TERRIBLE FISH

TERRIBLE FISH was a play for two women and one man. The starting point was the confessional poetry by Sylvia Plath whose work was predominantly characterized by her personal life, and the repeated question "Who am I?". Her poem "Three women", written for BBC Radio in 1962, was the basic template for the play TERRIBLE FISH. Written for three voices, the poem describes a night at the delivery ward, and in the play TERRIBLE FISH it becomes the trigger for exposing different conditions regarding the oppositions life-death, health-illness, delivery-abortion, conscious-unconscious. In the intuitive and fragmentary structure of the play, the main mission was to find some performance material in poetry. The scenography consisted of an installation of battery lights set up on microphone stands. These stands also served as barriers for the performers to move unimpeded through space and to form movement into a dance. The performers did not speak into microphones but into small beams of light. This „mute concert“ uncovered the inner and hidden world of an isolated and lonely person. Even though it primarily dealt with the female identity, the play also questioned the female in the male, and the male in the female. The subject of fragility, not only female, was the end result of this dark performance form, which does not explain nor does it answer the questions asked.