ABSTRACT
Together with the other spectators, I stepped on to the stage of the Berlin theatre Haus der Berliner Festspiele. Cardboard sculptures built from cutout models stood on large tables spread out across the room: strange, fili-greed skeletons of beings that have never existed, their composition defying known anatomical structures. The audience was invited to lend a helping hand, and soon everyone was absorbed in the task of somehow joining the various bones and bone parts: An ankle was attached to a femur, and cervical vertebrae between costal arches created long orthopedic formations of a type never seen before. The assemblages negate the recognized organization of bodies, making it diffcult to distinguish between above and below, front and back. 1 It was a while before I noticed the display device by the front edge of the stage, across which parts of sentences drifted, revealing fragmentary accounts of aliens and foreign beings. The dancers David Kern, Nicole Peisl, and Christopher Roman later made their way through the rostra, twisting and turning their bodies, mimicking the sculptures. Their momentum seemed rooted in the objects' own contortions, and their movements translated the asynchronicity of the turning and shifting joints. Noises, amplified and transformed through the microphone, streamed forth from Christopher Roman's mouth: labored, groaning cries, as though the outward projection of an innermost being, or a way of giving voice to the burgeoning skeletons on the rostra.
