Helena Waldmann

Revolver besorgen

“Helena Waldmann’s work is a godsend for the theatre. The Berlin-based choreographer is a magician of the stage who knows that a work is only successful when it is able to conjure up the world of illusion. Nevertheless, with her innate intelligence and critical attitude, she is also able to question social and political conventions, going beyond the mechanisms of the theatre. Her work is always marked by an overlapping of sensuality and thought.”

In her production, Get a Revolver, Waldmann investigates forgetting as a positive and liberating potential of the human brain, sensing the capacity for happiness contained there. With the superb dancer Brit Rodemund, she has achieved a grotesque as well as humorous work “that reflects on restraints, and the temptation to break away from these, using ballet as a symbol of the rigorous training that life demands of us. During the 60 minutes of the performance, Brit Rodemund becomes her own twin: a classical ballerina with dazzling presence, then a searcher, for whom everything, even her own body or a plastic bag, is a source of wonder. She impressively shows the balancing act between a thirst for discovery and the depths of madness. Even in difficult moments, she gives her character the dignity a person needs to remain human” (Andrea Kachelrieß, Stuttgarter Nachrichten).

Despite the knowledge that a revolver might entail a departure from a world that she no longer understands, she is still able to laugh – about the possibility of liberation contained in forgetting. Is one then really lost to the world when memory is no longer linked to the world’s demands?