From 8-13 July 2025, Angela Vitovec, aka Angela Schubot, and a mixed ensemble of performers from Theater Thikwa and the independent dance scene will once again showcase Ya!, a performance created in collaboration with yarrow in 2024.
This morning, I drifted on a long, narrow wooden raft of sorts across a river. I navigated by pushing off from the bed of the river with a rod. This is how I kept steering towards the river banks to collect blossoms: large, yellow labiates, orange, daisy-shaped and small, white and pink umbels. I’m not sure why I was collecting these blossoms. I can only say that there was a meaning behind it – and that all the blossoms had disappeared when I woke up and looked around.
My experience with Ya!, a performance whose title derives from the word “yarrow”, resembled my dream. In wholly mysterious ways, it accompanied me for a while yesterday, through the seemingly endless evening (totally unmistakable all the way into my dreams), opened up a space for memories and feelings, moved me, sang to me, channeled me through a dark cave before spitting me out at the end, reborn.
Nothing about Ya! is straightforward. It starts with the ground, a wavy wooden plateau that climbs up to the walls in a concave curve, and ends with time, which appears to lunge out repeatedly like a twisted spiral into new, unevenly sized arches. In between are crunched up bunches of brown sheep’s wool, wool on the walls and wool around a cave on whose wall I lean against as I listen with closed eyes to the meandering harmonies of voices.
As I listen to the choir of prone performers and the smell of wool seeps into my nostrils. Suddenly, it’s as if I hear in these voices the bleating of sheep. And all at once I’m standing in that herd where my mother and her siblings spent all their afternoons. The memory – if I can even refer to this vision that I never experienced myself as such – lingers with me for a moment before it is gently swept away.
There is a gurgling and chortling sound next to me. It’s coming from a mouth in which water is being churned into foam. Water that drips in trickles over the lips and down the chin of the performer, who is no more than half a meter away from me. I follow the path of the water and the stirring of my own sentiments. Where I expected to find disgust, I discover just a great deal of unruffled awareness. Chin, water, and noise have long since become a landscape. A mossy rock in a chortling mountain stream.
As I sit by this stream, the voices of the choir coalesce to a polyphonic melody. A song moves through the room, touches me like wind with sounds and gestures unknown to me, which I nevertheless feel are meant for me. Perhaps this mystical language that is given expression in Ya! is a kind of communication that transcends the boundaries between species so it can encompass the yarrow, the sheep, the gust, the stream, the river, and even the dream?
English translation by Melissa Maldonado
Ya! by Angela Vitovec aka Angela Schubot was shown at Theater Thikwa from 8 to 13 July 2025.
