Sarah Hugentobler

With her high ponytail, her salmon t-shirt and her mini speakers under the chin, Swiss-German artist Sarah Hugentobler takes us on a strange kind of journey. A unique ventriloquist, her body hosts three voices, three individuals in addition to herself, under the watchful eye of a fifth person who replicates themselves at will in an amusing video counterpoint. Who is she? A middle-aged woman? A little girl? A man with a strong accent? An entire community? Or maybe, an artist who manages to make them all cohabitate in a surprising tightrope performance? Bin ich das ? (literally “am I this?”) blurs identity lines to interrogate all its dimensions – intimate, psychological, social – before asking us the question. What we hear is not what we see, and vice-versa. In this gap between the eye and the ear, the artist titillates our senses. For her first theatrical performance, written from interviews, the Bernese video artist playfully manipulates the notion of character, on the limit between reality and fiction, and shows her mastery of the craft of representation. In this solo for many voices, Hugentobler explores the space of the theatre with just enough artifice and makes us hear the invisible.