water tongues
Water Tongues is a performative practice that explores the interplay between human beings and the rest of the living world through the observation and embodiment of water and its forces.
We know, in different ways — scientifically, spiritually, metaphorically, intuitively — that we are all entangled with the rest of the living world, and that our lives depend on a constant exchange of matter and energy with our environment.
Do we have languages for this interconnectedness?
Water Tongues explores this sense of connection and seeks to give it performative forms and communicative power ... in unexpected and visionary ways!
Through photographs, videos and sounds of water, we encounter its movements, states and forces: waves, currents, turbulence, suspension, evaporation, ice, flooding, stillness, infiltration. We observe these dynamics and let them resonate in the body, awakening impulses, sensations, images and associations.
Here, water is a messenger rather than something to be represented: a medium through which we encounter what we often cannot name.
We study nature, observe and imitate it, photograph it, exploit it, examine it through microscopes and from space; we create myths and fairy tales to interpret its forces. We climb mountains, hold flowers, pray to nature, and protect ourselves from forces that overwhelm us.
Yet how do we communicate with these forces?
How do we exchange and play with this larger whole?
How do intuitions move through it?
Water Tongues offers performative tools to approach, cultivate and express what emerges in our encounters with the natural world, but often remains beyond words.
A current can become a character. Turbulence can become a relationship. A wave can become a voice and open up a narrative.
The performer follows these encounters into movement, voice, words and forms of language that do not necessarily belong to an already known or codified system, creating a connection with what we cannot fully name or define in nature. By speaking with what remains hidden from our everyday perception, we play and communicate with monsters, microorganisms, wild creatures and forces, shells, water lilies, yaks, roots, clouds or an ancient biological ancestor.
This is not a method for representing water or reproducing its characteristics. It is a practice of sensing and embodying its forces, allowing performative narratives to emerge.
Water is a vehicle, not the subject of exploration.
5 & 6 December 2026 BERLIN
Feeling and redefining our relationship with water is one of the great challenges of our time (Unique Global Ocean)
Ecology of Urge
Water Tongues grows out of a long-standing interest in the relationship between perception, urge and composition.
It builds on three foundations of Daniela Marcozzi’s artistic practice: The Urge of Being, the training Beyond the Narrative of the Five Senses, and several years of creative research in marine environments through sailing expeditions, encounters with cetaceans and sensory exploration at sea.
In The Urge of Being, the impulse is a force that moves the performer towards action and composition. Water Tongue extends this research by exploring how impulse can also emerge through a relationship with the world outside us.
Through Beyond the Narrative of the Five Senses, Daniela developed embodiment explorations arising from her experiences in natural and aquatic environments. Being in nature, particularly at sea, led her to notice forms of perception and sensitivity that seem to go beyond the familiar five senses: a sense of current, a sense of forms, a sense of urge, a sense of pollution, etc.
Water Tongues brings these lines of research together, exploring how our encounters with water can become a source of performative material.
Nature doesn't exist. Nature as something out of us doesn't exist.
We are nature. Are we nature?
Are we natural enough?
Are we artificial?
:)
Let's dance this out
crazynaturalcrazynaturalcrazynaturalcrazynatura
artistic tongues
The practice combines physical theater, dance and movement practices, vocalisation, body-voice training, and individual and group improvisation.
Drawing on Jerzy Grotowski’s plastique sequences and physical theater practices, the work begins by opening the energetic channels of the body and developing the performer’s availability and responsiveness.
Through guided embodiment explorations, participants engage with the movements of water, natural forces, pollution dynamics and different forms of relation. Rather than imitating or representing water, they investigate how its movements and qualities can resonate physically and generate original material.
Breathing, vocalisation and body-voice training extend this material into sound and language. Through movement phrases, short monologues, encounters between performers and improvisations, participants explore how an impulse can develop into a physical, vocal or textual composition.
Water Tongues moves from observation and sensory exploration towards embodiment and composition.
Participants work with photographs, videos and sounds of water from different environments. They observe its movements, rhythms, intensities, textures and transformations, paying attention to what these dynamics awaken in them.
calendar, fee & location
5 & 6 December 2026
Saturday 5, 12:00-20:00
Sunday 6, 14:00-19:00
Locations
The sessions of Saturday will take place at Theaterhsus Berlin Mitte, Neue Jakobstraße 9, 10179 Berlin
The session of Sunday will take place at Expedition Metropolis Theater, Ohlauer Str. 41, 10999 Berlin
Fee
Early birds for payments by Nov. 1st: 180 Euro
Full price for payments from Nov. 2nd on: 230 Euro
Donor price from 240Euro on
One soli-spot at 140 euro
Please make the transfer to:
Daniela Marcozzi
IBAN: DE08100100100187805115
BIC: PBNKDEFF
Cancellation Policy
* For cancellation on and after Nov. 1st, I am sorry but reimburse is not possible. Please consider that this is completely an independent project and I can't relay on secure funding.
* Before Nov.1st 50% refund is possible.
Info and registration
Please write an email to daniela.marcozzi@gmail.com
+39 351 8867010
Water Tongues comes from years of research into the relationship between the human body and the rest of the natural world.
These researches took me beyond the studio. Being at sea brought me into contact with forces, movements and forms of life that I could observe, but not necessarily understand or translate into familiar language. It also brought me into closer contact with pollution, the exploitation of natural resources, habitat loss, the loss of communities and the disasters that follow.
Moving between a sense of immeasurable beauty and profound sadness at the condition of an exploited sea, I feel that we are losing not only ecosystems, but also the ability to articulate our belonging to them.
What might become possible if we found new ways to sense, express and communicate our belonging to the living world?
Note by Daniela Marcozzi