Dani Brown’s THE PRESSING is an exploration of CUNT, straddling the somatic, the scenic and the damn-right slippery. The performance interlaces Brown’s voice, body and choreographic practice. Through physical, visceral and humorous states, she investigates and reappropriates CUNT, a once-revered word that Brown now writes in all caps as a “subversive act in terms of how it shows up on the page”. Similar to many female and femme-identifying artists before her, Brown continues a lineage of artistic enquiry driven by the need to examine her own assigned gender and sexual anatomy. Born and raised in Rochester, NY, Brown quickly danced her way across continents. After working with Kampnagel theatre in Hamburg for five years, she arrived in Berlin in 2012 and landed dance gigs with the likes of Ligia Lewis and Dragana Bulut. When not dancing, Brown is also a member of MINT, a collective of choreographers working with intimacy coordination in film and TV. Leading up to THE PRESSING, we caught up with her to discuss funding, butterflies and the forces that seem “to be pressing down on all of us”.
How did you conceive THE PRESSING? Was there a particular catalyst that began the research?
When I started, I was really frustrated with my assigned (and assumed) femme gender. I went into the studio needing to physicalise, to experience my existence (far) beyond any gender. But slowly, this process brought me around to recognising the inherent and immense wisdom and power of CUNT. ‘CUNT’ is clearly a femme-coded term (well, that’s one way to put it anyway), but I was interested in what CUNT has to offer all of us, however we identify. From that moment, I set out to create a CUNT-centric scenic object. I use the term ‘scenic object’ because it set up a particular procedure around how I wanted to conceive – this live thing which could be taken in from many different perspectives.
The work reappropriates the word ‘CUNT’, which obviously has more than one connotation. What does that word evoke in you?
I got to get into the weeds a bit regarding the history of the word, whose original meaning was synonymous with, among other things: woman, queen, wisdom and creation. It’s a word with a lot of power. Today, the power is in its subversiveness, but even before it was subversive, CUNT just was. In the 13th century, it was the word both to name female genitalia and to simultaneously regard it as the seat of great wisdom and creation. In me, CUNT evokes the sensation of something tightly coiled, both protective and bursting at the seams, utterly slippery in its complexity, something sneaky and magical. It evokes a sensation of centre.
Are there layers of vulnerability (both physical and emotional) when exposing your genitalia? How do you manage this level of intimacy with the audience?
Because I work with my body, it’s in one instance super holy and in the next, just the material I work with – precious, but also not. It shimmers. I imagine this might be difficult to understand if your day job isn’t centred around your body and its ability to express something. I feel less vulnerable about being naked than I do about physiologically softening my heart, throat and jaw in front of an audience, or even speaking and singing. When I’m bending over and the focus is specifically my genitalia, as opposed to just being naked, then I definitely have a quick moment, like, ‘Oh yeah, right. We’re doing that now’, but after that moment it’s just the material again.
The set design incorporates floral arrangements and live butterflies. How did you decide on those elements?
Among the many alternatives CUNT offers to dominant ways of being, I find myself increasingly drawn to its quiet darkness.
Back in 2015 when I first began working on what became THE PRESSING, I had a late-night showing at O Espaço do Tempo in Portugal. The studio was filled with half-wilting floral arrangements left over from an anniversary celebration, and because it was summer, hundreds of night butterflies swarmed the space. Those delicate creatures became permanently embedded in the work. Years later while developing the stage design, I was drawn to the vanitas paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries and interpreted parallels with the world of CUNT: beauty and decay, pleasure and impermanence, life, death. The butterfly, found in many vanitas as well, became a central symbol: metamorphosis and desire, not to mention the obvious visual trope of butterfly wings symbolising the labia.
You received Wiederaufnahme (resumption) funding to stage the show. Was it a long time coming?
I’ve been applying for production funding from the Berlin Senate since 2012 and to HKF since 2020. Fourteen years later, the Wiederaufnahme grant is my first funding from the city. The onset of cultural funding cuts (2024) has done a lot to highlight how fucked up the current system is. Last year, I joined the AG Tanzförderung organized by members of the Zeitgenössischer Tanz Berlin. We recently put together a petition to fundamentally restructure the funding system for dance, with the aim of creating a sustainable foundation for research, development and production.
Four years have passed since the premiere at Radialsystem. Have your feelings towards the work or the message in it shifted during this time?
The summer before we premiered, in 2022, Roe v. Wade was overturned, and that felt deeply prescient. Four years later, there’s certainly a part of me that wants to connect the work more directly to what is currently unfolding in the world, to the forces that seem to be pressing down on all of us. But there’s this thing about CUNT. They’re ancient. Among the many alternatives CUNT offers to dominant ways of being, I find myself increasingly drawn to its quiet darkness: a space of stillness, receptivity and depth that stands in stark contrast to a culture of constant production, performance and reaction. Right now, that feels both radical and necessary.
THE PRESSING will be on from Aug 6-9 at Radialsystem. For more info, visit their website and follow Dani Brown @danibrownberlin
