Flights of fancy are not exactly what we think of as reasonable or realistic. "Keep your feet on the ground! One thing after another!" are the usual responses when a person wants to share his or her spontaneous enthusiasm or instinctive fantasies. Grown-ups still use such cliched answers. And children are only too aware of them. Every child is given its place or a path to follow; grown-ups tell them what talents they have, not to speak of what problems. Just keep your feet on the ground! Alternatively, don’t stand out too much from the rest!
For her production of Flight of Fancy or why cry the choreographer Beate Höhn from the Nuremberg co˃labs dance theatre has attempted to explore how children and grown-ups react to such responses, and look for the special qualities in an individual: being pushy and being a failure, wanting to be liked and being ridiculous, being lonely or always involved in conflicts. And because she expresses a lot of this in dance her show is basically about intimacy and distance, affliction and airiness, about flying, soaring through the air and falling – or being felled. Her four utterly different dancers, two men and two women, take on particular roles but these can also change and merge with one another. Hence they experience and dance through a series of situations, some of which are serious and some humorous. In doing so, they touch on stories without feeling the need to explain a thing. The show needs very few props; a few oversize clothes, small trampolines, drawings projected on overhead transparencies, a bright simultaneously stable and diaphanous back wall, and a selection of music to underline the various moods. Thus the production itself becomes a sort of heady flight of fancy through highs and lows.
