Water Will (in Melody)
“Water Will (in Melody)” is a devised choreographic work for four performers using melodrama as a point of departure. Wrestling with language and notions of “the will”, this dystopic fantasy becomes a space for negotiating desire, imagination, and feelings of an encroaching end. Unfolding with playful inventiveness, a wet and cavernous landscape becomes host to a fiction that invites instability, recreation, and catastrophe. Lewis initiates this world in which voice, gesture, touch and movement, flow like waves –– both gentle and turbulent.
Through the language of mimesis, Lewis and her performers engage with the porousness of the theater by producing a fantastical-like materiality translucent to its metaphoric and symbolic weight. Surrendering to the possibilities of the haptic, sense gets un-done to get re-done, paving way for an-“othered” organization of sight and touch. Through this process of alienation, exteriorization, and materialization, this melodrama touches the borders of its own making giving life to both the emotional landscape of its protagonists as well as to the theater itself.
* Production: Ligia Lewis
* Co-production: Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2018 / Centre D’Art Contemporain (Geneva), tanzhaus nrw (Düsseldorf), Arsenic Centre d’art scénique contemporain (Lausanne), donaufestival (Krems), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Münchner Kammerspiele Funded by: Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe
* Funded by: Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe
* Supported by: Baryshnikov Arts Center (NYC)
* Thanks to: Jarrett Gregory for residency support
Concept, choreography & direction
Ligia Lewis
Creation with original performers
Titilayo Adebayo, Dani Brown, Susanne Sachsse
Performance
Dani Brown, Ligia Lewis, Jolie Ngemi, Susanne Sachsse
Dramaturgy
Maja Zimmermann
Light design
Ariel Efraim Ashbel
Sound design
S. McKenna
Stage design
Eike Böttcher
Costume design
sowrong studio
Assistant
Gilad Bendavid, Carina Zox
Production management
Sabine Seiffert (HAU Hebbel am Ufer)
Management, production & distribution
Godlive Lawani–Stane Performing Arts Management
Photos
Photos 1 & 3 by Dorothea Tuch. Photo 2 by Steven A. Gunther