Shifting Ground with Lewis Walker & Johanna Hedva

This feeling arises more quickly for some people than for others, namely those whose bodies, identities, or social positions have never experienced the luxury of a stable foundation.


For 3hd's performance program "Shifting Ground", Lewis Walker and Johanna Hedva share the stage at HAU Hebbel am Ufer to explore how inheritance becomes transformation—in search of a stable self on unstable terrain.


Lewis Walker's "Bornsick" explores inherited diseases and identity formation within systems that shape people before they can define themselves. Through gymnastics and dance, the performance reveals the self as a construct—built from learned movements, imposed roles, and cultural echoes. The queer body navigates between conformity and freedom, layering itself up and down in search of stability. Conditioning creates a machine; unlearning returns humans to the animal.


"Bornsick" confronts the paradox of searching for permanence on a constantly shifting foundation.


In this new stage project, Johanna Hedva sings songs from her upcoming, as yet unreleased album "Fist." The work marks Hedva's first collaboration with opera director George R. Miller, who stages what could be the afterlife—eerie and empty, white feathers, black mucus, an upturned mattress.


Written on a haunted acoustic guitar that disappeared for ten years and then returned overnight, the songs evoke "dominatrix blues," "swamp witch lullabies," and "succubus folk." Hedva's voice, trained in Korean p'ansori, glides between croaks, growls, and intimate serenades.


The songs contain damning wails, dismembered body parts, murderous rage, and, of course, the very common, swampy heartbreak with men on their knees. Desire is ruinous—it has ruined everything.


140 min. (including intermission)