Until the waters foam up
Presented in cooperation with Stiftung Reinbeckhallen.
Glen Sheppard, Concept / Direction / Adaptation / Visuals
With Marie-Gabrielle Arco, Billy Coulthurst, Crispin Lord, Fritz Polzer, Barbara Sotelsek, Felix Utting
UNTIL THE WATERS FOAM UP was an investigation into theatrical time as an experience of endurance, companionship and care. Conceived as an experience of night, lasting from dusk until dawn during Pentecost, the performance asked an audience to remain with a group of characters through a period of darkness that they themselves believed they might not be able to endure. Rather than constructing a sequence of dramatic events to fill this time, I asked what the events of such a night would actually be, and allowed them to play out in real time.
The work was haunted by Antonín Dvořák's RUSALKA. I approached the opera as a fable about transgression and Otherness, a story in which crossing a boundary produces irreversible consequences. My response to RUSALKA was informed by my experience of sexual coming of age during the height of the AIDS epidemic, an experience I understand retrospectively as a kind of bruise: something that remains present in the body even after the immediate danger has passed.
The performers in UNTIL THE WATERS FOAM UP were inspired by the figures of RUSALKA without simply representing them. They were people who were simultaneously themselves and not themselves: echoes of the Prince, Rusalka and others within the opera, displaced into an ordinary contemporary world. A central premise was that these figures were somehow watching their own story take place after it had already happened. The didactic inevitability of the fable – the warning against transgression and Otherness – was therefore already known to them. They were living inside a story whose consequences they could see approaching, while nevertheless having to inhabit the ordinary time of a night.
The performance unfolded in real time. People arrived, left, returned, ate, talked outside, waited, slept or remained awake. Small actions and comings and goings were not used simply to connect larger dramatic events; they constituted the dramatic material itself. The work therefore deliberately resisted the conventional compression of theatrical time, in which insignificant actions are omitted and only consequential events are presented. Instead, it asked what happens when the apparently uneventful time between events becomes the principal material of performance.
This produced a form of collective keeping watch. The audience did not simply observe characters enduring a difficult night but spent the night with them. Endurance became relational: a matter of remaining present, supporting one another and allowing time to pass. The absence of conventional dramatic incident created space for attention to shift towards bodies, gestures, proximity, fatigue, silence and the changing conditions of the room.
Music and video were incorporated into a hyper-realistic dreamscape in which visual events emerged almost seamlessly from the environment. The resulting world remained close enough to ordinary life to make the passage of time perceptible, while the persistent presence of Rusalka created a second temporal and narrative layer beneath it.
The work was therefore concerned with the relationship between real time and theatrical time: what happens when theatrical duration is not imposed upon lived experience but allowed to emerge from it. It also explored whether the absence of dramatic event might itself become a form of intensity, and whether spectatorship could become an act not of anticipation but of accompaniment.
The title, UNTIL THE WATERS FOAM UP, evokes a state of suspension before transformation or catastrophe, but the work's interest ultimately lay less in whether catastrophe would arrive than in what it meant to remain together while waiting for it. The performance sought to create an experience of living with the bruise of an already-known story while also recognising persistence and survival in spite of it, without resolving that experience into consolation or platitude.
Glen Sheppard, Concept / Direction / Adaptation / Visuals
With Marie-Gabrielle Arco, Billy Coulthurst, Crispin Lord, Fritz Polzer, Barbara Sotelsek, Felix Utting
UNTIL THE WATERS FOAM UP was an investigation into theatrical time as an experience of endurance, companionship and care. Conceived as an experience of night, lasting from dusk until dawn during Pentecost, the performance asked an audience to remain with a group of characters through a period of darkness that they themselves believed they might not be able to endure. Rather than constructing a sequence of dramatic events to fill this time, I asked what the events of such a night would actually be, and allowed them to play out in real time.
The work was haunted by Antonín Dvořák's RUSALKA. I approached the opera as a fable about transgression and Otherness, a story in which crossing a boundary produces irreversible consequences. My response to RUSALKA was informed by my experience of sexual coming of age during the height of the AIDS epidemic, an experience I understand retrospectively as a kind of bruise: something that remains present in the body even after the immediate danger has passed.
The performers in UNTIL THE WATERS FOAM UP were inspired by the figures of RUSALKA without simply representing them. They were people who were simultaneously themselves and not themselves: echoes of the Prince, Rusalka and others within the opera, displaced into an ordinary contemporary world. A central premise was that these figures were somehow watching their own story take place after it had already happened. The didactic inevitability of the fable – the warning against transgression and Otherness – was therefore already known to them. They were living inside a story whose consequences they could see approaching, while nevertheless having to inhabit the ordinary time of a night.
The performance unfolded in real time. People arrived, left, returned, ate, talked outside, waited, slept or remained awake. Small actions and comings and goings were not used simply to connect larger dramatic events; they constituted the dramatic material itself. The work therefore deliberately resisted the conventional compression of theatrical time, in which insignificant actions are omitted and only consequential events are presented. Instead, it asked what happens when the apparently uneventful time between events becomes the principal material of performance.
This produced a form of collective keeping watch. The audience did not simply observe characters enduring a difficult night but spent the night with them. Endurance became relational: a matter of remaining present, supporting one another and allowing time to pass. The absence of conventional dramatic incident created space for attention to shift towards bodies, gestures, proximity, fatigue, silence and the changing conditions of the room.
Music and video were incorporated into a hyper-realistic dreamscape in which visual events emerged almost seamlessly from the environment. The resulting world remained close enough to ordinary life to make the passage of time perceptible, while the persistent presence of Rusalka created a second temporal and narrative layer beneath it.
The work was therefore concerned with the relationship between real time and theatrical time: what happens when theatrical duration is not imposed upon lived experience but allowed to emerge from it. It also explored whether the absence of dramatic event might itself become a form of intensity, and whether spectatorship could become an act not of anticipation but of accompaniment.
The title, UNTIL THE WATERS FOAM UP, evokes a state of suspension before transformation or catastrophe, but the work's interest ultimately lay less in whether catastrophe would arrive than in what it meant to remain together while waiting for it. The performance sought to create an experience of living with the bruise of an already-known story while also recognising persistence and survival in spite of it, without resolving that experience into consolation or platitude.
