Punani Tsunami: Do you still smell the coffee?

“Do you still smell the coffee: Punani Tsunami”, is a dance theater piece created in 2010 by performer Martin Hansen and Sarah Nevada Grether, which traces a series of ever shifting relationships based on the real, imagined and virtual. The performers chart a terrain of memory and illusion, whilst commenting on the role that technology plays in the mediation and perhaps creation of relationships in this day and age. We present ourselves as brother and sister, teacher and student, nymph and demon, lovers, strangers etc., exploring the tensions that arise from these situations. 

The text is heavily based on Janet Frames ‘Towards another summer’ which deals with childhood and being a foreigner far from home, throughout the piece we migrate like birds, through fiction, (in reality) all the way back to childhood in search for authentic relation and communication in the midst of technological Armageddon. 

“I don’t wish to inhabit the world under false pretences. I’m relieved to have discovered my identity after being so confused about it for so many years. Why should people be afraid if I confide in them? Yet people will always be afraid and jealous of those who finally establish their identity; it leads them to consider their own, to seclude it, cosset it, for fear it may be borrowed or interfered with, and when they are in the act of protecting it they suffer the shock of realizing that their identity is nothing, it is something they dreamed and never knew; and then begins the painstaking search – what shall they choose – beast? Another human being? Insect? Bird?” 

-Janet Frames ‘Towards another summer’  

Photos taken by Dieter Blum