Tornado Watch means: the conditions are right, where you are. It’s not a Tornado Warning - there are no sirens, no one has even confirmed they’ve seen a cloud. We are just saying, the conditions are right, and so we watch.

In Tornado Watch, Eszter and Katharina work as obsessive meteorologists to produce perspective shifts between room-scale weather phenomena and cosmic weather predictions; playing with physicality and artifice, with time and delay, with sentimentality and everyday catastrophes. The performance combines everyday objects and materials with the mysteries of the universe and comments on the parallels between theatre and science. With its playfulness and irreverence, the project speaks about the necessity of curiosity in crisis while asking questions about resources and the limits of individual responsibility. It’s also about our perception of time - playing with awareness of the current moment, the frame of the performance, and the processes that continue after the performance is finished. A subtle soundscape builds cumulatively throughout the piece, catching and transforming the sounds of rain, hail, and heat. With these lo-fi materials, the attempt to recreate weather is inherently absurd, can only fail - but it’s this attempt that is so fascinating and beautiful. Tornado Watch is part of an ongoing research into the dramaturgy of the background (“events that don’t address us”), which the duo began in 2021.


https://tornadowatch.online/performance 

by Katharina Joy Book & Eszter Koncz

December 2021 HKW BerlinJanuary 2023/Machinehaus/Essen
March 2023 Bazaar festival/Prague
June 2023/2023 Prague Quadrennial Studio Stage/Prague