WaterWaltz

It's a sunny Sunday in Pankow, Berlin's dreariest suburb. I fix a salad, fill a bottle with water, and go down to my bike. I stop by a Schrebergarten - one of Germany's famous allotment gardens, which I am lucky enough to share with collagues at the end of my street - and pick up a towel, a lying-cushion, and a panama hat I find lying around. Time to get healthy by the lake!

Coming in to Berlin's Weißer See lake - the largest in Berlin-Weißensee and approximately in the centre of that district - many Berliners seem to have had the same idea. The lake reeks with population, people half naked or more lounging around, the beach cafe (entry 4 EUR) with its Hollywood-parody sign and giant letters looming over the water, giving everything a feeling like it's the 1970s. Not to mention the golden September light, which makes everything look sepia-toned, like it's from an old family polaroid.

I find the area between the Milchhäuschen cafe and the Boat rental, find my place, and sit down on the cushion, waiting for the show to begin.

WaterWaltz is a performative cycle that began in 2022 in Krumme Lanke, a lake in south-west Berlin, and has since moved around many of Berlin's favourite water-holes, including Tegeler See and Müggelsee. These are all popular places for Berlin-style summer recreation, where a motley crew of last night's revellers, families, and weirdos gather to soak up the sun and the sand, in a sort of mildly disappointing version of a beach. Waterwaltz re-appropriates these places as site-specific locations for dance via an innovative invisible floating mat, which makes the dancers look like they are dancing literally on top of the water, carefully steered by invisible ropes as the crowd watches on - or simply integrates the magical dancing figure into their everyday recreational activities.

 Photo: Dusan Sekulovic

The spectacle of seeing a dancer-on-water against a backdrop of passers by does not lose it's magic over the 3-hour duration of WaterWaltz, which repeats it's cycle every hour. It's worth the free entry price just for this: during the performance I saw, a visitor and her dog amusingly entered the stage while talking loudly in Italian on a wireless headset, apparently oblivious to the audience before them.

Kiosk Festival Part 2: A Body Under a Microscope

Waking up at STANICA seems never easy.

This year's Kiosk festival was, unlike last year, not plagued by rain - although it was as much an omnipresent threat as the overpass that dominates the tent-laden field at the back of the cultural centre.

Last night was the usual kick-ass local DJs, led by DJ TRANSmisia who played a stirling set and led revellers through a wide range of re-mastered and almost unrecognisable queer-influenced pop tunes from the 90s, from the Backstreet Boys to Aqua. I wake up still feeling like I haven't recovered from the train ride, (and D'Epog's bulldozing Handsfree certainly didn't help) and wondering if I even will before disappearing back to Berlin tomorrow.

 

Photo: Natália Zajačiková

The final day of Kiosk is a few shows with a quiet resonance to them - the perfect way to end the festival, together with some public discussion with Festival Directors Michaela Pastekova and Martin Krištof. Congratulations on another hearty Kiosk!

Medař

Walking into the stage of Medař - a work from Czech puppetry group FRAS - is walking into a familiar magical world of puppetry. In a world that flattens everything out into the same categorizable screen-surfaces, puppetry is refreshingly 3-dimensional in its approach: we can zoom, slide, transform, and destroy using only our imaginations. The scope for puppetry is limited only by our capacity to give in to its illusions, which are never forced on us, but remain a strong and beautiful invitation to discover once again a love of life.

 

 

Photo: Mariia Hryhorenko

That invitation is dripping with pleasure in Medař - its recycled materials, soft lighting, and painstakingly-decorated red temple proudly framing the action of the microscopic drama. Paper dangles from the structure, as the puppeteers draw from their toolkit of instruments to slowly agitate the world into life - marked by an ingenious use of a map drawn onto an old piece of corregated iron, also used as a type of rusty backgdrop to the play.

The narrative itself follows a Nepalese man Joshi whose sister falls ill, and who has to go and fetch a special medicine from a mountain-top. The gongs and chimes of the atmospheric soundtrack (credited as FRAS) slip shapes and transform as flexibly as the stage itself, moving through a list of imaginative concepts, lovingly-designed to delight. There are various set-pieces - sort of dead-end jokes - that mark the narrative, such as repeated dousing of a candle, or flies leaving only to return, moments which perhaps make up the true diversionary delight of the work.

 

Photo: Mariia Hryhorenko

Kiosk Festival Special Edition: Handsfree by D'Epog

Following last year’s prank for Kiosk – which I wrote about extensively here as an interesting example of anti-theatre that tangentially performed various aspects of local viewing culture – D’Epog returns with the epic Handsfree, an adventure into a character who burned down their own house, and is now at a crossroads of negotiating how to deal with their material existence.

There is too much to write about in Handsfree. It really is a 2.5-hour, exhaustive monologue-installation with some projection interludes, probably just to giver Herculian performer Magdalena Straková a bit of a break. In the meantime, the text touches on a barrage of themes relevant to our contemporary moment: as we follow the performer’s journey through loss of material possessions and her dark, existential contemplation that follows this emptiness, it seems that there is no end to her exploration of exploitation, precarity, and social punishment, and the dark psychological effects of this on the individual. Handsfree is a work that delights in its endless spiral towards death and something like Agamben’s “Bare Life” that happens with the veneer of lies is removed, and the curtain is pulled back.

It does this with both a sense of pleasurable anarchy, and more-than-passing enthusiasm for theatre convention. The show opens with Straková atop a dystopian pile of trash (Set and Costumes: Dominik Styk), a la Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days, sporting a grotesque mask, grim reaper cloak and black shopping bags. She begins to talk about her possessions, occasionally crescendoing into an absurd squak of “Mam, Mam”, like a nightmare or perpetual panic attack. The section ends with her pointing the finger and flailing, her voice distorted as the Doors Classic Light My Fire starts up, and the story of her accidentally setting fire to her house – on which Handsfree is based – begins.

 

Photo: Marek Jančúch

What follows is a rollicking ride through the protagonist Magda’s exposure to the hell of living her contemporary materialist existence. We meet Magda’s cat Mila via a dragged-around cat house on wheels (a la Brecht’s Mother Courage) and hear about his needs, and then Straková reads a distorted fairy tale of the Princess and the Pea, with a re-animated version of the Disney tower collapsing in the background. She tells a story of setting gamified challenges for herself, puts her material belongings on a bus, and lay on a park bench with all her possessions, washing her clothes in public. She speculates that maybe she could buy a car park and set up her life there. Amusingly, the audience is led out of the Žilina's Museum of Art to an actual car loaded with belongings, marvels at Straková throwing clothes out of the first-floor window and onto the public square below (subsequently interacting with passers-by) and watches a short part of the 90s TV show Alf – before Straková picks up the projector and smashes it on the floor.

 Photo: Marek Jančúch