Between control and freedom (advance notice)

VOM WASSER - Reaching for the intangible: A rehearsal visit with performer Lisa Seidel-Kukuk, who is working on a collage about water at Ballhaus Ost. She earned her master's degree in Bern with this piece. Shortly before the Ballhaus Ost, the thunderstorm breaks. I want to attend a rehearsal of Lisa Seidel-Kukuk, who is presenting her first piece, a homage to water, at the Ballhaus. The wet pavement, the dust from the construction sites, the leaves on the trees, everything takes on a smell of its own with the sudden rain. That's what I smell, out on the street on the road, and then suddenly that's a sentence from the piece "Sensible Chaos" by Lisa Seidel-Kukuk. It is the observations of small things and snippets of images from the edge of consciousness from which the young performer builds her piece. There are drops of water running down a window pane; the light on the glass square directs all glances in the stage space there, the performer, who sprays the rain from a bottle, almost disappears. Other drops become audible, fizzing out on a hotplate, amplified by a microphone. Water sprays as a fountain from a plastic bag - the scene lasts as long as there is water in the bag. Visible music "Sensible Chaos" is not only a piece, but was also part of a final project with which Lisa Seidel-Kukuk earned her master's degree at the Bern University of the Arts, in the newly founded Scenic Art Practice course. The fact that, for example, the musician Christoph Illing is part of the visible part of the stage work, and that the sound production becomes part of the image, is also the result of a course of study that promoted exchange between the artists. There is something very inviting about this view into the open toolbox: how Illing directs the drops onto the stove top until they become clouds of steam, or puts on old, slightly damaged classical recordings by Schubert or Offenbach on a record player. This is unobtrusive on the one hand, and yet full of offerings to the interpretive spirit on the other. For Lisa Seidel-Kukuk, who had previously studied puppet theater in Stuttgart for four years, the studies in Bern were a further education, also in production and marketing. She sought out Nicola Hümpel of the Berlin group Nico and the Navigators as a mentor, and with their support her piece is now coming to Ballhaus Ost. "All the contributors are also authors of the piece," says Lisa Seidel-Kukuk, "but because she performs and directs herself, the view through her mentor helped her a lot. How does one come to choose a "homage to water" as a theme, when water can only ever be present in small portions in a stage set, in basins or projections, but never with that elemental violence that is its very fascination? Even in puppet theater, it was a matter of dealing with material, says Lisa Seidel-Kukuk, and water as a material appealed to her precisely because of its intangibility on the one hand and the many fields of reference on the other. She has read about its physics, thought about its pollution in the Gulf of Mexico, but also about the romanticization of water as an element. Obsessed with diving The ballet Swan Lake, recently restored to fame by the film "Black Swan," is such material, domesticating the fear of nature's destructive power in aestheticizing images. The swan and the water, nature and the woman enter into connections that generate the uncanny. Lisa Seidel-Kukuk takes this up in a scene as lovingly as grotesquely. She dances a dainty little swan that plunges with growing enthusiasm into a pool on stage, headlong, flapping its wings. She is at the same time the fantastic art figure, but also the dancer who can no longer breathe under water and for whom the dream of transformation and fusion takes on threatening forms. Where can I let go, where does the form need control and guidance? Lisa Seidel-Kukuk had to ask herself this not only with regard to the water, but also with regard to the structure of her collage in the development of the scenes from the improvisation and the play with the material. This is a fine work until the end, in which every light setting is as important as a sentence or a poem by Goethe. And the light will be tweaked now, after our conversation and before the first run-through, for which she expects her mentor.

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