2001 At the Edge of Time (Magdalena Inc.+)

A Curtain as a Playmate - a Performance by Magdalena Inc.+ at the Saarland Museum
by Elke Geifert, Saarbrücker Zeitung, October 2001

Dance of images: The performance by Magdalena Inc.+ at the Saarland Museum brought together many multi-media aspects, such as Walli Höfinger‘s strong body images and Ruth Hommelsheim‘s projected photographs. There was nothing new here. Or was there? The performance group Magdalena Inc.+ was presenting their performance "At the edge of time” in Saarbrücken for the second time this year. The performance itself was unchanged, but the auditorium of the Saarland Museum offered a new perspective on the “freestyle improvisation“. The first performance was shown several months ago in the Church of St. John and will be followed by further performances in Cologne and Darmstadt.
Perception, time and improvisation: 3 themes which characterize this performance. Walli Höfinger, master student of Prof. Ulrike Rosenbach and a performance teacher at the Art Academy of Saarbrücken, used her body to define space. Christiane Hommelsheim, her sister Ruth, and Christopher Dell were responsible for the acoustic and visual sequences which were projected in the space. The abundance of different artistic media, in part improvised and in part meticulously prepared, gave rise to a “space-time structure” meant not to make a statement about time itself, but to speak for itself as a nonverbal experience and presentation of time.
” Our improvisation is not form, but content”, Walli Höfinger explained. The group worked on this space production for 2 years. Each artist contributed to the process of conveying time through narrative and sensory means. Walli Höfinger and Christiane Hommelsheim used body and voice to supply each other with “space images”. A transparent curtain divided the space in two and served both as a projection screen for Ruth Hommelsheim’s photographs and as a “playmate” for Walli Höfinger. Hiding, exposing, light and shadow, Christopher Dell’s virtuoso vibraphone music in the middle part of the performance - everything had its place, but also, as it seemed, its clearly defined limits. The red-dressed Walli Höfinger found expressive body images over and over again, but ultimately left the viewer wondering what message was behind them. Christiane was sometimes searching for the “thread in England”, trying to get hold of it, but: “It‘s not that easy.” This spoken sequence seemed to put the whole situation in words. The “light” radio music played in the last part of the performance posed the question of the point of this background music, but in the same time it mirrored a contemporary phenomenon. These “space images”, though impressive in part, were not always able to find the thread.

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