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, according to Sheppard, the perils of transgression and warns against Otherness.
Sheppard’s response to RUSALKA is informed by his experience of a sexual coming of age at the height of the AIDS epidemic. He describes this experience as a kind of ‘bruise’ and imagines that the performers who we will spend these 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. Sheppard uses 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.
The performance takes place in cooperation with the Stiftung Reinbeckhallen.
*Please note that the performance on May 28th will be recorded.
Registration
Attendance is limited and entry will take place at 8:45 PM, shortly before the performance begins at 9:00 PM. Please register by writing to peopleinrooms@gmail.com. You will receive a confirmation email stating whether you have secured a place or have been put on the waiting list, with further information being sent closer to the date of the events.
Attendance is free of charge.
