a Punch of Losers

In among the endless swells of history, how are the tales of the defeated recorded and told? What is it that sustains their tireless, almost childlike persistence on regrouping so as to be “defeated better”?

Lenin’s well-known phrase “one step forward, two steps back” captures the rhythm of this work perfectly – a personal and poetic rumination by the choreographer Margarita Trikka on the histories of the defeated. She brings a select group of dancers to the stage – yet another band of tireless fellow travelers who face the consequences of their desire not to abandon the fray head on. Their rhythmically steady footfalls really do have an oscillatory sort of urgency that at times explodes from their bodies and at others fades away like the echo of a glorious battle – like a sharp intake of breath let gently out.

With her "a Punch of Losers", Margarita Trikka comes out “in favor of the defeated living amid the makings of history” and urges us to preserve the daring and the delight of childhood – a necessary condition if we are to tirelessly defend our vulnerable selves. And if everything seems inescapably to lead towards the melancholy of resistance, the choreographer overturns any and every form of defeatism by finding dignity in the fights of the defeated.

“We are the defeated. We are the ones who never accept defeat. Those ridiculous ones… If there is nothing to fight for, we will find something. And we mourn the last battle lost – not because we lost but because it may have been our last.” These words open the latest work by the Prolet OCD dance company, the second part of a trilogy taking defeat as its theme.

In an interview, the choreographer Margarita Trikka notes the following with regard to that eternal battle between body and mind: “The body has memory and a special kind of genius all of its own. Just like there’s collective memory, for example, or a collective conscience, well there’s a collective bodily memory too. I think that whenever we dance, a little battle takes place over what kind of intellect will win out. Clearly the bodily intellect is playing on home turf and so it’s easy for it to dominate at first, for the brain’s thought processes to quiet down at last. When we dance, we get that familiar feeling of not thinking anything at all. But I don’t believe there’s a break in our thought processes, not at all. There they are, keeping guard in some corner, and the moment we truly surrender ourselves to physicality… Boom! Out they pop, all sly, to ruin things. And so the battle begins again.”

Is there a history of the defeated? We know that history, as a rule, aligns itself with the victors. And those in power walk down avenues opened up by the victorious. However, the losses of the defeated are not always material in nature, are not just connected with the spoils carried away by the winners. Losses are often also incurred through the effacement of time – of the memories that can bring the fight back to life and place the defeated back into the annals of history.