iris ter schiphorst

FAZ, 19.11.1999, Jochen Schmidt

"The Basel Bernarda team goes further in its abstraction than all others who have attempted to translate the play into dance. The fable is only of interest here insofar as it creates the atmosphere of hysteria that Schlömer and Oehring are after: a steam boiler of suppressed passions, in danger of exploding almost from the start.

The music is more actively involved in creating this atmosphere than in most other dance pieces...an unconventional music of melodically interspersed noises: Vocal cantilenas soaring over clusters, nervous sawing of the double bass, electronic explosions behind which, almost inaudibly, Schubert's Ave Maria or the distant song of a muezzin unfolds.

Schlömer's choreography condenses the musical instructions into a dark maelstrom that sweeps the audience along inexorably. For five quarters of an hour, the performance drills almost painfully into the audience's nerve centre."

Positions February 2000, Gisela Nauck

"Three like-minded, like-feeling people obviously came together with the authors, because it became a dance theatre piece "as if from a single mould". Helmut Oehring and Iris ter Schiphorst developed a tonal score that moves between the extremes of a slow-motion standstill and musical torpor in glaring noise. Monotonous repetitions, breaks, new beginnings of the same, loops, occasional sounds "from outside" (bells, a bird) and repeated fragments of Bach and Schubert - memories of the past, of an ideal world, longing, drowned in the noise of an ancient gramophone. Oehring and ter Schiphorst have added an unconventional pair to the Lorca figures. Its function is similar to that of the Evangelist in Bach's Passions, but in fact it embodies the untold nature of a story, because its reality plays out in the emotions: the deaf performer Christina Schönfeld, who narrates the main features of the fate of Bernarda Alba and her daughters in sign language, to which the countertenor Arno Raunig - whose text is naturally just as difficult to understand in cantilena singing - gives expression in the literal sense. Throughout the piece, the pair are strangely at odds with each other - musically too - because they actually do what one expects but ultimately cannot understand.

Equipped with this ready-made score, Joachim Schlömer created a choreography of realistic symbolism for the Tanztheater Basel ensemble in the (stage and costume non-)colours black and white - and occasionally red (Frank Leimbach, Gesine Völlm). A deadly flamenco is the only "real" dance in it. Just as in the music, the dance language is dominated by discontinuities, fragments: as disruption, aimless activism, fruitless outbursts. Only Bernarda Alba represents frightening consistency with her slow gaits and movements. In these premieres and first performances, music and dance merge into a black emotional theatre of gestures, movement and sound, uncompromising, without embellishment, brutal - but touching. The dancers of the Tanztheater Basel and the instrumentalists Peter Kowald (double bass), Markus Retschnefki (prepared piano, keyboard) and Jörg Wilkendorf (electric guitar) provided the necessary dance and acoustic presence. And I finally had a seat in the Hebbel Theatre so that I could experience the necessity of Dolby surround sound (Torsten Ottersberg) for myself."