ma

Sleeping on a chair, radiating subtle grace of a limited edition silk ragdoll sitting sideways on a scooter speeding down a night-painted town. His head rests against a concrete wall of a deconsecrated chapel, his observers far from pretending not to feel cold at 10 p.m. somewhere in October. Is there really a dream flashing by behind the sleeper’s immaculate face?

Ma Liuming

under the black milk wood

Pupils at the max, about to get of shore. Darkness reached its pitch, there can hardly be anything beyond. Sinking my fingers in the seat is the only way to check that, yes, this is a theatre and, no, this is not a second before the Almighty asked himself for a lighter, as I breathe, smell and hear….hear a bumblebee the size of a cauliflower buzzing over my head. I bet the person next to me would admit, it is actually a cauliflower the size of a bumble bee.

But now there is wind coming and the first row (I decided to assign a name to that point in the middle of void, to comfort myself with some stroke of sense of location) is hit by rain, with people out there screaming accordingly.

There is a monologue. It is a busy one, walking around, monologuing, pausing, disappearing, but above all, reappearing right the opposite from where you last hear its steps, so the final impression is you have the honour to deal with an entity impersonating a man made of meat and bones, while soundly ignoring the fact that pedestrians are not that good at reaching a speed of light.

Darkness gets dense. It coagulates into pieces of something, which feels like leaves of cotton birches riding by under the pace of the Radetszky March, or should it rather be a marching platoon of jellyfishes, saluting towards a tribune staffed with baby tomatoes? Soon I find out. It simply rains little noodles of velvet.

Another soundscape pulling me to the edge of a forest, making me look at a village drowsing in a valley beneath. The church bells strike midday. I feel like getting horizontal, sprawl myself across a moss mat and bite into dark bread with margarine…when a massive tree falls down so nastily close, that I duck instinctively and shut my eyes.

“When you close your eyes while dreaming, you slip into a dream that belongs to somebody else” says a voice coming from the infinite.

Theatre Dream at BAC

speedy oranje

inside a tent filled with artificial twilight
lead into a corridor narrow and dark enough to give a feel of a train passing through a bottle of ink

therefore

functionally placed inside a lion’s cage, with the lion embodied in a slim figure of a man with black trousers and overall, who looks like slowly, but resolutely approaching me

barefoot

his face with a cropped white hair frame – a style not far from what a Roman Emperor electoral candidate’s would ask his stylists for

hic sun August the August aka T

somehow

he keeps looking at me but it is a look you give a snowman made of complexionless ideas

indeed

this makes one feel very transparent

as he is getting closer I wonder if he would make it through my body in the same fashion as ghosts routinely deal with fireproof walls

it feels like it and off he goes, leaving the tent, entering the light of the day

here comes a second one, equally barefoot, but much stockier, sporting colours of pumpkins and oranges , which make every single fold of his cushion-like frame come out

up in his face topped with froggy glass solution remindnig of a chief architect of yet another solution nicknamed the final, resides a pair of eyes which, like those of his partner, make this impression of their rightful owner’s soul having been fished out and sealed in a tiny flask marked “choking hazard”

his hand is cold as he grabs mine. It is a  fishy handshake, more or less the same grip you can expect when introduced to a well cooked lobster. Though there is no confirming message in his eyes, he apparently likes my bag, so he takes it. Simultaneously, he snatches a chair with a girl formerly seated on it, now rushing away, just too slow, for he is even slower, slow enough to catch her handbag and making her follow him outside the tent.

that’s Pumpkin aka R

Packing their chairs, the rest of the audience flows out as well.

Procession. T in the lead, then R lazily pulling his girl, then a cloud of people with chairs, giggling. On course to seek for a new stage.

Procession encamped in a park.

