WOOSH! ZACK! BANG!
RYKENA/JÜNGST: SPLAAASH
For their Pop Up Splaaash, the two choreographers Lisa Rykena and Carolin Jüngst use the stylistic device of exaggeration and experience a story of power, strength, time travel, death and resurrection in the soundscape created by Raphaela Andrade. The Hamburg illustrator Jul Gordon accompanied the team during a performance and, in the spirit of the material, processed the experience in a comic.
Illustrations by Jul Gordon. Text by Oskar Smollny | March 16, 2023
Knall! Rappel! Zapp!
Lisa Rykena and Carolin Jüngst take the onomatopoeia of comic history and, with the help of musician Raphaela Andrade, make it the acoustic engine of their piece Splaaash. It crashes, whooshes and squelches! The two dancers move so synchronously to the live sounds that a world is conjured up before the eyes and ears of the audience, spreading like a bubble in the gyms, auditoriums and youth centers the Pop Up piece visits. Even today the genre of superhero stories is still dominated by male characters and stereotypes. And although the piece looks at these narratives humorously, the audience is surprised by drama and seriousness during the performance: besides exaggeration and overdrawing, conflict and struggle are also an integral part of the stories told in comics.
Boom! Kapow! Woosch! Zack! Bang!
When Wonder Woman swings her lasso of truth, when She-Hulk uses her superhuman physical powers, or when private detective Jessica Jones fights her way through New York – the protagonists are always accompanied by the large letters of the onomatopoeic text cloud, which translates the sound into font for us readers.
Boing! Zoink! Zing!
How do we tell stories about our bodies? And what does a superhero look like if we can design them ourselves? In Splaaash, Rykena and Jüngst discover and conjure their bodies, become fire, rubber, and flow through space and time with the help of their inflated costumes. In her zine, Hamburg-based illustrator and comic artist Jul Gordon beautifully captures the transformation between states of production for young audiences and leans on the source of the piece’s inspiration, the medium of “comics.”
