Without water, life would not be possible; it is the prerequisite for our bodies to develop, thrive, grow and survive. At the same time, water is in a constant state of flux, symbolising exchange and transformation - in various states of aggregation and constantly taking on different forms, flowing through different bodies and connecting them with one another. Water stands for intimacy and closeness and at the same time has the cosmological dimension of the element that relates all life on this earth to one another.

Following on from this, SHALL I BUILD A DAM? explores ways of relating bodies, sounds, texts and movements from a post-human feminist perspective in order to arrive at a form of interaction and community that explores possibilities beyond an anthropocentric perspective with its traditional subject-object relations. Things will be in flux, influencing each other, absorbing each other and relating to each other. It is about guilt and complicity, theft and gift, poetry and politics, viscosity, solidification, evaporation and flowing away.

SHALL I BUILD A DAM? is the first time that composer Kai Kobayashi, who has worked intensively with music theatre for many years, has collaborated with choreographer and performer Simone Aughterlony and lighting designer and set designer Joseph Wegmann. With this project, the Deutsche Oper Berlin is also continuing its successful cooperation with the Munich Biennale, with whom this piece is being created as a project in which developments and transformations become visible and audible as a spatial process, in line with the Biennale's festival motto "On the way".