with: Leonid Yovchev and Catherine Metodieva

premiere in Sofia: 16 and 17 June 2022, Swimming Pool
premiere in Berlin: 26 and 27 August 2022, ACUD Theater

Аtlantis is dedicated to Е.Т.А. Hoffmann – the author, the composer, the uncanny (Unheimlich) character – as the ultimate effect of his own oeuvre. The Hoffmann mania that lasted two centuries, that has rewritten subterraneously the history of modern literature and music, is a direct result of the Hoffmann-effect: the effect of destabilising the Real, of extracting the More-than-the-Real from the “banal” tissue of the real. Hoffmann the uncanny Subject, faces his Double: the uncanny Real.

Atlantis – Hoffmann’s utopian place, the Promised Land of the More-than-the-Real, is where Hoffmann’s weird world – a world where “аll that is solid melts into air”, indeed – materialise. The Hoffmanniana and the Hoffmann mania have both their origin there.

 

In Atlantis Metheor Collective mobilises its signature theatrical contra-techniques. Thus, Hoffmann-the-Master-of-the-Uncanny will serve as the protagonist of a theatre oratorio unfolding a fantastic theoretical proposal, thus plunging into Hoffmann’s upside-down world.The performance is created with the support of Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Sofia Municipality and National Culture Fund of Bulgaria.

 

Trailer

 

Ex corpore is dedicated to the time, to the body, to the shadow. To the change, to the capability of the bodies to be in the same time hard and soft, to change and persist.

The performance is part of the Ex corpore project, implemented with the financial support of Sofia Municipality and the Ministry of Culture. The project is part of the Legacy Program of Plovdiv – European Capital of Culture 2019.

“From the human body an inhuman body has to be made. Not by external force, without any sadism and inhumane experiments, the body itself, the body has to miscreate itself, to turn its joints inside out, to find all the ways it never is, the postures it never stands in, the muscles it never uses, it has to find its tails and appendices, to stretch its skin, to grow its hair out, to twist its torso, to reshape its face.

Let desire guide us. Let desire lead us to where we end and where we begin anew. Let’s let the body invent its inhuman techniques. A body that doesn’t conform to the requirements of the known, a body dissolved in the unknown, a body that doesn’t take and doesn’t give, a body open to the wind from which the invisible weasel demons leap out. A body standing on the edge of the world, where the shadows are more substantial than the bodies that cast them, where bodies thin out and fade away, where ghosts get bodies.”

Ani Vaseva

Excerpt 1

Excerpt 2

director: Ani Vaseva
text: Ani Vaseva, Boyan Manchev, including fragments by E.T.A. Hoffmann
German-Bulgarian translation: Strashimir Djamdjiev, Teodor Berberov, Nina Chilianska
Bulgarian-German translation: Elvira Bormann
German-language tutor: Ventzislava Dikova
apparatuses: Stefan Donchev
music: Kristian Alexiev
costumes: Ani Vaseva, Teodora Bambikova, Borislav Borisov
photography: Boryana Pandova, Zafer Galibov and Metheor archive

Cast: Leonid Yovchev and Stefan Milkov
and the voices of Karin Mueller Stefanov, Annett Hardegen, Dirk Cieslak, Kristian Alexiev and Ventzislava Dikova

Premiere: May 2019, Goethe-Institut Bulgaria

This performance is dedicated to the life and art of E.T.A. Hoffmann. To the Romantic demons, to the beautiful and the ugly, to the uncanny, to technology and poetry. “Hoffmann is a writer of what should be and not of what is.”

Excerpt 1

Excerpt 2

director: Ani Vaseva
text: Ani Vaseva, with included fragments by Boyan Manchev and Ani Vaseva from earlier Metheor performances, as well as texts written by the actors. The costumes in the performances are taken from earlier Metheor Performances, designed by Aglika Terzieva, Georgi Sharov, Stefan Donchev and Ani Vaseva.
photography: Boryana Pandova

with: Leonid Yovchev, Emona Ilieva, Stefan Milkov, Georgi Dimitrov, Greta Gicheva, Gordan Koev, Kalin Nikolaev, Lachezara Vasileva, Martin Dimov, Nicol Vasileva and Trayan Hristov.

The majority of the actors are 1st year acting students of Ani Vaseva and Leonid Yovchev.

Premiere – September 2018, Cinema House, Sofia

Theatre performance about theatre, life and death.

“There is no present. You blink and the moment has already passed, the next one is coming. As I say this, it is already past, and the future is yet to come. I stand in the void. I am gone.”

