sizzling, bubbling, sputtering

"Sensitive chaos" prepared in the Ballhaus Ost. There are 1.386 billion cubic kilometers of water on earth. Fresh water makes up only a fraction of this: about as much as a shot glass in a bathtub. Lisa Seidel-Kukuk stands on the stage of the Ballhaus and fantasizes about water. She talks about the rain in July that surprised her: not a nice summer rain, but a "pointed winter rain." "Sensitive Chaos" is the name of her piece. Aquariums stand, water bags hang around, strange film footage flickers across the back wall. Old underwater footage shows two men, swimming towards each other again and again in new loops, wrestling, pushing each other away. Next: Seidel-Kukuk's face, filmed through an aquarium. At the very end: an elephant walking under water. Seidel-Kukuk's co-performer, the sound artist Christoph Illing, grates and scrapes sand and stones in a water glass, amplified by a microphone. He has also previously let water drip onto hot stove plates, where they hit and hissed and evaporated. Has sprinkled powder into a filled water glass so that it began to bubble, and produced lots of associative, electronic water sound on the notebook. These are beautiful, crazy, poetic scenes that the two invent. For example, how Lisa Seidel-Kukuk creates waves in an aquarium by simply tilting it, which roll very slowly and calmly from one side to the other. How she holds her face under water, dreaming and soft, and later again, as a fluttering black swan, whose head under water makes it impossible for her to flap her wings. When we think of water today, the first thing that comes to mind is polluted seas, all the people who have no access to clean drinking water. More than three billion people are said to be without clean drinking water by now. Lisa Seidel-Kukuk tells, at first, a different story. She asks about the poetry of water, about its terror, its violence, about the murmur of the streams and the roar of the surf. But toward the end, the third performer, Ines Marita Schärer, sprinkles black powder into an aquarium, and Seidel-Kukuk glides and bounces, twitches and wriggles across the long-flooded stage floor as if she were a fish dying. There are beautiful, even haunting images - and yet one doesn't quite get into it. This has to do with Ines Marita Schärer, who is a kind of servant in this play. Quiet, modest and attentive, she sits on the edge, pours water into containers for Lisa Seidel-Kukuk, sprays it against glass panes, holds postcards up to the camera. At one point, she is allowed to carry a suitcase filled with water across the stage. That is her greatest performance. But everything that happens on stage is related to each other, and so Lisa Seidel-Kukuk's performance also comes across as a rather narcissistic ego trip.

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