NoUseCryingOverSpilledMilk

No Use Crying Over Spilled Milk

What happens when a place loses its original purpose? What stories remain, which new ones emerge – and what comes next?

No Use Crying Over Spilled Milk is an interdisciplinary performance by unsyn.collective and Lichtverein Göral, set in the abandoned indoor swimming pool of the PTA in La Neuveville. We are a collective of artists working in performance, dance, light, sound and scenography, collaborating on a project where different artistic expressions meet and merge into new possibilities.

For nearly a year, we’ve been engaging with this unique space. The former swimming pool becomes not just a stage but an active part of the narrative. Its architecture, materials and history serve as the starting point for an exploration of appropriation, responsibility and inevitable transformation.

We’re drawn to the moment when artificial order reaches its limits. What happens when the structures we’ve created can no longer be sustained? How do we take responsibility for what we’ve changed? The performance oscillates between exhaustion and renewal, searching for visions of a future that has already begun.

Through research, experiments and an open artistic process, we’ve developed our shared language. Dance, sound, light and scenography blend into an immersive experience where space, body and audience enter into dialogue.

In August 2026, we’ll present No Use Crying Over Spilled Milk four times as a 60-minute performance in the abandoned PTA indoor swimming pool in La Neuveville.

With your support, we can finalise the production phase, create the technical and spatial conditions, and briefly bring this extraordinary place back to life.

Dance & Music

Dance & Performance

The performance unfolds in and around the empty basin of the indoor pool. Drawing from material, site-specific, and conceptual research, Laura Mercuriali and Rahel Kohlbrenner, together with Kim Bigler and Chiara Halter, develop a contemporary choreography in which movement becomes a voice for control, transformation, and exhaustion. The dancers navigate between precise composition and improvisation, merging body with space and atmosphere – so that the location itself becomes part of the performance.

Music

The music is created from sound recordings and samples taken from the indoor pool and is developed in close dialogue with the dance choreography. Melissa Holliger (Miel), DJ and sound artist, combines improvisational methods with her experience in movement-oriented music. Taking the rhythms and dynamics of the dance as her starting point, she creates an independent sonic world in which music and movement mutually influence each other. Both alternately take on the roles of narrator and interpreter, resulting in a fluid interplay of action and reaction. Like the pool once filled with water, sound and performance now fill the space, allowing its currents to re-emerge.

Light & Scenography

Lighting design

How does light change our perception of a space? When does it reveal, and when does it conceal? In the abandoned swimming pool, light becomes more than illumination—it transforms into a narrative medium in its own right.

The Lichtverein Göral collective—Joël Rapeaud, Linus Fässler, Mirko Bölsterli and Sophia Keller—creates a light installation that continuously reshapes the space. Projections onto glass surfaces frosted with buttermilk, reflections, fog and a live camera generate images that merge with the performers’ bodies before detaching again. Light does not merely accompany the performance—it becomes a voice in the story, guiding the gaze, shifting perspectives and opening new layers of perception.

Scenography

The scenography (Hannah Blaser and Nele Heeb) works with tangible materials such as natural sponges, plexiglass, nets, uranine and surfaces that either echo the space or deliberately contrast with it. Organic and synthetic elements collide, blurring the lines between the natural and the artificially ordered. The result is an environment where control and dissolution, stability and transformation coexist.

The former swimming pool is not treated as a mere backdrop but as an active part of the performance. Its architecture, materials and history shape the staging just as much as the people moving within it.

To ensure the audience can experience the space safely, targeted structural measures are implemented, including a railing along the pool and adapted seating for barrier-free access.