Made in Bangladesh

What lies behind the words “Made in Bangladesh”?
Helena Waldmann, with twelve Bangladeshi Kathak dancers, investigated Bangladesh’s infamous textile factories and translated into dance the working conditions that she found there. Waldmann stripped all the ornamentation from the north Indian Kathak dance, in which the colorfully clothed dancers’ feet hammer the floor. The kicking feet in competition with the stitching of clattering sewing machines, their pirouettes with the yarn bobbins. The quick rhythms of the Kathak make the exhaustion physically palpable. “I’m not physically strong enough for this work. I go through exploitation and abuse.” Statements like these and others from seamstresses appear at intervals projected on the backdrop. But the dancers proclaim into the microphone: “I am proud to be a part of the fashion industry – proud to be independent.” These too are sentences from the seamstresses and it is exactly these unresolved and irresolvable ambivalences that Helena Waldmann distilled in her researches and has put next to one another on the stage. What for one seamstress represents exploitation, for another means a first step to financial independence. The analogy with the European cultural sector and its self-exploitative structures is further sharpened in the second half of the piece. Quotes like: “Last year I danced 60 performances – this year 100. For the same money”, demonstrate clearly that European dancers too earn their money under precarious circumstances. “Made in Bangladesh” is a strong uncomfortable work, and in its consistency and physicality exactly the correct means to give artistic expression to the breakneck working conditions of the contemporary world.