Artistic Inspiration from Mehmet Sander

A little over a year ago, I wrote a short blog post about Mehmet Sander. I just came across a few more videos of his work on-line, so I got inspired to write a bit more about him now. Mehmet is a choreographer-dance who taught me a lot. Above is a video documenting his piece Obtuse Space – performed by six dancers, including Mehmet, on a set that includes a flat and a sloped area.

I met him when I was living in Long Beach in the 1990s. He ran the Mehmet Sander Dance Company, which I ended up volunteering and helping out with administratively for a couple years, mostly schlepping around sets, designing and selling T-shirts, and sitting in on rehearsals… sometime sketching, sometimes just being inspired.

Mesut Özil and Mehmet Sander

This is a tale of two Germany-born Turkish-heritage men who somehow get linked in my mind… though they are very different. (Note that this means I am posting twice in a row about World Cup futbol… which is a little unrepresentative of the small role that soccer fandom plays in my life… but it’s been on my mind quite a bit this summer.)

Above is a video of Mesut Özil – decidedly the best left-foot footballer in all of Germany (arguably the best player in Germany?), phenomenally graceful, lightning fast, really aware of what’s around him, and not only a great scorer, but a person who sets ups others’ great scores – a champion assist-man – there’s probably a term for this? And he’s 21 years old – so he’s still getting started in some ways. Özil (and indeed nearly all of Germany’s scorers) is not an ethnic German; he was born in Germany, to Turkish parents. Others have written about the significance of this – it can an overstated metaphor for an allegedly post-racist society. I find it, at a minimum, beautiful and ironic that an Aryan country has such a kick-ass wonderful Islamic Turkish-German as their star.