HELENA WALDMANN
PRESS CLIPPINGS
EROTIC IN RED GELATINE
The whole performance is a celebration of senses.
Sybille Roter, Musik & Theater
FASCINATING FANTASIES
This is a fascinating sensual play with desiable objects being displayed to the viewer. The text, reporting in a strikingly peculiar, apparently indifferent fashion about eros and death, luck and corruptibility has been transformed into congenial images by Helena Waldmann. The distance between the man, who hopes to be able to buy his luck and the woman, offering herself is being transmitted through the body of the actress in an exiting, voyeuristic liason with the viewer. He cannot with draw: he is being seducted and carried off. "The malady of death" is a fantasy animating mind and body, a performance the images of which are inscribed into one's mind.
Volker Albers Hamburger Abendblatt
THE BARTERED BRIDE
An image, a text, a dream: in the performance of Helena Waldmann the woman's body is part of a canvas.
Jan Schulz-Ojala, Der Tagesspiegel
TWO SILENT NIGHTS
In the blue gelatine the woman's body is like a secret. The isolated parts of the body stand out clearly, yet the body as a whole remains obscure. We perceive the mysterious profile of its sharpes. It arouses our desire and puzzles us with its preparedness to surrender. Stage lighting and body weight, the consistency of materials and the paticularity of movements create an interplay between proximity and distance, between openesss and turning away. Intervals, short melody curves, the body's splashing on the foil, the toneless voice - Helena Waldmann processes them into a discreet insistent performance.
Edith Boxberger Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
FUTILE WAITING FOR RESCUE
The audience, the viewers of agony. The woman's body on the canvas, nude contractions on blue and red gelatine, the colours as intensive as that of a prismatic telescope in the refined stage light. A living work of art in constante change. From the view of art history it may be fixed in between Yves Klein and the blood-thirsty Austrian performances of the sixties. The next tries to convey love as loss, death, death within the body, death within emotion. Helena Waldmann's test arrangement vividly emphasizes this statement. From the meditative mixture of being situated on one's back, hearing music and the monotonously recited text, the living body evokes the impression of corpses in plastic bags, the shroud of Christ, uncleaned new-born babies. The privilege of the text has long been set aside. The viewer's attention moves between the changing impression like the woman's body in gelatine. In Helena Waldmann's entire work of art the text only indicates the direction.
Thomas Plaichinger,die tageszeitung