MONSTRUM_and here I am blind
Concept, direction, masks: Sara Bocchini
Music: Elia Moretti, Jakub Štourač
Artistic collaboration and costumes: Helena Štouračová
Light design: Jiří Šmirk
Production: Petr Hromek
Cast: Sara Bocchini, Elia Moretti, Jakub Štourač, Koza
performance of dance and physical theatre; length: 45 min
premiere 22 FEB 2020 Plum Yard, Malovice; Prague premiere 3 DEC 2021 Ponec – dance venue
To be awake when one is not supposed to. During a sleepless night the perception of the senses is shifted. The pain is more acute. The solitude is absolute. On the threshold between consciousness and falling asleep weird things occur: thoughts are digging into realms they do not dare to dig into under the sunlight; fragments of dreams confuse the contours of objects; the body becomes the terrain, on which submerged tensions strive to manifest themselves. Mortality is a matter of fact, as real as this very body unable to surrender to sleep.
MONSTRUM_and here I am blind deals with sleep, dream, insomnia, with the confusion of these three states. A level of existence, in which it’s no longer possible to say clearly, whether you have experienced something for real or you have only dreamed about it. “Only”: does a night dream not have any status of reality? Really?
How does what we are used to consider reality reveal itself in the darkest hour of the night? What does remain beyond the coming and going of fear, hope, disillusion, happiness, sorrow? How long are we able to stand this glimpse into darkness?
MONSTRUM depicts the anatomy of insomnia: a restless flow of under skin pressures, collapses, erosions, shifts. An embodied grammar of wandering, impulses, messed-up perceptions. The exhaustion provoked by the inability to switch off and drift into dreams, or into nothingness. An anxiety of continuity. An epiphany with the snug of a goat, which means nothing more than what it is.
MONSTRUM tries out a subconscious approach to dramaturgy, to recreate the uncatchable logic we experience while dreaming. Things seem to pop out of a chaotic magma, juxtaposed side to side and claiming for being looked at. Moving thru this magma is a stream of consciousness, a cluster of fragments, a presence that constantly re-shapes its level of existence into time and space.
A nocturne dance to contemplate
what we don’t dare to see
in the daily light