Made in Bangladesh

Burning factories, wage slavery, and junk products – that is our image of the low-paid textile industry.
Dance director Helena Waldmann has worked out what is true and false in this picture.

This performance carries a title that is a label and that brings a particular content with it. And it is one that says something to every even halfway-enlightened citizen because it is sewed into many textile products and has produced headlines. It stands for: the garment industry, cheap clothes. The story of ‘Made in Bangladesh’ began on a journey that Helena Waldmann undertook in 2010, as she was in Kolkata due to a guest performance in India and journeyed onward to Dhaka. Strange buildings in the middle of fields attracted her attention. She was told that these were clothing factories, and she shuddered at the sight of the masses of people that she saw streaming into them. In April 2013, one of those factories collapsed; not the first horrible accident in such a huge concern, but this time more than 1100 women and men died in the rubble. A photograph of the collapsed building and thousands of people around it recurs in the performance: projected on the backdrop; in the foreground is a hand that points at something that is unrecognisable in the distance. That’s how it is for everyone who looks on at the unimaginable horrors from afar; and that’s how it was for Helena Waldmann, who travelled in that country and returned many times.

She formed an idea of it, as she says, “that was much less black and white, but with a lot of grey in it”. She met up with experts and activists, looked at factories and saw women there who were honestly happy about their work. Because they otherwise would have none, and so no freedom to control their lives even a little. And she saw dancers and the Kathak, the classical Indian dance that they dance there. One of its characteristics are the quick foot stamps that follow complex raga rhythms. The choreographer saw the possibility of establishing a correspondence between the vertically aligned bodies of the dancers and sewing machine needles. A compelling idea.

Respect, that’s what ‘Made in Bangladesh’ is about. Dancers, relates one of the ensemble, are booked for shows in their country – once a month, at most twice a week, and paid only for those. Or not. Often no one watches, dance counting as just a decorative prop at celebrations. As Helena Waldmann brought her dance team together with a group of the same number of seamstresses, there was even envy of the factory workers. These expose themselves to a merciless piecework system for tiny wages, pushed on by target quantities and delivery deadlines, which are dictated to the factory owner by the buyers. The buyers on the other hand are dependent on big companies, and these in turn on bank consortia. In the meantime, out of fear of losing their reputation and orders, perhaps also out of sensible care, quite a lot of entrepreneurs have invested in better fire protection and health and safety. That is, if there is not a lack of will for it, as at present. Thanks to two irreconcilable politicians at the head of the state, the country is almost fallen into a state of civil war, and orders are stagnating. The competition is Vietnam, Burma, Cambodia. Ethiopia is the future for cheap labour – until that too is over. It makes one want to scream, to say the least. In Helena Waldmann’s piece the dancers sum up the abuses in a gesture: at first one person does it, then the others follow, as firmly as enraged – cutthroats. ‘Brother’ is the sewing machine brand at which the workers sit in the photo on the programme.

Just no boycott, please! The state is corrupt, openly in close connection with the clothing industry, unions are forbidden, strikes rare; on the other hand a common phenomenon is the so-called Hartal, a sort of general strike to generate political pressure. The people protest their rights on the street. To take this protest to the world, ‘to you’, one needs someone like Helena Waldmann, and her way of instigating issues in the theatre. For these women, in their place, and also for their own profession, the dancers line up on stage, at first without showing their faces, colourfully clad from head to bare toe in Shalwar Kameez, wide long shirts, trousers, headscarves. They work. First with their feet only, the heels. Lift, lower, up, down. The knee slightly bent. The contact with the floor slowly becomes audible, the whole foot goes into action, taps then also at an angle, or steps to the side, and then back. Intermediate steps. They all become ever faster, the sole pattern becomes music. Heads click to the side, hands get busy, the arms spell out the geometry of the Kathak: to the top, below, sideward, diagonally. Sometimes they look as if they are measuring lengths of cloth – endlessly repeated. The group forms several short rows, corresponding to the work desks sorted into lines in the factories, whose output is constantly checked. They stay put, almost uninterruptedly in motion, obeying a strict pattern and a command from a loudspeaker. “Visitors are coming, smile now!”

