Water Will (in Melody)
Water Will (in Melody) is a devised choreographic work for four performers that uses melodrama as a point of departure. Wrestling with language and notions of ‘the will’, this dystopian 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 theatre by producing a fantastical-like materiality that is translucent to its metaphoric and symbolic weight. Surrendering to the possibilities of the haptic, sense gets un-done to get re-done, paving the 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 theatre itself.
• The Dominican-American dancer and choreographer Ligia Lewis has previously presented minor matter – for which she won the prestigious Bessie Award – and Sorrow Swag at Kaaitheater. As a dancer, she has performed on the Kaaitheater stage in 7 Pleasures by Mette Ingvartsen and MONUMENT 0 by Eszter Salamon.
‘Raw and direct, disturbingly grotesque, suddenly beautifully poetic and unwittingly explicit.’ – Katja Vaghi, bachtrack.com
concept & choreography Ligia Lewis | performance Jolie Ngemi, Dani Brown, Ligia Lewis, Susanne Sachsse | dramaturgy Maja Zimmermann | light design Ariel Efraim Ashbel | sound design Jassem Hindi, S. McKenna | stage design Eike Böttcher | technical direction & light Catalina Fernandez | costumes sowrong studio | assistant Carina Zox, Gilad Bendavid | production management HAU Artist Office / Sabine Seifert | touring & distribution HAU Artist Office / Nicole Schuchardt | production Ligia Lewis / HAU Hebbel am Ufer | co-production Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2018, Centre D’Art Contemporain, tanzhaus nrw , donaufestival, Arsenic Centre d'art scénique contemporain, Walker Art Center | funded by Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe | supported by Baryshnikov Arts Center
