Lyndsey Winship: Barbara Kraus / Lieblingsperformance

Version 1

Improvisation is about the thrill of being alive. Or the boredom. or the embarrassment, or the awkwardness, or whatever it is we think we feel as our hearts beat and the blood runs through our veins. And it's about sharing the vitality of that unpredictable existence with the other bodies in the same room.
The skill of improvisation is to draw seemingly random characters, ideas and actions together with an invisible thread, or to steer uncontrollable events in a particular direction, but Barbara Kraus' performance can be just as exciting when it goes off course as when the alchemy falls into place. The skill of improvisation is to draw seemingly random characters, ideas and actions together with an invisible thread, or to steer uncontrollable events in a particular direction, but Barbara Kraus' performance can be just as exciting when it goes off course as when the alchemy falls into place.
The skill of improvisation is to draw seemingly random characters, ideas and actions together with an invisible thread, or to steer uncontrollable events in a particular direction, but Barbara Kraus' performance can be just as exciting when it goes off course as when the alchemy falls into place.
Because imperfection and failure are just as real as laughter and storytelling and songs and structures and amid the waffle and fantasy can be sudden piercing moments of insight, perhaps as unexpected to Kraus herself as they are to us.
But there's a charm and a truth in the simplicity of the situation. Perching on top of Nadia Lauro's installation of fur-covered mountains, Kraus sings tunelessly about the facts of existence: we breathe in and we breathe out, we wake up and we go to bed and then one day we don't wake up anymore.
And maybe that's really all we really need to know.

Version 2

She stole my shoes. Barbara Kraus took one curious look at my feet and slipped the shoes right off them. She held them up in front of her face. 'Please don't sniff them,' was all I could think, but of course she did, and grimaced. But then she danced in them, criss-crossing the room in a childish skip, and what began as a cheeky gesture became the seed for a revealing monologue about the joy of movement, the pressure of the dance industry and the realities of growing up
This combination of comedy, unexpected insight and audience interaction is typical of Kraus' approach to improvisation. And it feels like even Kraus doesn't always know where it's going to turn next. Her strength is her complete commitment to her characters, whether it's the overbearing chatterbox who bombards English guests in German and vice versa, or her take on Iggy Pop. She is taken over by them, in voice, posture and action.
As long as she is caught inside the bubble, so are the audience, but as soon as real life seeps in too far - Kraus checking the time on her phone, or unsuccessfully trying to persuade audience members to join her on stage - it starts to deflate. She drags a young man from the audience to dance to an Iggy Pop tune, complete with wig and sunglasses, but what Kraus probably hopes will be the climax of the performance turns into a painful three minutes that sends such a promising performance spiralling to a flat finish.


Berna Kurt: LES ASISTANTES. UTOPIA ON THE STAGE
“Utopian illusion of living together without sacrificing individual freedom” (excerpt from the leaflet)
A group of female performers, dancing all together or sometimes alone, trying to play in harmony some musical instruments; preparing tle leaflets of the performance; kidding with them; criticising the critics’ or dancers’ harsh attitude towards the dancers…. so on.
The idea of living together is a challenging one. It’s an issue for anybody thinking about or trying to “change the world”. Dichotomy between individual and the society is an issue for most people acting in a political and collective way.
On stage, they read some parts of the text they gave to the audience before the performance. It’s difficult to get their intention from the text. They share somr thoughts with us; they take some positions but it’s not easy to communicate. Some people leave the room.
After the performance, you have to think about to get the whole picture; it’s not easy. You remember their modest but intense gestures, their way of moving together in harmony. You want to believe in the possibility of living together…

Ingrid Türk-Chlapek: Lieblingsperformance
When I interviewed Barbara Kraus, she pointed out that she explores new paths in her work with the risk to fail. Will her approach be visible in the live realisation?
Indeed, Kraus encounters strange situations. New for her is the space she performs in, the installation of Nadia Lauro, unknown of course to last night’s public. Kraus succeeds in keeping their concentration more than eighty minutes. While jumping in different roles, like fantastic Sethi, working class Johnny or Iggy Pop, she continuously reacts to the audience. She dances in the shoes of a female spectator, beats a man with two pillows and caresses the hand of a scared lady smoothly saying: “Don’t worry, it’s just a performance.” Verbalization of her thoughts and feelings connects her and us continuously to the present. Out of that she might have mistrusted her inner watch, thus she checks her real watch twice during the performance and although announcing the performance’s end several times, stops acting only while the audience starts to leave the room by themselves. It seems kind of a foggy end, which melts away a shaped whole of this amazing, fragile improvisation.