NYX – The Rhythm of the Night
waltraud900 feat. Aylin Çelik
DATES:
Premiere at 16. Mai 2025 im FWT Köln
Further Dates:
17. Mai 2025 FWT Köln
21. November Pumpenhaus Münster
22. November Pumpenhaus Münster
19. Januar 2026 ZAKK Düsseldorf
“Breathe in. Two more years until you’re 30 and you’re still not successful enough.
Breathe out. There are so many wars and you don’t talk about one of them in Germany.
Breathe in. I can’t have children.
Breathe out. We Germans don’t demonstrate radically enough.
Breathe in. Merz calls us little pashas.
Breathe out. My life would be easier as a man.
Breathe in. I have to answer the emails tomorrow.
Breathe out. I’ve talked too much about myself today.
Breathe in. I won’t be able to live on my pension. What the fuck?
Again. Close your eyes.
Breathe in.”
Is everyone sleeping so badly right now? Or is this simply the new normal? If the day belongs to reason, then the night belongs to restless thoughts, to the body that cannot rest while the world is being renegotiated somewhere. When the night gives us no sleep, we long for someone who can control it.
NYX, the Greek goddess of the night, stands for the incomprehensible, the state between clarity and hallucination. She never sleeps. She lives in the depths of Hades. She is the only goddess who is feared even by Zeus.
Inspired by NYX, dancer Phaedra Pisimisi and musician Aylin Çelik bring the unspeakable to the stage: sleeplessness, waking dreams and the absurd beauty of nocturnal spirals of thought. They turn bodies into shadows, echo the voices of the night and also bring to life a tangle of voices from questions about the future – collected with children and senior citizens, i.e. from those who perhaps feel the most that nothing is safe here right now. NYX is an evening about insomnia and a ritual for everyone who wonders what the fuck this is all about.
Crew
CONCEPT & IDEA waltraud900
ON STAGE Aylin Çelik and Phaedra Pisimisi (in the video: Raphael Arvanitakis)
DIRECTOR Bianca Künzel
SET DESIGN Ria Papadopoulou
CHOREOGRAPHY Phaedra Pisimisi
MUSIC Aylin Çelik
DRAMATURGY Dorle Trachternach
OUTSIDE EYE DANCE Darwin Díaz
LIGHT DESIGN AND ENGINEERING Eckehard Merholz
PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT Katrin Wiesemann
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More InformationPress
“The Düsseldorf artists’ collective waltraud900 showed how an unattractive topic can be turned into an entertaining and thought-provoking stage performance on two evenings at the Freie Werkstatt Theater as part of the ”Common Struggles” series.
Under the title “Nyx”, dancer Phaedra Pisimisi and musician Aylin Çelik relive a night in a collage of dance, song and recordings in fast motion – visualized by illuminated numbers on an alarm clock – that is probably familiar to many people suffering from insomnia. The title goes back to the Greek goddess of the night, or, as Çelik puts it, “the mother of sleep and death.”
On the one hand, very real factors play a role, such as when the bed is too soft or a mosquito buzzes through the bedroom. Then there are the thoughts that always seem much more significant and dramatic at night than during the day. These are incorporated into the stage action as polyphonic audio or video clips. For example, there is the child who can no longer sleep peacefully since there was a fire in the house next door. Or the mother who is worried that her son will have to go to war one day.”
(Kölnische Rundschau, 20.05.2025)
Funded by
Kulturamt der Stadt Düsseldorf, dem Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes NRW, dem NRW Landesbüro Freie Darstellende Künste und der Kunst- und Kulturstiftung der Stadtsparkasse Düsseldorf.