Later they come on in elegantly baggy clothes in muted colours, and a trainer, casting agent, or choreographer orders them to their places, pushes them on and urges: “smile!” In principle, they do the same as before, one sees the lines again, though this time on the other side of the stage, mirrored, and a little smoother in detail.

What’s new in this connection is this approach speaking of low wages, exploitation, fear of unemployment and old age poverty – as Helena Waldmann hints at in videos and engages in public discussions with the audience.

‘Made in Bangladesh’ is made from heavy material, it doesn’t equivocate. That’s what it’s about. Otherwise: cheap work is just used, not respected. We have apparently forgotten how to value real value.

Made in Bangladesh is a critique of the willingness to ignore the human cost of cheap Bangladeshi products.
This project, born from Waldmann’s shock at the working conditions in Dhaka sweatshops, also levies a critique of market forces in dance, both in Bangladesh as well as in Europe.
Made in Bangladesh is an engaging, well-crafted, thoughtful and entertaining dance. What made Made in Bangladesh work so well is how sensitively Waldmann handled both definitions of political: she exposed European (wilful) ignorance and simultaneously managed not to reduce the dancers to exotic foreigners. She accomplished this by using (relatively little) material based on the Indian dance form Kathak. The steps were taken out of their traditionally narrative format and combined bricolage-style into movement phrases. This had the effect of making an essentially post-modern work from traditional Kathak dance material. And while that sounds a tad sterile, it was deeply interesting, feeding the audience a satisfying meal, without resorting to syrupy, potato chip tactics.
What Waldmann also did extremely well was to transport a feeling that mixed both the monotony and the extreme hectic pace of sweatshop life. The dancers beat their feet percussively on the ground, in shifting but followable rhythms. Arm gestures created a flurrying tapestry in as a whole. Twice, between the line formations, a sequence of turns was performed in rows of dancers. The turns moved row by row through the formation, before beginning again like a typewriter, but at a delirious, stenographic speed, exemplifying both the tedium and the tempo of a factory life. The tempo was propelled by a metronome incessantly ticking through the performance, counting down till the end of the day, till the workers retired, or perhaps to the next accident.

Helena Waldmann, despite being neither a dancer nor a choreographer herself, prefers to work with dancers at a theatre that tries to communicate even political issues nonverbally. The moving bodies’ constant companions are videos by Anna Saup. They contribute not only to fabulous visual effects but also as documentary facts about the respective subject, accompanied by an expository voiceover. Music and an exquisite lighting atmosphere complement all this and create an audio-visual Gesamtkunstwerk. This is not often done as convincingly as in Helena Waldmann’s highly acclaimed coup “Made in Bangladesh”, premiered at the Theater im Pfalzbau in Ludwigshafen.
The videos are to the point but the hammering steps of the nine female and three male dancers from Bangladesh are even more powerful and overshadow what the images have to say. The dancers squeeze past the seamstresses’ machines to then continue their dance on the apron stage. The splayed naked feet of men and women in traditional colourful tunics over bloomers stomp below bent knees, the resounding soundtrack to the up and down of first one and later many sewing machine needles in the background (Co-Choreography: Vikram Iyengar). The bottoms of their feet clock the highly rhythmical, syncopated Kathak, which – precisely coded – tells whole stories. In this case it’s the story of exploitation and the deceitful bliss of the exploiter to participate in the blessings of capitalism; modified by Waldmann’s spirited dance ensemble in free variations of the Indian original in a physically demanding tap and stomp marathon.
During the last third of “Made in Bangladesh” the director seeks and finds a parallel in the (self-) exploitation of western art and culture slaves who, just for the experience, work as non-paid interns. Although this is true it does however leave a strange aftertaste.

