RAINY DAYS – The Obstacle Dissolved

RAINY DAYS – The Obstacle Dissolved is a contemporary dance theatre work that investigates how modern societies deal with death, loss, and the discomfort surrounding mortality. While we live in a time of constant communication, death often remains excluded from everyday conversation. The piece examines this contradiction: in a world saturated with information and connection, experiences of grief and dying are frequently isolated, private, and difficult to articulate.

The performance approaches death not through narrative storytelling but through a series of physical and spatial situations that expose how avoidance, confrontation, and acceptance manifest in the body. Movement material develops from states of interruption, suspension, and weight. Actions are started, stopped, repeated, or carried to exhaustion, reflecting the psychological processes that accompany loss: denial, disorientation, resistance, and gradual reorientation.

Rain functions as a central metaphor throughout the work. It represents both obstruction and release. Rain can slow movement, blur perception, and create a sense of heaviness, but it can also dissolve boundaries and wash away structures that once felt fixed. In this sense, “rainy days” become a condition rather than an event: periods in which familiar certainties break down and individuals are forced to renegotiate their relationship with the world.

Rather than portraying death as a distant or purely tragic event, the piece proposes that acknowledging mortality can reshape how we understand connection and presence. By making visible the silence that often surrounds death, the work opens a space where vulnerability, attention, and shared experience can emerge. In doing so, it reframes loss not as a final barrier, but as a moment that exposes the fragility and value of being alive.

Artistic Concept / Choreography: Birke van Maartens
Performance: Paula Hennigsen & Birke van Maartens
Sound Design: Birke van Maartens
Light Design: Kenji Tanaka
Video: Units Digital Production
Camera directed by Peter Schings
Videography by Tobias König