OPHELIA – EXIT WATER
performance
1h 10 min
2021
Münchner Kammerspiele
Ophelia – Exit Water confronts the inevitability of Ophelia’s fate by forcing open the script that has bound her to silence, surrender, and submersion. Through lyrical and prose fragments, the piece traces how water becomes both a stage and a sentence, a mirror and a burial, inscribing the female read body into a cycle of disappearance. If drowning is the final gesture allowed to Ophelia, what other movements, what other exits, have been left unwritten? Three Ophelias, fractured yet speaking, search for a vocabulary beyond their own erasure. Moving through language, voice, and embodied resistance, Ophelia – Exit Water unfolds strategies for escaping the tight weave of gender-madness-water-death. Instead of dissolving into symbol, these Ophelias reclaim the ability to pause, to turn, to step away—to resist the pull of the current, both literal and scripted. Ophelia – Exit Water does not seek a singular resolution; instead, it lingers in the space between inevitability and possibility, asking whether an exit is the same as a liberation—or whether some stories must be drowned before they can be rewritten.
Ophelia – Exit Water was produced as a cooperation between Münchner Kammerspiele and Leftbank Theater Kyiv.
concept: Alek Niemiro, Edith Saldanha
performers: Maryna Klimova, Anastasiia Pustovit, Edith Saldanha
text: Mehdi Moradpour, Alek Niemiro, Edith Saldanha
dramaturgy: Tamara Trunova
scenography+costume: Marlene Pieroth
music: Matthias Kremsreiter
production: Martín Valdès-Stauber