Helena Waldmann engaged nine female and three male traditional Kathak dancers for “Made in Bangladesh”. Vikram Iyengar is co-choreographer for this premiere in Ludwigshafen, which despite the brightly coloured robes (Costumes: Hanif Kaiser, Judith Adam) strenuously avoids folkloric impressions in favour of minimalism and severity – both in terms of the movement vocabulary as the precisely positioned and concise statements like “Don’t boycott our products”.

Like tap dance, Kathak is a dance where the dancers themselves are the source of percussion; in Indian Kathak they are nevertheless barefoot, and often wear jingling ankle bells (not here, their absence is part of the minimalistic production). There are intricate arm movements, pirouettes and leaps: but Waldmann/Iyengar uses them sparely. Instead, it’s about the ever faster clocking, in order that the dance approximates to the working practices of the production line. The twelve dancers must run against each other in linear formations, as if it was about quantifying movement. That is impressive and emphatically sobering, almost unwieldy. Smiles are only switched on, when the overseer/choreographer demands it.

Visual insistence

Two photographs, originating from the great disaster in 2013, are for some time projected: an aerial view of the mountain of rubble, and heartbreakingly, a woman and a man, partly dug out, covered with dust. In death, he put his arms around her. Here also, less is more, the piece impresses through an optical insistence, for which Helena Waldmann takes her time.

A bargain! Who wouldn’t be happy? But everything comes at a price. Of course one repeatedly hears about the working conditions in sweatshops and textile factories, reads about the few cents workers earn there for their never-ending shifts, and about collapsing factory buildings, where they graft under health-damaging conditions all for the wealthy in this world to have fifty instead of five blouses in their closets. But how can one personally disassociate oneself from this? Report after report and one even knows that all this is not just happening on behalf of discounter shops, but also of high fashion brands.

Dancing to the rhythm of machines
“Made in Bangladesh” is the title of political choreographer Helena Waldmann’s newest work. With “Letters from Tentland”, “BurkaBondage”, and “revolver besorgen” she has already repeatedly allowed us at Pfalzbau Ludwigshafen to take a look at conditions we don’t usually get an insight into. It’s thanks to a long-standing relationship of trust to programme director and internationally acclaimed dance expert Jörg Fischer that Waldmann now for the first time presents a world premiere at the Pfalzbau that afterwards will travel the world.
Ten of the twelve dancers from Bangladesh standing silently in line, 80 per cent women, 20 per cent men, just as in the world of work behind the sewing machine. Needles go up and down on the video wall hung up in the background, ever more, ever faster. Their upper bodies are stretched out, their feet racing. They are not factory workers, rather performers from various ensembles committed to the Kathak, which through its fast footwork and rhythmic syncopation is characteristic for dance in Bangladesh.
Because Helena Waldmann and Vikram Iyengar don’t employ the customary ankle bells, the dance obtains a completely new impact that the well-travelled dance devotee is able to translate into impressive tableaux. The uniformity of the workers’ movements, the almost unbearable monotony, heightened tempo, optimization, piecework. In the background run tables showing the required quantities per day, hour and minute.
Again and again, silence descends upon the frantic machine and traffic noise: a photo of bodies in the rubble of a collapsed factory for instance. Or above a dancer suddenly left alone on the stage a written “Please don’t boycott our products.”
And Waldmann goes still further on this impressive and intelligent evening. Alongside the lunacy of the global textile industry, her attention falls upon the everyday conditions of an industry that is seldom the focus of reports – the professional world of the artists themselves: two months rehearsal without payment, forty five Euros per show, whoever is ill or pregnant gets the sack, and to earn the same amount of money for 60 performances in the previous year, one must – just like in a factory – dance 100 times this year …Smile and optimize. The merry-go-round turns ever faster: “we are proud to be a part of the capitalist world order”. Another sentence that strikes like thunder.

