"Border Strip" (William Wheeler)

by Diego Chamy

The following text is a review of a performance that had place at Ausland, Berlin, on December 6^th, 2006. The performance was part of the festival “Tanznacht – Tanz made in Berlin”.

Is it possible to draw up the basis of a new economic theory through a performance? Through a performance that seems quite innocent and even innocuous?

When a travesty is presented to us we are used to immediately find a complete series of typical marks: sex, prostitution, exuberance, poverty, street, marginality, rape, provocation, damage, trauma, exile... “Border Strip” is not an exception. But we better don’t have to trust generalizations. These marks –it is true– are still present in Wheeler’s work; but she/he is there without making faces. She/he has a great gentleness, she/he expresses energy that characterizes nobility; she/he keeps calm behind a tough life story.

“Border Strip” shows the path from an economy of exchange to an economy of desire. This is not only unexpected –we expect something else when we see all those green glamorous objects on stage–, but also close to an important revolution in the history of economic systems. If there was something that we couldn’t escape from, that was the logic of exchange. There are never fair exchanges neither are there equal exchanges. Wheeler opposes the logic of exchange with the logic of giving, of gifts. He proposes a desire area where we only see people dancing (then maybe to desire is to dance, to move). Desire is defined here as something that won’t be satisfied by an exchange, something that is full and complete by itself. “Radio signals going on the space”[1]. It is desire as an activation and incarnation of a force.

When the Green Lady (William Wheeler) has nothing, she only has her desire. It is not to desire what we do not have (negative way of desire), but to desire as our power, as to what we are capable of (positive definition). That is what defines us. You will arrive to your desire; it is always with you, even though you win a fly to Las Vegas (money flows as the perfect complement for the negative way of desire).

The Green Lady is an escapist. Her strategy is to clone herself, to become others, to be a war machine against the border police. To escape has nothing to do with being a coward (although cowardice in many cases can be a smart behavior). Escape is about creation. You escape creating a line on which you build up your life. You will find your life much more in the line you draw than in the points you must arrive to. Transvestism could be a creative escape from the economy of exchange to reach an economy of desire where the action of giving determines how the things work. The way to make the two genders’ binary logic disappear is not by adding a new gender, but by making the genders go crazy, making them explode. More genders than people; and then no genders at all. The economy of the genitals (the economy of the exchange) does no longer works. The genitals do not belong to the economy of the representation anymore. They strictly don’t represent anything.

Crossing the border doesn’t always mean to go somewhere else. It doesn’t necessarily mean to change or to escape. But maybe all this theater of political borders was a distraction used to keep the theoretical aspect of the piece safe and enable its presentation for an audience.

[1] Wheeler, William, “Border Strip”