Ophelia’s Got Talent

Water is the element of assimilation and adaptation, a symbol of the boundless capacity to expand, of an eternal, inseparable unity with the outside world. Iconographically, water has been closely associated with womanhood – and with images of violence and death: a figure standing next to a quiet pond is a cipher for the domestication of female subjectivity; whitecaps on the sea’s surface stand for the result of her physical disintegration, a mermaid’s fishtail is a metaphor for her ability to embody the regularities surrounding her.
In an oceanic landscape full of cultural and historical references to all manner of water creatures and drowned strangers, “Ophelia’s Got Talent” does not only ask whether training and physical exercise can help us escape the precarious circumstances of the present with climate catastrophes and other disasters looming. On the wet terrain of the stage, the performers try out what it means to “be Ophelia”. Deliberately satisfying the fantasies of others is a part of the elaborate game which she is mistress of. Leda, Melusine, Undine, the nymphs, Nereids or sirens, they all shape our biographies to this day. And as their heiresses, the company speculates on future life forms that will have assimilated these conditions, transformed them and yielded new forms of being.

Statement of the Jury
Florentina Holzinger’s super-heroines are back – even more courageous, combative and fit for the deepest seas than before. Moderated by the glass-eyed pirate “Captain Hook” who, like the rest of the female crew, performs bottomless, the evening begins as a talent show of athletes with various gifts who leave behind customary body images and taste norms. They wear their scars with pride and invent new forms of gracefulness. The stunts steadily increase in momentum: from freediving in several water basins to mass masturbation on a hovering helicopter, from siren song to plastic waste maelstrom inside the water basin. The common thread through Holzinger’s maximalist sea-creature show is Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Her act of drowning herself, however, is reinterpreted as an empowerment strategy: The performers narrate and rewrite their trauma by a self-determined, controlled flirtation with mortal danger. From survival mode to crazed spectacle.

Tojuror Katrin Ullmann’s video statement in the Berliner Festspiele Media Library (in German)

Programmheft (pdf 0.1 MB)