«The origin of all things is water« asserted the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus 600 years before Christ, and thus unleashed a wave of existential questions about the nature of the world. He was followed by other great thinkers, who traced the origin of all things sometimes in the fire, sometimes in the earth or in the air and whose ideas were later summarized in the so-called »4-element theory«. Hille and Marthe Perl also know that behind the terms »fire, water, earth, air« that we are familiar with today, there is still an infinite, unexplored cosmos. As a mother-daughter project, the gamba duo has eavesdropped on the fiery, surging, earthy and airy sounds of several centuries and combined them in a matinee. On their search they come across Irish folk music, travel to the time of music of England and France and find themselves in baroque dance halls. They draw pictures of an old woman by the fire, warming herself and drinking tea, a swampy mudflat hike, tear-soaked seas and getting caught in a destructive storm. In short: an atmospheric detour into a cosmos that can hardly be told and explored with words, but very well with music.

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Production image © Marco Borggreve