Von Doris Meierhenrich
09.03.2025 / Berliner Zeitung
Anyone who still imagines Sisyphus, the stone roller condemned by fate, as a happy man has not yet met the Egyptian singer Adham Elsaid. At HAU1, he glides across the stage in his wheelchair, pulling his Arabic vocal garlands through the space so boldly and weightlessly that he can only be seen as the complete opposite of the Greek compulsive character. Adham has not simply accepted the physical immobility imposed on him by a polio infection, but has transformed it into a vocal and mental agility, and ultimately freedom, that is a joy to behold.
Adham is one of the four experts of the everyday that Helgard Haug from Rimini Protokoll has found for her latest production ‘Ever Given’, which is currently showing as a co-production in Berlin. And with Adham's shimmering vocals, she circles around those tipping-points, interruptions and catastrophes in which the supposedly ‘right’ course of events suddenly comes apart at the seams and something else becomes possible - in small lives as well as in the great history of the world. Sisyphus also appears a few times, but remains merely a cue for the stubborn repetition constraints of this world, in which the four narrators naturally also found themselves. But unlike him and his modern counterpart, the giant container ship ‘Ever Given’, which gives the evening its name, they have broken out of it by virtue of their courage.
Not only Adham tells of this breach, but also Hana, who once worked as a lawyer and general for the Syrian state, then came into conflict, fled and got to know the fine line between the repetitive loops of organised escape routines and the power of despair. His dense, dark narrative, which oscillates between agonising waiting and rapid advance, forwards and back again, is one of the most visually powerful, eye-opening moments of the evening. But the artist Marianne from Austria, who talks about her stuttering via a monitor, also expands our view into much larger contexts.
While musician Barbara Morgenstern and drummer Daniel Eichholz play sometimes frightening, sometimes snappy electronic rhythms on self-rotating pedestal islands, she reminds us that the history of the earth over billions of years is nothing other than a huge ‘tipping point revue’. A phalanx of radical incisions in which human history is only the smallest section. Progress for mankind from a palaeontological perspective? That would be the slowing down, the halting of our overheated world gears, just as Marianne herself creates space for her faltering words through pauses.
But the show must go on and so Helgard Haug forces the narrative strands into a circular structure which ends exactly where it began: in Egypt at the Suez Canal. In 2021, the ‘Ever Given’, loaded with 18,000 containers from the Far East, ran aground there, causing global trade to falter for six days. One clogged eye of a needle, just one drop, and the entire system trembles! An intense evening with as much poetic power as enlightenment in its exciting contradictions.