To function per time unit
Waldmann raises the tempo, turns the screw further. A Line Manager oversees sewing machines and dance positions alike standing in numbered rows. A shirt originating at one, a commercial flamenco or chorus line show rehearsal at the other. Keep on smiling, “We have visitors”, informs the manager. Only seldom does someone break or lose it: you can because you want what you must do. When he or she actually does so, come the most powerful moments of the evening; because the people know that they are ruining their health: “But I’m working as hard as I can.”
Tables of required quantities per worker cause us to shudder, as do the dancers grasping their own throat – and the conversion of people’s functioning into time and money. In the 77 minutes of the show’s length a textile worker earns 28 Cents, the German textile industry 1.4 Million Euros – shaming knowledge – followed by furious applause.

Helena Waldmann makes her twelve dancers stamp their naked feet Kathak style on the floor – as precisely as machines. Faster, and faster. Like robots they repeat the same arm movements with which shirts, blouses, and t-shirts are produced a thousand times each day. The needles projected onto the screen in the background are stitching into the void.

In an offstage voice over the foreman demands: “we need to become better, much better.” And as if this weren’t enough, the performers form a choir and whisper and hiss and shout out the clicking and clattering of the sewing needles into the audience. They overexert themselves, but assure us that they are happy and plead with us not to boycott “their factories”.

For the second part, the dancers change costume and are put to the acid test by a kind of master coach. He controls every step, demands rapid never-ending turns, concentration, and a beaming smile on their faces. Who doesn’t pass the test in his eyes loses their job to a younger colleague or to those who work more for even less money, and who smile even more. Helena Waldmann pillories the art business and documents something rarely spoken about: the supposedly idyllic world of theatre is bound up with merciless self-exploitation.

The third part is captioned: “Optimize even more”. The dancers are standing at the edge of the stage and taking their pulses. They are very rapid, as the heart rate monitors on the background screen show. And at the very end it shows an image of how a human being is being created with a sewing machine.

Nobody in the audience can escape the videos. They show people sewing in a textile factory in Bangladesh. One of these factories won notoriety in 2013: its collapse caused innumerable deaths and injuries.
Back then choreographer Helena Waldmann was already working intensely on a piece that addresses the exploitative conditions in those textile factories. The title of the production engaging twelve local dancers that she developed together with her co-choreographer Vikram Iyengar is “Made in Bangladesh”. The title refers to what is sewn into the labels of cheap clothing.

The blazing rage about the untenable conditions in those faraway factories may be massive – on stage it must get under the skin. And it’s thanks to Helena Waldmann’s use of the Bengali dance Kathak – which due to its rapid, percussive footwork reminds us of clattering sewing needles – that it does. The dashing of naked feet is intensified by the Tike-Tike-Tak-Tak spoken like staccato thunder by the ensemble, as well as Hans Narva’s brazen glowering sound. Uncomfortable: In the beginning the videos show enormous needles racing up and down – and just like the needles the dancers too move vertically. The repetitive character also manifests in other movements but: “we are happy!” One of the dancers took the microphone. Then: a bang. Videos of the collapsed factory; a wail of sirens, a babble of voices, crying. Despite all the suffering: “please don’t boycott us” – the video screen reads. .

Waldmann’s unmistakeable call to the Western World: don’t boycott Bangladesh but help in changing the seamstresses’ working conditions. Just as the conditions of the dancers who are exploited both in Bangladesh and the West. Waldmann’s way of building a bridge here is very clever. Suddenly the scene on stage changes from a factory to a dance hall – and therewith to bare-knuckle competition and exercise. What remains: a performance whose aesthetic fury serves up a stirring message.

