The desire to disconnect from the material plane has always constituted one of humanity’s dominant yearnings, peaking in purification and catharsis. Yet, in Beninga’s work, this also includes the moments that follow movement outside of everything—moments when the black-and-white figures reach a stage in which they know themselves, but without the serenity they sought in the colorful illusionary realm. In several scenes, Beninga’s seated dancers are depicted gripped by the realization that infinity will elude them. With their winged and folded hands, they return to themselves, within themselves, with a detached expression in both physical and emotional space. This is also conveyed by the dancers’ steps, depicted without visible feet or contact with the earth that should support them—except for one foot, raised and defiant, accompanied by a bare buttock, as if the figure has lost its mind. Conversely, the uncovered, winged hands defiantly refuse to aid in a flight destined to descend and reach the infinite.

Beninga’s Bacchanalia dwells in those moments when movement clarifies and interrogates urgent questions about the nature of life and the possibilities of separating matter from spirit. The intoxicating visions and illusions that drive the dancers’ bodies in a whirl of movement cannot overcome that existential emptiness—a hollowness that pulses again once body and soul touchdown on a ground that slips away, unraveling the beads of the dance. “What mainly interests me about this subject,” Beninga says, “is its threshold quality—between joy and frenzy, between here and there in a poetic dimension, but also in intoxication, between reason and its loss.” A wry smile emerges in Beninga’s voice as she describes, in our conversations, the ambivalent atmosphere of the Bacchanalia: “It’s fun, it’s a party, [...] a kind of dance but also death. A passage from the earthly to the heavenly [...] the effect of the wine goes beyond the self. Bacchanalia is a historically ambivalent event, with no single reading, and the myth is one of multiplicity. On the one hand, it’s fun, and on the other, total madness—which is threatening and unpleasant. It’s on the boundary between pleasure and delight and a sense of violence. You might say it’s the effect of wine, but honestly, it’s also life [...] It’s not that you don’t enjoy life, but it’s hard to live with the tension between the desire for comfort and pleasure, and the realization that, actually, it isn’t so simple.” In her drawings, Beninga traces and erases the figures’ steps through enchanted space and time, confronting the tension born of this ambivalence.

The imaginary voice of Socrates—Paul Valéry’s Socrates in “Soul and Dance”—holds a fictional conversation with a physician among his interlocutors, expressing the same difficulty of living Beninga articulates:
“[…] Do you not know some specific remedy, or some exact antidote, for that evil amongst all evils, that poison of poisons, that venom inimical to all nature?... Which is called: the weariness of living? – I mean, understand me, not the passing weariness, the tedium which comes of fatigue, or that of which we see the germ or know the limits; but that perfect tedium, that pure tedium which does not come from misfortune or infirmity, and which is compatible with the happiest of all conditions that we may contemplate – that tedium, in fine, whose substance is none other than life itself, and which has no other second cause than the clear-sightedness of the man who is alive. This absolute tedium is in itself nothing other than life in its nakedness, when it sees itself clearly.” ²
The physician offers no remedy, but as an opposing state, suggests hallucinations that are not melancholic, intoxication, and illusions produced by narcotic vapors. Yet when Valéry’s imagined Socrates asks whether there are intoxications not rooted in wine, the physician answers affirmatively, citing love, hate, and desire. Socrates adds the noble intoxication that comes from action, positing that shaking the body in dance can bring relief and infuse the energy of happiness.³