Could you watch a play like a landscape or a face where feelings pass by like light weather changes?
The performers appear as one organism with two different personalities. Bright flourescent light floods both stage and audience areas. Almost nothing seems to happen, but what happens is in great detail and absolute precision. In the performers’ faces, posture and breathing, a melodrama takes place where all narrative elements have been sifted out. The experiment is as follows: Can one bear such lack of narrative? Can one bear reading emotions without cause and effect?
The public is repeatedly questioning its expectations. In the lit audience, the faces of the viewers start reflecting the performers’ faces and the audience becomes a distorting mirror of the stage. Meanwhile, the show follows a precise score, doubled by two bodies: head movements without emotions; head movements filled with emotions; emotions without head movements. Finally, we get to witness the original operatic melodrama—an icon of western cultural heritage, the source of all distillations that came before—performed in a lip-sync duet.
A performance by: Antonia Baehr
With: William Wheeler, Antonia Baehr
Production: Wheeler/Baehr and Podewil Berlin, 2001
