A reflection on TOUGHGUY at Berliner Festspiele within the frame of Performing Exiles / 100° Diaspora on 28th June 2025
©Alice Heyward
2025
A lone, male figure (Ginjo Sakai) dressed in dark trackwear circles the bare stage with large, territorial strides. His energy commands and consumes the space, carving a singular presence through strong, spiralling, grounded motion. His gestures pursue direction without deviation, exuding power and invincibility through their achievement. He moves with intention, resisting submission to external forces or contingency.
TOUGHGUY opens as a resolute, solo dance work and doubles into a duet, with Yuki Takahashi joining Sakai, in the same sportswear and similarly dominating, supremacist drive. The work stages the destructive power of ambition and the arrogance that comes with an unquestioned sense of identity. Through intricate phrasing, their fierce dance-fight unfolds into a portrait of collapse, vulnerability and defeat. As their pursuit to annihilate the other escalates, it exposes the dancer—and the human—to their own toxic, self-consuming capabilities.
The material of this work is force, drag—physically, and also metaphorically, through Amanda Donato’s gendered casting of two male dancers to explore her own experience as a woman navigating competition in an individualist, male-dominated world, and friction. Domination pulsates with the desire to prove and rise through the conquest of the other. Each twist, pivot, and extension insists against gravity and limitation, tracing the aggression of a body shaped by power—its seduction and its exhaustion.
The work moves through chapters, telling a story. The work moves through chapters, telling a story. The dramatic, operatic score by Kaan Bulak aligns with the movement production of illustrative imagery. His unreleased track, "Fructus Eius" with LUC ILLA and Luise Enzian also premiered with TOUGHGUY. Music cues emotional tides, mapping the psyche as terrain—jolts of fury followed by solemnity, moments of exaltation that crumble into silence. The stage becomes a place of internal weather, where relation presents conflict. Connection manifests in attack and offence.
The dissonance between body and intention becomes the work’s central expression; its event. And with that, we see the dance turn inward, toward self-confrontation and self-destruction. The ground splits beneath us when the fight is no longer, or never was, purely external. We break ourselves when we defeat the other, revealed to be intrinsic to us.
The figure, at first singular, becomes two, then transforms into a shared terrain of struggle. Their confrontation is not only about male rage and how it resides within us all, but also about survival within its myth. How can we escape cycles of trauma and oppression while remaining complicit in the very systems that sustain them?
When will we learn that while others are not free, neither are we? The pursuit of personal, opportunistic gains at the expense of others erodes us all, leaving us all losers, defeated in a world where we relentlessly compete against each other.
A Wake: A physical homage amidst grief
Amanda Donato is conduit for her grandmother with advanced Alzheimer’s in her latest production ‘A Wake’
By Winifred Wong
2024
A deep sound emanating from inside the studio is heard even as we wait outside Uferstudios to enter. As we walk in, the low-frequency envelops us, drowning out whispers of conversation. This is an imposing space. A spotlight shines towards the audience as if we were staring towards a sunset or a very bright moon. Fog lies heavy on the stage.
The first act begins: Donato walks so imperceptibly in the dim lighting that she seems to be floating towards the audience, adrift at sea. She is in all black and wearing an apron to her side. There is a subtle but deep discomfort in her movements: her arms are tightly boxed into odd angles, and at times she observes her hands as if she does not recognise them. It is as if we are inside a smoky, dark mind that is too loud to hear any thoughts.
The performance is a shuddering choreography interspersed with fleeting moments of peace and lucidity, but even when her body is lying horizontal and seemingly at rest, she is not. There are sequences of functionality, like smelling coffee or sorting through mail, that are interrupted by being pulled this way and that, and collapsing into spine-defying poses.
In Act 3 she cackles, ominous only because there is no apparent reason, and immediately catches herself and hunches over double, as if physically carrying the weight of existence. Donato looks to the sky often as if for answers, at times supplicating, at others fearful that the sky would come crashing down. At the end of Act 4, she spins on the floor with strobe lighting flashing as if it were a thunderstorm and she is desperate for the comfort of rain.
The discordant soundtrack by Stefanie Egedy bears down relentlessly at times, and at other times, it is disquieting. There are samples of blowing wind, a whistle, and a piano playing in a distance, simultaneously affecting loneliness and sensory overload, and all the time heavily present in the performance.
Light and sound artists MXM (Mirella Brandi and Muep Etmo) have created a desolate, lonesome landscape for the performance. Sparse lighting obscures more than it reveals, and spots that cast large shadows on the white tiled walls are reminiscent of a hospital, further emphasising that Donato is alone onstage and possibly the only character in her mind.
A heavy wooden board appears and you are caught between worrying and being enraptured with what will happen next, having seen a distressed, glitching body in the past acts, and can only helplessly trust in the body that is before you. The board balances on the short side, then becomes a cellar door, a poker card of life revolving on its edge, a podium, a shield, a hedge, and a magic carpet that seems to levitate through Donato’s expert manoeuvres. Finally, it is a door that engulfs her like rubble.
