LOTTEgoesLIQUID

LOTTEgoesLIQUID
Scenic installation based on Zygmunt Bauman's "Liquid Life"

Concept: Eleonora Herder
Direction: Eleonora Herder, Falk Rößler, Arne Köhler
Texts: Lucia Carballal
Duration: 1:20 h

Lotte is only one of many who suspect her luck somewhere between crude promises and constant chances. She comes back to a past love. She would like to belong to something, but above all she wants to remain independent. And she is not alone in this. She ends up in a house full of people for whom the once desirable triad of work, house and family can no longer be the goal of all efforts. Instead, they wade through their lives, in which anything could happen all the time, but in the end hardly anything effective in the long run happens.

Everything can become a concrete possibility, an opportunity to hit the jackpot with a single stroke. That is why there is no longer any reason to exclude an option from the outset. Self-perceptions, people, life plans - they are valid until they have become obsolete and have to be replaced. Because there seem to be many more delightful alternatives...

The human being in the postmodern, globalized society lives in fragments, aborts and new beginnings. He must try to remain as flexible as possible and avoid any kind of commitment as best as he can.

This is how the Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman describes the current existence in the Western world. Contemporary life is "liquid life", in which previously solid structures are increasingly disintegrating and stable bonds are becoming a general problem because they could restrict possibilities. It is a matter of staying open for better opportunities.

The scenic installation LOTTEgoesLIQUID makes it its mission to take up Bauman's insights into life in globalized postmodernism in a theatrical work, both in terms of content and form.

Living a "liquid life" means first and foremost that everything happens faster, shorter and more simultaneous than past generations were used to. The "liquid life" is a life of short attention spans, in which the individual experience loses its significance because it is constantly in danger of being lost in an abundance of other events. It is important to conclude individual phases of life as quickly as possible and to be able to continue undisturbed - even if this is not always possible...

In LOTTEgoesLIQUID the audience is placed in the same situation as the seven characters of the play: They have to decide constantly whether they want to leave or stay and for how long they are willing to give someone their attention. There are no short actions being served bit by bit. Instead, one is always confronted with too much: too many actions, too much excitement, too many possibilities. Seven different lives stories develop simultaneously in front of the audience.

The spectators walk round an island of interconnected rooms. There is no angle from which you can follow the whole action. You’ll have to keep walking to find out what happens at the other end of the stage. If you want to follow a character over a longer period of time, you need to set off together with him. Meanwhile, other things are happening elsewhere, so that you unavoidably keep missing something... The individual scenes and storylines all run parallel and are interwoven. The "liquid life" never stops. You always got to be on your guard. Breaks are a waste of time.

But in LOTTEgoesLIQUID the many fragments come together to form a whole. All elements finally unite to a theatrical symphony. Perhaps in this way it becomes possible to make the pulse, the breaks and the constraints of contemporary life in the western world tangible. Whether this music of "liquid life" only exists in the theatre or also outside of it still has to be found out.

Concept & direction:
Eleonora Herder
Falk Roessler
Arne Köhler

Texts: 
Lucia Carballal

Stage design: 
NAEVAS

Sound design:
Arne Köhler
Falk Roessler

Actors:
Laura López (Lotte)
Lluna Pindado (Inge)
Anahí Setton (Josefine)
Albert Alemany (Paul)
Ramon Rojas (guitarist)
Joan Casas Rius (Berndt)
Arne Köhler (Fat Kid)

Video trailer for "LOTTEgoesLIQUID”

Snippets of „LOTTEgoesLIQUID“

Capitalism monologue of the figure Berndt in "LOTTEgoesLIQUID":

The Guitarist (LOTTEgoesLIQUID theme) by Lotte's Music
This musical piece is a composition that was created during the work on "LOTTEgoesLIQUID". In it the musical leitmotif of the guitarist's figure and the whole composition was worked out.
The melody appears again and again at various points in the scenic installation - sometimes played live with the electric guitar, sometimes through an audio cassette that some of the characters in "LOTTEgoesLIQUID" listen to.

Paul by Lotte's Music
Lotte sings this song in a simple acoustic guitar version at one point in the performance. She calls at a radio show and tries to get back her ex-boyfriend Paul with this song.

"A scenic experience and a theatrical adventure. Because LOTTEgoesLIQUID is not a conventional play from the outset. The audience is invited to enter a space with a highly distinctive stage construction. A series of fragile spaces directly confronts us with the actuality of the lives of these scarred people presented to us by the play."

Jorge Pisa Sánchez (www.indienauta.com)

"Everyone is an outsider in some way. Some just say it, others show it, or don't show it out of false modesty. Some no longer want to have to love just one person, others are looking for precisely that eternal love that is no longer bearable these days because even the person seeking it no longer truly believes in it. And in the midst of it all, the ticking of a clock, constantly reminding you that time is running out, that you're getting old, that perhaps you have to reproduce in order to BE."

A destada (Blog: “This is improvised”)G