T and R spread around. Their walk betoking a pair of trees that has just managed to grow a pair of legs, but retain their sense of time…very, very slooooow.

they pick twigs and some of the audience, making them all dance in a circle the way you’d dance if the atmosphere consisted of mixture of vasoline and feathers

they clash, if something involving two objects meeting with a speed of a stoned snail could be classified with such a term

they clash and they entangle with tenacity of a very keen pair of lianas, merging into a single mass without the need for a meat mincer

a jogger decides to join in. He softly lands his precise body on the grass and goes for push ups delivered in a style aiming straight for divinity. With T and R busy making a panting skein out of themeselves, the three might surely get connected via a channel our brains can just dream of, unless the jogger is busy regretting nobody finds him a splendid opportunity for a youtube moment.

SPETTACOLO, says a mother, placing her two kids in front of T and R. Aware that this is a piece of theatre, the children go for LOL the moment T and R form a statue of a four-eyed god of honey.

a respectable lady of even more respectable age desperately seeks an explanation of what is this stuff all about

but nobody satisfies her

Reverse procession. Back to the tent, having fully explored the art of slowliness when making a 50 metres distance in ten minutes.

T and R petter out. The audience may need some time to regain their daily pace.

Thomas nad Ruhller – ORANJE

performance

just that fast

Horiro hates travelling by the Levitating Train. His skin stretches just too much, often his body trashes about quite wildly going through a variety of supersonic cramps. The service might need to debug a little, thinks Horiro the moment he finds himself sitting in a Victorian armchair at 221b Baker Street, London with a very little chance to catch an evening flight to Tokyo, as it is the year 1893.

There’s a suitcase in front of Horiro, increasingly reluctant to make a good impression on him, but still looking far better than everything spitted out by a luggage terminal of an average brutality level.

Horiro opens the suitcase and pulls out an object resembling a jacket. It is indeed the LACTATION JACKET! (23 lacteal model, with natural fluid circulation)

The very moment there is something buzzing nastily, breaking in the room. It is the NANO-BUMBLE BEE! (twin nano-turbine model)

“Yes, it was me who sent the NANO-BUMBLE BEE, and so what?” Horiro confesses openly several scenes later, still sporting the lactation jacket.

Somewhere else in time the countess Arhanyi is dozing off with little Horiro’s lips stuck to her brand new lactation jacket. This won’t change till Horiro’s thirty fifth birthday.

Horiro switches on the telly. The news are on. “They know less than me again” Horiro shivers. The Levitating Train reaches the orbit with an insignificant delay.

To be continued…

Demago Theatre

procedure de Sade

She’s naked in a very formal manner. Sitting at a bar stool, facing the audience motionless, pale, her eyes indicating she might be busy chasing astral pets some five dimensions above the ceiling. Hands folded neatly in her lap, feet resting on a silver frame. She blinks repeatedly, her body trembles. Silence all over.

Pushed by a man in black, casually senior with a professional look, a nursing table appears on the scene, with two rows of glass flasks on board along with a tray full of napkins, a burner and a bowl containing something yet to be seen in action. The man’s look is fire-proof, no emotions leaking. He takes the first flask, lights the burner, then a stick with cotton wool soaked in alcohol. He finds a spot on the woman’s back, quickly puts the burning stick inside the flask and presses it against her skin. Trapped in the vacuum, the skin bulges instantly . He withdraws his hand – the flask remains sitting on the skin.

Soon the woman wears quite a revealing costume made of light bulbs. One by one, the flasks are removed, and there’s a scalpel in the man’s fingers. The skin opens like a smile.

The flasks go back on skin, filling with blood slowly.  It’s like a rubber tree being
tapped.

Flasks away. The napkins’ turn. Scent of disinfection. One by one, the man picks cakes of blood. They stick to the napkins, so they can be pegged on, just like washing on Sunday afternoon.

My neighbour softly leans against my shoulder. She’s unconscious.
We take her out, soon she wakes up. Was that a thumbing sound of one of the cakes hitting the floor?

