Münchener Biennale: Shall I build a dam?

Without water, life would not be possible; it is the prerequisite for our bodies to develop, thrive, grow and survive. And at the same time, water is in constant flux, representing exchange and transformation - in various states of aggregation and constantly taking on different forms, flowing through different bodies and connecting them with one another. Water stands for intimacy and closeness and at the same time has the cosmological dimension of the element that relates all life on this earth to one another.

Following on from this, SHALL I BUILD A DAM? explores ways of relating bodies, sounds, texts and movements from a post-human feminist perspective in order to arrive at a form of interaction and community that explores possibilities beyond an anthropocentric perspective with its traditional subject-object relations.

Things will be in flux, influencing each other, absorbing each other and relating to each other. It is about guilt and complicity, theft and gift, poetry and politics, viscosity, solidification, evaporation and flow.

SHALL I BUILD A DAM? is the first time that composer Kai Kobayashi, who has been working intensively with music theater for years, has collaborated with choreographer and performer Simone Aughterlony and lighting designer and set designer Joseph Wegman. With this project, the Munich Biennale is also continuing its successful cooperation with the Deutsche Oper Berlin, with whom this piece is being created as a project in which developments and transformations become visible and audible as a spatial process.