A sailor plays on the shore with a small wooden boat and looks into the distance. He sees the silhouette of a mermaid, lets go of the wooden boat and swims towards the sea creature. Shouldn't it be the other way around, the mermaid swimming towards the sailor? No matter how, the longing is on both sides. The longing for the other, for the foreign, as Hans Christian Andersen describes it in his fairy tale "The Little Mermaid" and as it is brought to the stage in the dance piece of the same name by the Theater Görlitz since Saturday. The choreographers Dan Pelleg and Marko E. Weigert give the audience a dance evening of a special kind - with aerial acrobatics is floating conquered a new dimension of dance.

The home of the little mermaid looks like an underwater climbing wall with little shell caves as dwelling. The dancers climb up and down between them, snake around them, glide past them in aerial acrobatics. This is very impressive, not least because some of them have their feet stuck in a fish tail, which restricts their freedom of movement. For quite a while, the sea creatures glide, float and swing across the stage in their mostly blue-green-violet-scaled costumes, bathed in harmonious light and accompanied by spherical music. So you really arrive in the underwater world of the little mermaid, which carries a great longing for people and for their souls.

Feet like on a knife's edge
. With the sailors on the ship, however, things are less spherical. The underwater climbing wall is quickly transformed into a three-master, on which the men dance exuberantly to rhythms that require two legs. The little mermaid watches, still caught in her fishtail, but already with a decision in her heart that will be irreversible. Amit Preisman dances her little mermaid henceforth with two legs, finally as a human being. The "real" people around her, wrapped in silver cloaks, move stereotypically to loud, thumping music. But she is in the middle of it, that's what she wanted. With legs indeed, but no voice, she cannot make herself understood to her sailor and show herself as his true savior. Every step hurts, her feet move on a knife edge. Will she ever arrive in a foreign land? Will the beloved turn to her? What is more important - to love or to be loved? The price for being different is high, but the little mermaid wants to pay it. What's more, she even accepts her death.

It remains exciting until the last minute how the fairy tale could find its end in a dance-like way. At this one, a sailor sits on the shore again, but this time not alone. He and his lover examine the small wooden boat. The silhouette of the little mermaid appears. The sailor does not swim to her.