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2000 6 Performances
Designed Deviation
by Sabine Graf, Saarbrücker Zeitung, July 17, 2000
PAS MAL: FIVE PERFORMANCES IN THE DEUTSCHHERREN-CHAPEL
We live, we breathe, we take in energy and release it again: every day,
all the time. The thrill of performance lies in finding images for
these processes and expressing yourself with and through them. This
opportunity was provided 6 times at the end of the summer term. The
performance forum of the Saar Academy of Fine Arts presented the works
of 6 performers, all women, some students in different semesters and
some graduates of the media and the painting class. The group had worked
with Walli Höfinger over the course of two semesters. A graduate
of the media class, and an excellent performer herself, she consciously
chose not to give the students a specific theme for the teaching assignment:
full freedom was given. That went for the students as well as for the
instructor, as Prof. Ulrike Rosenbach pointed out. The deviation – “as
a supplement to what I am teaching” – had to be created
and experienced. On the one hand, the elements of Ulrike Rosenbach’s
teaching (transformation, transition in sequence), on the other, the
extreme bodywork of Walli Höfinger (rolling over stairs, hanging
at great heights) – together with the different ideas of the
performers, the results were persuasive. It was striking that 4 of
the 6 performers come from the academy’s painting classes, especially
because this added a visual and spatial dimension to the focus on the
body. Simone Ilg performed her action last Monday in the auditorium
of the academy, when she interwove color and form with time and space
in the form of colored balloons filled with air, wrapped in white tape
and stamped on to leave shriveled husks. The image was effective. More
intensive than on canvas. The 5 other performances on Friday night
in the Deutschherren Chapel, which again proved an ideal location for
performances, also spoke to the lasting effect of images.
Jacqueline Wachall, as much a painter as she is a performer, performed
variations on her recent favorite theme, the skin, with several scenes
involving body coverings. Open secrets with prosthetic breasts, false
hair and a coin-purse turned inside-out at waist level created the paradox
of the covering that exposes. Klaudia Stoll, also a graduate of the academy,
like Jacqueline Wachall, worked with the balance of her body, word-images
projected in the space from a CD-ROM, and two red dumbbells. And here
the difference between painters and performers became clear: The body
rules.
The performer Klaudia Stoll draws the images from inside herself, as
does the media student Gudrun Esterer: the alternation between taking
in energy by eating and expending energy through movement is shown in
a performance whose clear structure is accentuated by sounds. This is
a goal to which the two younger performers of the evening, the painters
Natalie Kolaric and Katrin Fischer, both aspire, each in her own style,
with or without props. The lashing energy of Natalie Kolaric in her solo
about the lack of a goal was tremendous, while Katrin Fischer's scene
about breathing and drowning/drinking, hovering between oceanic feeling
and a banana milkshake, was wild and witty: The viewer is left eager
for more.
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