Fire for Water

2021

30min

Fire For Water was performed by me at Gessnerallee Theater in Zurich, Switzerland with lighting design by Maria Shaplin and sound board and composition by Leroy Chaar.

Fire for Water was a theatrical -hypnotic- undressing of power and paradox. It was presented in sync to an original soundtrack projected spatially in speakers around and underneath the audience platforms.  Text was projected in the upper left of the stage in-between transitions of the looks.   The metaphor of fire’s duplicitous capacity to burn (destroy and war) or gather (warm and create) was a guiding metaphor for the piece. I performed an unraveling of archetypes related to fire, and designed the look of the performance to connect with the elements of fire like wood, coal, and captivating light. The piece began with me sitting at the glow of a fire in the theater, and ends with me lighting a wood fire outside of the theater building and visible to the audience. In between, a steel armored warrior is forged from a flickering flame. They are softened (drinking oxygen and water) into a swimmer, she-rower, and time keeper with water. The performance circles around the question of duality – in displays of 0 and 1’s and the story of “two arrows” that is told mid-way though the piece. This story speaks to cycles of violence through the parable of being struck by an arrow and the options to either strike back- thus engaging more striking arrows, or to consider the strike as an end to striking but a beginning to addressing the pain of infliction. I created this performance with the proposition: how can humans come to the fire that they created and make it a fire for water. That is, to cool these human disasters of war and greed and transform the passions that fuel these catastrophes.

Produced by If I Can’t Dance with Gessnerallee Theater and Kunstfort Vijhuisen.