In the last act, she starts to knead a dough ball (for fresh ravioli, as Donato helpfully suggests to me later) lying on her side, then she gets up on her knees, and finally on her feet. The kneading is the only movement that persists uninterrupted and helps her to stand, mirroring the dedication of maternal love and care despite disease. Defiantly, she looks forward into an alternately dimming and flashing light. Could they be camera flashes, desperate to capture memories while those in a mind disappear, minds as pliable as the dough that Donato is handling with so much care?
She kneads to the end, a hopeful act that implies maternal love and care is and always will be our salvation.
‘A Wake’ runs in Uferstudios, Badstraße 41a, 13357 Berlin till 8 Sept 2024.
Winifred Wong is a Singaporean poet, writer, and performer based in Berlin. Her poetry has
appeared in SAND Journal, Softblow and SingPoWriMo, among others. She has covered cultural
events and current affairs with arts institutions such as Esplanade Theatres and news outlet Yahoo!.
Interdisciplinary Commemoration: Interview with Movement Artist, Amanda Donato
by Ewan Waddell for HUNDHUND.
2024
It's been a while since our last artist interview! But we're returning with a powerful one :-)
This time we sat down with Amanda Donato — a Canadian movement artist with an upcoming series of performances just a stones throw away from our HUNDHUND home at Ufer Studios in Wedding, Berlin.
We were introduced to Amanda by old friend of the studio, Yu Bai — another great artist of dance who we interviewed back in 2022. It was a pleasure to sit down with Amanda to learn a bit about the extremely personal contexts explored in her movement, how she sees dance evolving as a medium in the years to come, and what people can expect from her upcoming performance series "A WAKE" (premiering Thursday Sept. 5th, running til Sunday 8th).
I first wondered how Amanda would define her artistic practice.
"My style of work is physical, intuitive and existential. Often exploring themes of psychological states and patterns, my movement language is an integration of controlled and chaotic expression. It reflects my fluid way of seeing the world and my undying reverence for the art of dance."
What is the journey that’s led you to where you are today? I asked.
"I was enrolled in ballet class at age 3, so dance was always part of my life. The dance studio was where I faced myself and formed my core values... The journey convenes endless questions, conversations, and a fearless abandoning of expectations and rationalities. I see all of my mentors, teachers, colleagues plus the art, literature and places that radically shifted my perspectives."
I was then curious, of course, to learn more about this upcoming project at Ufer Studios.
"'A WAKE' is a solo work that honours and commemorates my grandmother and her legacy. She is currently living with advanced Alzheimer’s disease, and it has been a complicated grieving journey. This work is a 45-60 minute piece that navigates the hard truth of aging and decay, the fears and diseases we inherit from our ancestors, and the regenerative and immortalizing power of art. It is an interdisciplinary work that combines an original low-frequency-sound-heavy score by Stefanie Egedy, lighting by MXM, and an act involving dough. “A WAKE” is a gift to my grandmother’s soul before she completes her journey, and the best way to remember her dynamic and adversarial life."
"I loathe ageism and the absence of death and decay in the common discourse. Creating this work for my grandmother is a way of crystallizing the importance of her life. Her sacrifices are the reason I have the privilege of creating art. I have the intuitive sense that I am making art for the silenced women before me."
I wondered if there were any questions she felt she was asking with this conceptual work.
"I am asking many questions I might never get the answers to, and existing in a territory of things I will never understand."
Is there anything you would like to achieve throughout the narrative of your career?
"I am moving away from attempting to “achieve” anything with my work, but if it affects people, leads them to reflection, or makes them feel seen... I am honoured."
As a parting question, for someone who clearly thinks with depth about many things, I wondered what Amanda's perspective is on the future of dance and how it will evolve?
"I see an expansion and advancement with technology. I see dance continuing to act as a vital bridge of connection across disciplines and borders."
Thank you to Amanda.
TOUGHGUY
Writing by Sebastian Back
1. Ginjo Sakai and Yuki Takahashi are exceptional. Sakai manifests a man furious with himself, God and the world while Takahashi gleefully pursues his desires at all costs. Amanda Donato is offering a portrait of men that should be more widely studied and discussed.
2. After the performance it occurred to me that these characters were kept away from manhood by their own incoherent pursuit of manhood. Manhood would or could be a role that acts out understanding, support, curiosity and a genuine support of the multifaceted world we live in. Donato's characters reflect the reality of modern men who demand submission from everything they come in contact with.
3. I hope you get to see TOUGHGUY. I wish the end was longer because Sakai and Takahashi's characters finally find connection outside of violence and envy. Throughout the performance both dancers look to the darkness/audience, they look up - maybe to a perceived heaven, spiritual influence or their own delusions. In the end they look at each other in recognition. I want to know what happens after that because that's where a whole, fascinating and beautiful story unfolds.