A labyrinth as evergreen as prejudice. Populated with white cone-shaped masks. There are no faces under the masks, just a pair of mute CCTV lenses.

Assigned to every tenth mask, there is a red femme with a white wonder nose. Now, every second femme is busy cradling a baby and every now and then they pick a mask and shoot it with a golden gun. The bullets make red flowers blossom on the masks’ bodies, but masks don’t seem to get troubled that much about it.

Unlike a handful of males crawling around, collared and leashed with latex balaclava pulled over their heads. They lack the privilege of getting a golden bullet and being spied on.

(oil on canvas)
artist and title unknown

First of all, there is no uninvited relative demanding retaliation in this story. Instead, a board of certified wizards meets and declares a major threat for the sleeping beauty. It is the linen barb or anything you get rid off moaning sadly once it is driven under your skin, no matter you’re a fish or a part-time receptionist.

The tale carries on with a simple plot. There is an accident obviously involving the beauty and the barb and the whole kingdom falls into a coma. “Even the partridges and pheasants being prepared for the royal table fall asleep, not mentioning the fire.” says the narrator.

Here comes the prince. He breaks in the golden chamber, finds the beauty, but fails to wake her up despite the fact he has a paramedic course. The prince is by no means discouraged and falls in love with the beauty anyway. They live together practising an open relationship and in nine months time, the beauty, still asleep, gives a birth to sleeping twins. The prince remains the only entity in the kingdom retaining consciousness, though he forgets why the hell he ended up there.

installed at the Museum of Installation, London

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

Laughing? Even got a reason for that? Well, that certainly is not an excuse. Got anything in your defence, apart form that ridiculous wig, sitting on your skull? Nothing? Well. Well. There is a record of you laughing. We don’t mind things like that. We kindly allow laughing. But we cannot tolerate people laughing aimlessly.

Kindly remove.

Persuing a dream of impersonating a 1930’s welder? Well, that is a NO NO. Doesn’t matter if you wear a clown nose or not. That makes no extenuation whatsoever.

Kindly dispose off.

And, there is certainly no place for trapeze artists these days. Hard times. One needs to be serious and in possession of a proper and solid vision. Hanging around twenty metres above the earth is not considered a sustainable activity contributing to our neatly managed society.

Kindly eliminate.

In hold of a crystal sphere hovering above your hands? Rolling it around your shoulders employing your mental powers? Hm. Impressive, but highly undesirable. Please, be so kind and enter our waste bag without resistance, as doing so, would cause a serious damage to your existence.

Kindly terminate.

Dronte etc. by Krepsko

Two chairs, one room….sitting in their corners, looking at each other.

One spotless, shiny, mint, the other a burnt torso, with toothless backboard.

One encircled with a ring of hundreds of smashed eggshells, the other being a ring itself with a hole as a gaping memory of what once used to be a platform bravely absorbing all a well-fed bottom can offer.

One can smell a diagonal line, unspoken, unseen, connecting the chairs without asking first.

The shiny one poses like a fresh Spanish Riding School graduate, one of its legs flamingo bended, about to flatten the last intact egg, while the wreck opposite guards a volcano of ashes with a dry egg blinking out of its gullet.

One untouched but busy destroying all its hooves can reach, the other destruction itself.
Pride and fall.

Armanda Spice

Chair I

(installation)

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

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

When earning enough not to worry and not to think that much about anything

When massive boredom is worth the safety of having a vision of undisturbed continuity of your cashflow

When her exploding and him trying to swallow the blast…with disturbing continuity

When both of them suffering from lack of the ultimate

When she runs under a van out of pure despair

…there might be some room to reverse things

…options to make the loop of breakings up and hugs of forgiveness seem less infinite

For boom to doom press 1

For boom to blossom press 2

For boom to nowhere press 3

Alexandr Brandt

The Next Second

2006

video

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

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