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Water Will (in Melody) is a devised choreographic work for four performers using melodrama as a point of departure. Wrestling with language and notions of “the will”, this dystopic fantasy becomes a space for negotiating desire, imagination, and feelings of an encroaching end. Unfolding with playful inventiveness, a wet and cavernous landscape becomes host to a fiction that invites instability, recreation, and catastrophe.

Lewis initiates this world in which voice, gesture, touch and movement, flow like waves––both gentle and turbulent. Through the language of mimesis, Lewis and her performers engage with the porousness of the theater by producing a fantastical-like materiality translucent to its metaphoric and symbolic weight.

Surrendering to the possibilities of the haptic, sense gets un-done to get re-done, paving way for an-“othered” organization of sight and touch. Through this process of alienation, exteriorization, and materialization, this melodrama touches the borders of its own making giving life to both the emotional landscape of its protagonists as well as to the theater itself.

Concept & choreography: Ligia Lewis
Performance: Titilayo Adebayo, Dani Brown, Ligia Lewis, Susanne Sachsse
Dramaturgy: Maja Zimmermann
Sound design: S. McKenna, Jassem Hindi
Light design: Ariel Efraim Ashbel
Technical director & light technician: Catalina Fernandez
Stage design: Eike Böttcher
Costume design: sowrong studio
Assistant: Carina Zox, Gilad Bendavid
Production management: HAU Artist Office / Sabine Seifert
Touring & distribution: HAU Artist Office / Nicole Schuchardt

Production: Ligia Lewis / HAU Hebbel am Ufer.
Co-production: Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2018 / Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, tanzhaus nrw (Düsseldorf), Arsenic Centre d’art scénique contemporain (Lausanne), donaufestival (Krems), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis).
Funded by: Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.
Supported by: Baryshnikov Arts Center (NYC).
Thanks to: Jarrett Gregory for residency support.