't I." Knowing that they themselves were not involved in the evil did not make it any easier to forget or forgive.

At the end of the piece, the Gottschilds opened the floor for people in the audience to express their reactions to the piece, and a discussion began that lasted for nearly 45 minutes. Responses included people who found that the piece was "a revelation" and people who were very disturbed by the feelings of guilt that were stirred in them by their recognition of ways of thinking about "the other" which were brought-up during the performance.

An interesting discussion began over whether curiosity was always bad and objectified the subject of the curiosity or whether it was possible for there to be good forms of curiosity that aid understanding. Although no clear-cut conclusion was reached, it was interesting to hear the thoughts that were being exchanged and provoked by the conversation. No two reactions to the piece were the same. Some people were deeply disturbed by what they saw as the overwhelmingly negative portrayal the work gave of race relations, while other audience members found a strong message of hope and understanding in the work.

However, one thing that was certain was that every person in the audience, whatever his or her opinion might have been, reacted strongly to "Tongue Smell Color.".