Takatakatak, a rhythmical stamping in time with sewing needles, a relentless up and down, takatak. Anyone not managing their workload has to miss lunch. Footwork and always the same hand movements, in rhythm, in unison, quicker, quicker, to produce even more clothes. Takatakatak. Again and again, the noise gets louder, twist around, quicker, 100 pieces of clothing an hour, ten hours a day, six days a week, takatakatak.
In some places the implacable performance “Made in Bangladesh” by Helena Waldmann is as exhausting and excessive as a day in the clothes factories in Bangladesh which the piece is about. On the backdrop to the stage in the Tollhaus, where the nearly 70 minute long piece is being presented, numbers, sentences and pictures are projected, which jolt and hurt – surely most of all the picture of two dead bodies in the collapsed factory of the Rana Plaza building.
Waldmann engaged twelve dancers locally from Bangladesh and worked with them on this piece of dance theatre for more than a year. “For me it was clear from the beginning that I should incorporate the Kathak, the prevalent dance form in Bangladesh. Certainly I reduced it to a very technical Kathak, left out anything poetic and also avoided the ankle bells. It remains a vertical, intense stamping, that generates a lot of pressure, and with that I am able to depict the physical working conditions there,” explains Waldmann in the subsequent talk. “I want to provoke the audience, of course it hurts”, she adds. When asked what solution she offers, especially as the sentence “Please don’t boycott our products” is projected onto the backdrop, Waldmann replies: “Everyone has to decide for themselves how they respond to exploitation, I am an artist not an adviser. I travelled to Bangladesh to find the culprits, but there is no single offender. Many women are happy that they are allowed to work as seamstresses, it’s much better than in the countryside where they are forced to marry age 14.
In the second half of the piece Helena Waldmann assigns the seamstresses’ bad conditions to the art scene, in particular to dancers, and the stamping begins anew – this time mirrored on the other side of the stage and with other costumes. Dancers have to train hard physically, become better and better and sometimes earn less than the people in the box office. But, someone asks from the interested public, which animatedly took part in the ensuing discussion: could one compare the situation of dancers at all with that of seamstresses? One of the dancers explains that in Bangladesh she sometimes has worse conditions than the seamstresses, in that she only gets temporary contracts and has absolutely no security. But they are young and hopeful that they will be able to change their country in their own way.
“The situation on German stages is terrible for actors and dancers”, that Waldmann knows from experience and many conversations. Whether seamstress or dancer – both work very hard and very long and should be paid properly. The consumer must be aware of this. A member of the audience summed it up: “Ms. Waldmann, you leave us helpless but moved, we feel the exploitation.”

The choreographer and director cast 12 Kathak dancers from Bangladesh. They showcase – in colourful costume – not only the flying footwork of the traditional dance, but also radiate joy and pride. These are no victim-performers on the stage: the dancers obviously also see themselves as joyful ambassadors from Bangladesh. They indeed sit at the back of the global workbench, but at least they belong. And pre-eminently it is 80 per cent women who work in the most important industries of the nation. Is one allowed to feel sorry for them? Does not pity here soon become arrogance? Everyone must decide for themselves.
In any case, the choreography allows the dancers to execute their Asia-Step in time with the machines: monotone, mechanical, and ever faster and faster. Until exhaustion, until desperation. The feet fly; “Tikitakatikitaka” whispers the group. On the video wall, heart rate spikes appear, and enormous sewing needles hurtle up and down. The machines’ movements find their way into peoples’ bodies. With best regards from the clown of capitalism – Charlie Chaplin in “Modern Times”.
“Best quality, fast and even cheaper than last week”, demands a voice offstage. To this, columns of figures flicker, showing how much a worker would have earned during the performance (91 cents), and how much the textile industry generates in the meantime (1.4 Million Euros). Occasionally the dancers have to change position, like chess pieces on a board. When visited they smile and wave. And then there is this gruesome but peaceful photo of a man and a woman: intimately entangled between rubble and reinforcement steel, dead in Rana Plaza. It is disturbing, but the dance work goes on.
Helena Waldmann doesn’t have to agitate, criticism of the system arises by itself, and is itself mirrored in the mechanisms of the art scene, which is also founded upon self-exploitation and self-optimisation. In the second part of the evening scenes are repeated, but now with the emphasis on starving artists who earn less than the woman in the box office, or are employed for three years as an intern. At least in theatre employment is not life-threatening.
But both seamstresses and artists evidently don’t know how to better sell themselves. In a classic morality tale, this would be the time at which the narrator enters the scene and talks about trade unions. Waldmann does without this lecture. In the end she doesn’t leave us wiser but more thoughtful.