The Art of Camouflage // The Urban Tale of a Hippo

There are indications of sensitive and/or health-relevant content.

During the performance of ‘The Urban Tale of a Hippo’, the audience can move freely around the space. Seats are available for persons with limited mobility.

In ‘The Art of Camouflage’ all the participants are interlinked in generating a speculative habitat. Between each other they play a game of disguise, intermingling and transformation in which the performers interact with the resonances emitted by water-filled aquaria that glow a noxious green or use mini loudspeakers or brass megaphones – an object of nautical origin – to produce mutations between human and amphibian voices. Do they retain their own identity, or do they become something “other”?

The boundary between self and surroundings becomes fluid, and ultimately an illusion behind which a complex and elusive reality appears. In the process binarities such as animal/human, object/person, and nature/technology are overthrown in favour of more convoluted relationships based on reciprocity.

In ‘The Urban Tale of a Hippo’, composer Panayiotis Kokoras, choreographer Andrius Katinas and set and lighting designer Nanni Vapaavuori craft a multidimensional atmosphere of music and movement. Performed by the renowned ensemble Synaesthesis, the work explores the post-human condition through instrumental and electronic sounds immersed in fog and light.

Inspired by the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the composition conjures three archetypal animal states, while the choreography transforms the audience into active participants with heightened sensory engagement. Synaesthesis deconstructs traditional playing to evoke animalistic and natural sounds, blurring boundaries between the organic and the synthetic. Dissolving hierarchies of sight, sound and viewpoint, ‘The Urban Tale of a Hippo’ invites you on a fluid, intuitive journey where shadows of the past make way for silhouettes of the future.

Programme

Sophiensæle, Hochzeitssaal

Ute Wassermann

for 3 voices, guitar, percussion, objects, bird whistles, plankton aquariums, brass megaphones, loudspeakers, field recordings (2025)

World premiere

Sophiensæle, Festsaal

Panayiotis Kokoras, Andrius Katinas, Nanni Vapaavuori, Morta Nakaitė, Synaesthesis, Operomanija

German premiere

Cast