SENSUS COMMUNIS

ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE

A performative project on the border between sound poetry, sound puppetry and object theatre. Are there things we can only learn by hearing? How does our perspective become inverted if we choose hearing instead of visuality as our initial sense of knowledge?

Sensus communis, a term also known as “common sense,” looks at how our sensory perception inscribes itself into our overall understanding of the world around us. And is it even the same world we are all living in? The theatrical adventure of listening is based on the idea that there are uncharted territories, absent worlds and multitudes of absent people or events to be brought back to the sensus communis by listening. The anonymous figures of the two “operators” as executors of an unknown, bureaucratic but also uncontrollable imaginative power.

Sound, as a natural part of our lives, takes on mythical dimensions in the performance as an object that cannot be perceived with a single glance; noise as a natural part of inhabited areas, but also of the cries of nature or cosmic space. Sound as a material from which and with which the most seemingly ordinary thing can be brought to life; because, after all, even the ordinary waste that we so easily dispose of can be its fantastic source. The specific memory of resonance embodied in tape recordings, which record unrepeatable moments just like photographs, can bring back those who have been deprived of words. Is it possible, with sufficient concentration, to perceive everything that has ever happened, is happening and will happen?

The performance works with the possibilities of limited perceptual experiences in the field of visual and audio expression. Using fundamentally analogue techniques such as analogue projection of meotar, lighting through batteries, small mechanical machines, etc., the production builds a specific type of puppetry. The idea of sound puppetry evolves into object theatre, focusing on the mechanics of things that have lost their meaning for today’s digital world and only represent the melancholic poetics of the past.

The expression of the whole performance is built through specific quasi-mythological images: animals-humans, a garden of abandoned things telling their memories, the dissection of the Overman and the mechanisation of the physical body. Operators, archivists, playing out their object mini-opera composed of the voices of things, in the name of restarting the stalling engine of humanity.

PARTNERS