Kira O’Reilly

performance

after kira 1

after kira 2

sideboards

and now…the Impersonator
Split in two, it is not exactly clear who imersonates who. Adding to that, the two try
to deny each others existence. There’s some boxing and bad language involved in the
effort.

his and his…Mother
Her breathing remains constant. She soundly ignores frequent revolver shots blasting
inside a metal picnic basket. She doesn’t speak, only resolts to quiet singing when
the curtain goes down, though she can hardly outperform the hum of flames consuming the
auditorium.

the Impersonator…shopping
“You want me to get you anything?” he asks when leaving the stage. We are left with a
synchronious footage of his journey to a very local shop. There he snatches a pink
hopping ball from under a surprised girl.
Hoppity hop, back to the stage he comes. He is early, the movie still shows him outside.

the Impersonator…stripping
He takes a TV, placing it in front of his head. The very same face appears on the
screen.He moves the TV down, and it works as an X-ray stripping device.
The screen exposes his hairy neck…belly…he stops where it is highly
(un)expected and (un)desired.
He moves the TV up, but the image gets stuck on the screen. He puts the
TV on the floor, rushes to the first row, grabs my bag and covers the glowing image of
his penis.

the Audience…drinking
We end up on the stage, offered shots of vodka by the mother. The curtain goes down,
and we watch another video – the impersonator dancing with a can of petrol
among the rows of seats. He produces a match. There is a familliar sound of a
liquid very keen to go ablaze. Hop hop hey!

Pink Orthodox by Shunt
(performance)

a spoonfull of…

Scoop a handfull of people’s talks, raw and still warm, then shut them inside a soundman’s cabin. Make the audience sit the other way round.

Framed by a narrow stripe of the cabin’s window, there is a trio of faces who, lit from under, can’t but look like marzipan heads of selected Roman Emperors.

The three practice a dada decomposure of echoes of a day before yesterday. By a diarrhoea of words streaming the madrigals way, the men peck daily banalities to pieces – absurd fragments that get an entirely different shape.

Just add some lentils and sundried tomatoes, then rush a cage on the stage.

ridiculusmus (performance)

exhausting metamorphosis

She appears, with long black hair, wearing a grey dress. She throws away all of that, without interrupting her moves that stay somewhere between a ground beetle’s agony and a dog dreaming about chasing a rabbit. She fights tied up waves of a black mattress.

The struggle finishes the moment she puts on a cream skirt and a smart shirt. She walks on the waves, much relaxed now, they seem to have no trouble holding the weight of her bare soles. She stamps on, hits the mattress to provoke it, to make it draw aside and swallow her.

The audience holding glasses of wine gets spattered a little.

Patty Chang

Entwistle

(performance)

quest for space

and they came close to me
from above
hanging
waiting till I touch them
once I find them
in the cloud of smoke
those
anchors

I touch one
and it takes me up
high above the ground
only to pump my flesh
with 220 volts

there are two rows of us
hanging out there motionless

but somehow we wake up
to what dream?

but somehow we make it back on earth
which earth?

There go the dancers – spending most of their time on stage fighting each other. Every time there is one or a couple igniting something, a reaction causing another reaction, multiplying, erupting into a seemingly chaotic mess and collapsing into silence again.

In other words a guy stamps heavily on the ground, trying to squash a girl under his soles. But she keeps tossing that hard he misses every time.
Then another guy turns up and stamps just once. That’s enough to make his adversary collapse. Soon more and more such predators appear, so when the whole stage is stamping and tossing happily, a true master turns up and, by stamping his foot just once, he makes all kiss the ground.

and so on and so on…a picture of evolution switching forms.

Ultima Vez (dance)

homogenise

A former C&A store.
No sad mannequins wearing spider webs.Just a continuous purr of blue conveyor belts.
Workers in blue overals busy putting something in
yellow boxes.A terrible sight of a fridge being slowly and painfuly disassembled, stripped to its
very core and far beyond. Soon there is no fridge, just an anonymous herd of spare parts.
The moving belt hurls to darkness of a machine that goes…

Once back on daylight, there are no spare parts any more, just pearls, ready to grant a shape to a plastic bag.

A private universe on its way to almost very nothing. All men equal, no matter if a SAAB or a pilot pen with a missing top.

No piano. No slow motion farewel shot. The credits follow:
pack of Hello Kitty chopsticks
878 pieces of data media
green plastic toy of american soldier holding his walkie talkie, found in the street
392 pieces of clothing
…

Michael Landy Break Down (self-consuming installation)

more downbreak