Kerstin Cmelka’s practice has gradually progressed from photography and
film into a striking repertoire of live performance. Cmelka’s
one-night-perfor- mance for based in Berlin, Change, is an adaptation of
a play by Wolfgang Bauer from 1969. This new live work, which Cmelka
realized earlier as a film, is part of her ongoing series of
Microdramas—a collection of folk-theatre-like performances and films
assem- bled using excerpts from classic dramatic texts, mainstream
clichés from cinema and traditional theatre genres. With a cacophony of
languages and dialects, humorous and tragic narratives, her works evoke
but refuse to align themselves with a spectrum of dramatic models such
as vaudeville, soap opera melodramas, stylized Hollywood films from the
40s and 50s, and even performance art from the 60s and 70s. Cmelka’s
works usually emerge from a kind of process of negotiation, one in which
she invites her artist friends to participate as actors. Through a
series of rigorous rehearsals, Cmelka shapes her actors into characters
through text, gestures, and costumes, but most importantly repetition.
The result is a familiar story played by a cast of motley archetypes
revealing crucial undercurrents of piercing social critique. SCW (text via Based in Berlin)
