BAD News
a lecture performance about bathing
I am Elly, the Batheness of Berlin. I am a bath alchemist. I work with the powers of bathing in hammams, saunas, bathtubs, lakes, streams and paintings to transmute any shit day into a golden day.
I want us all to bathe more! And I want us to bathe in a social manner.
(Goes and sits in front of tub) Bathing methods, bathing beliefs and bathing taboos are mirrors of a society and its zeitgeist - ask Americans why you can’t go naked into a sauna or members of the DDR why FKK is so healthy. Today’s lecture is broken up into the chapters: An abridged history of the bath; Watch Me Take a Bath; Bathing in the Arts; Amerigo Bathspucci; and A Case For Social Bathing. Bathing offers us a glance into a social history as well as a historical one. It is a journey into privatization and individualization of an act we all do.
The bather. The female body bathing.
One of western arts favorite Motifs. Female Renaissance artists were not allowed to use live models, a restriction which greatly hampered their artistic development and sequestered them to a life of exquisite still lives and bouquets.
Direction, Text, Audio, Video, Stage and Costume Design: Elly the Batheness of Berlin
Light: Torsten Litschko
English Theater Berlin
Photos: Helene von Schirach
I prepared myself for my ice bath in Lake Superior, a lake known to keep her dead. Her temperature causes people to sink, not float. I did a cold plunge in the lake on a snowy day, a sunny day and an icy day. The average temperature was -11 degrees celsius. My whole family assisted me. My mom held the towel, my brother some warm water, my niece, my sandals and my sister-in-law filmed. . video: next slide # elly takes an ice bath On a day with soft falling snow, I listened to his motivational speech
I enter the water. I remember the breath.
When I get out, I feel warm all over. My body feels imbued with menthol. I am not shivering or cold. I walk with naked toes back to our house and sit in front of the fire, where my eight year old niece draws a portrait of me.
In a winter, full of truly bad news in Minnesota, my family connected through communal bathing. We got vulnerable together, shut out the outside world and chose to be present with one another.
