::| gisela oberbeck | holzschnitt | papierschnitt | schattenbildtheater |::
„Man is the shadow’s dream“„ (Pindal)
Image-Shadow-Theater go
Shifting forms, shifting lights, shifting images –
Compositions on surfaces and in space
Metamorphoses, associations, sounds, noises, rhythms, voices, music – Image Shadow Theatre is all of these.
After much experience in traditional shadow theatre, I developed a new and original kind of theatre. The special feature of this theatre is the conscious play with shadow rather than the play with figures (as in traditional shadow-theatre). This means the player moves the lights rather than the figures (hand-held figures are replaced by stationary figures) and in so doing, the shadows move and come to life.
The shadows move mostly very slowly across the screen or in the space, are broken up, pass over each other, meet other spaces. In combination with tone and sound they create atmospheres – and in this way lead us into their own world.
The themes of these performances are transformation –as found in fairytales, poetry and shadow, and the abstraction of stories and contemporary themes.
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Subjects are:
· current political and cultural-political issues like displacement, expulsion, cultural encounters
- · different metamorphic forms in fairytales
- · poetic observations of natural forms
- · poems and images translated into scenes:
- from SAID, Pablo Neruda, Christa Wolf, Else Lasker-Schüler...
These themes are translated into archaic images and are often accompanied by live music.
In most of the pieces, language and image alternate and are not presented together at the same time.
The prepared pieces are based on a fundamental mood which is presented visually and musically in a compressed and abstracted form.
The haziness alters the images and throws them in a different light.
“The shadows have, for me, their own world, they use the sounds and my play with them in order to come to life for a short while. I play with extremely reduced light in order to bring the viewer, and myself, closer to this world. (The eyes and the mind can grasp this where the camera usally cannot)”