Until the waters foam up
A deconstructed durational response to Dvorak's RUSALKA.
Presented in cooperation with Stiftung Reinbeckhallen.
Until the waters foam up is an experience of night, a ritual of passing time, a performance incorporating music and video in which visual events emerge seamlessly from a hyper-realistic dreamscape that is haunted by the opera RUSALKA.
RUSALKA is the story of a water nymph who rejects home to pursue a fickle prince. When the prince rejects her, she is exiled at the threshold of flesh and water, luring men to drown. In her first appearance, she asks her father to stay with her “until the waters foam up:” something in the night is difficult for her to endure alone. Subsequently, Rusalka and the prince, both distinctly queer in Glen Sheppard’s reading of the opera, are forced by society to make a choice—inevitably, the wrong one—that leads to their tragic demise. In the opera’s finale, the prince, after a period of cursed wandering, finds Rusalka and begs her to release him to death with a kiss. She obliges. RUSALKA, as a fable, illustrates the perils of transgression and warns against Otherness.
My response to RUSALKA is informed by an experience of a sexual coming of age at the height of the AIDS epidemic. I describe this experience as a kind of ‘bruise’ and imagine that the performers who we spend this nights with are and, at the same time, are not the characters of RUSALKA. These characters are watching themselves, the inevitability of this didactic warning undoing them playing out in front of their eyes as they live it: analogous, but somewhat cryptically independent of the material, Until the waters foam up responds to this. I use the opportunity to stage the night in real time to at once incite a prone experience of living bruised and suggest a recognition of persistence and survival in spite, albeit absent platitudes.
Glen Sheppard, Concept / Direction / Adaptation / Visuals
With Marie-Gabrielle Arco, Billy Coulthurst, Crispin Lord, Fritz Polzer, Barbara Sotelsek, Felix Utting
Supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the programme NEUSTART KULTUR.
Photos: Cordula Treml
Presented in cooperation with Stiftung Reinbeckhallen.
Until the waters foam up is an experience of night, a ritual of passing time, a performance incorporating music and video in which visual events emerge seamlessly from a hyper-realistic dreamscape that is haunted by the opera RUSALKA.
RUSALKA is the story of a water nymph who rejects home to pursue a fickle prince. When the prince rejects her, she is exiled at the threshold of flesh and water, luring men to drown. In her first appearance, she asks her father to stay with her “until the waters foam up:” something in the night is difficult for her to endure alone. Subsequently, Rusalka and the prince, both distinctly queer in Glen Sheppard’s reading of the opera, are forced by society to make a choice—inevitably, the wrong one—that leads to their tragic demise. In the opera’s finale, the prince, after a period of cursed wandering, finds Rusalka and begs her to release him to death with a kiss. She obliges. RUSALKA, as a fable, illustrates the perils of transgression and warns against Otherness.
My response to RUSALKA is informed by an experience of a sexual coming of age at the height of the AIDS epidemic. I describe this experience as a kind of ‘bruise’ and imagine that the performers who we spend this nights with are and, at the same time, are not the characters of RUSALKA. These characters are watching themselves, the inevitability of this didactic warning undoing them playing out in front of their eyes as they live it: analogous, but somewhat cryptically independent of the material, Until the waters foam up responds to this. I use the opportunity to stage the night in real time to at once incite a prone experience of living bruised and suggest a recognition of persistence and survival in spite, albeit absent platitudes.
Glen Sheppard, Concept / Direction / Adaptation / Visuals
With Marie-Gabrielle Arco, Billy Coulthurst, Crispin Lord, Fritz Polzer, Barbara Sotelsek, Felix Utting
Supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the programme NEUSTART KULTUR.
Photos: Cordula Treml
