Aunt Elfi´s Making Things. The Humming Bird

It is not what the title leads you to expect. The setting for Aunt Elfi´s Making Things. The Humming Bird is a cellar with a wood-burning stove. Right from the first moment, a young woman speaks into the camera and does not stop entertaining the audience in her very homespun, dialect-tinged language.
The first surprise effect comes from the contrast between the young, dainty woman and what she says. Just as surprising is the story that Lia Juresch and her protagonist Clara Wannerer dish out to viewers. Always turning directly to the camera, the woman says that the sound of a fallen broom has moved her to go into the cellar. As she was putting wood in the stove, she realized that the vent pipe was slowly slipping from its holder.
Thus is the bizarre starting point of the story that the performer tells as a one-woman-show. In part, agreed upon, in part improvised, the banal everyday situation becomes ever more absurd as the protagonist fears that a fire will start in the house and decides to press an iron rod on the loose stove pipe.
Karl Valentin comes to mind when she thus becomes trapped in the situation and while waiting for help relates the tale of a paper hummingbird and its hobby show.
Lia Juresch keeps her camera close at all times to the protagonist whose language seems as though she has merged all the statements and set phrases of her female relatives within her. Taken as a whole, these all too familiar, largely awkwardly touching statements as base yield a rather humorous picture of this odd commonplace situation, thus allowing for a performance by one of the (still) rare women comedians.

(Christa Benzer)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt


A loud clatter lures a young woman into a boiler room, where she maneuvers herself into a hopeless quagmire. In a blend of slapstick, miniature effects and theater of the absurd, she talks profusely, struggling against her predicament – increas­ ingly desperate and with a heavy dialect coloring her words. All of this, when what she really wanted to do was some arts and crafts: paper hummingbirds. Wonderfully irreverent.

(Diagonale Catalog, 2013)