“This is manipulation. I’ve made those people, the actors, say those things in a certain situation, and then used them in the performance. The manipulation is even greater. For when I say ‘I’, it’s not me who’s saying it, it’s the director who’s made those actors say those things. In principle, this is clear enough – it’s a director’s job to sit at the back and make other people do stuff. But in this case, we’re talking about pure mystification. Some people stand around and say that they are who they are and that they’re speaking in their own name, they’re saying ‘true’ things, when in fact it’s part of the set-up. And if a person is on stage and speaking, they’re already a character.

It’s very amusing, look, I’ll do this trick: I’m saying ‘I think green is a nice colour’, but it’s not really me who’s saying it, it’s written for me in the script. I’m colour-blind. If it wasn’t written for me in the script, I would never say it. I’m colour-blind! I’m colour-blind! I’m colour-blind! I’m not colour-blind! I’m colour-blind! And I’m not even truly colour-blind. I just can’t distinguish between grey and violet and between blue and green. The director takes advantage of her knowledge that I disagree with this statement, that I actually think it’s a matter of interpretation and that I can simply see more shades and more complex colours, and she makes me say I’m colour-blind. And even what I just said, again, it wasn’t me saying it, it’s in the script. I’ve said it, but in a different situation. When I say ‘I’, I mean the director. No, I, I’ve said it, me, Leonid, but each and every ‘I’ isn’t written by me, it’s she who’s writing it, yet when I say ‘I’, it’s me. That means in effect that my words are stolen from me and I’m being used. Life sucks. You can’t even be an ‘I’. Even those words aren’t mine. Again, it’s she who’s speaking. It’s she who said that. And that. Shut up! It’s her again. Ughhhh.”

A Play About Us was created with the support of the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture and Cinema House.

Trailer 1

Recording

director: Ani Vaseva
text: Boyan Manchev

music: Konstantin Markov
apparatuses and digital programs: Stefan Donchev
paintings: Boris Deltchev
costumes concept: Ani Vaseva
costumes: Darina Stoimenova, Katya Petrova and Teodora Bambikova
masks and special costumes: Emilian Bonev and Mihail Zhekunov
inspizient: Mihail Zhekunov
photography: Orlin Ognyanov, Тeodora Bambikova, Photo-Corpus

with: Leonid Yovchev, Emona Ilieva, Valery Georgiev, Maria Panayotova, Martina Apostolova, Mihail ZhekunovPremiere – October 2017, DNK, Sofia

Roadtrip to Hell is a theatre oratorio loosely based on Dante’s Inferno and Monteverdi’s Orfeo.

Roadtrip to Hell articulates an experimental hypothesis about a form of radical existence, hypothesis about life possessed by desire that knows no end.

For desire that knows no limit, Hell is not inevitable end but necessary condition.

The roadtrip to hell is a journey to oneself. Hell is not ahead of us. Hell has already happened. Hell is here and now.

“Where there is no desire, there is no hell. Where there is no hell, there is no desire.”

– – -Roadtrip to Hell was created with the support of Sofia Municipality’s Culture Programme for 2017 and the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture.

Recording

Shadow’s chorus

director, author of text and music: Ani Vaseva

apparatuses and programs: Stefan Donchev
photography: Georgi Dimitrov, Teodora Bambikova and Boryana Pandova

with: Leonid Yovchev and Galya Kostadinova
and the voices of Boyan Manchev and Tsvetan Tsvetanov

Premiere – November 2016, Cinema House, Sofia

H.P. Lovecraft is strange, remarkable figure in literary history. Although he dies almost completely unknown and in poverty, his work has immense influence on the horror genre in literature, cinema, music and pop culture. Besides the hundreds of movies, books, music albums dedicated to motives from his oeuvres, there also exist well known pop references inspired by Lovecraft’s stories (the most popular of them probably being Arkham Asylum from DC comics iniverse). The Apocalyptic Lovecraftian cosmos contains bottomless dark abysses with five dimensions, where Cyclopean cities with unimaginable geometry are inhabited by eldritch, fascinating figures. In this super-natural, super-organized world alien creatures – half-plants, half-mollusks, half-mammals roam the vast Mountains of Madness.The formless is frightening – that what has many forms; that what is indiscernible and indefinable. But in Lovecraft, paradoxically, the scary is also likeable. In this essential for Lovecraft tension the team of the performance finds the starting point for its research.The performance is also a lecture, as it experiments both theoretically and practically with notions from the Lovcraftian universe, with facts from his biography and his literature. The popular today genre of lecture performance is questioned, as well asits pretention for immediate, un-representative approach toward the material. Can we give a lecture, provide information and reflection without giving up the dynamics of the form, the despair, darkness and explosions of imagination, born from Lovecraft’s texts?

* * *

“Our bodies are miraculous, our habit of using our time-organ partially and lazily has made us see form as flat, isolated in its one time, in one truncated interval, thereby leading us to a weak idea of form. If we enter into the inside of time, if we enter into actual miraculous theatrical time, we can see form in its multiplicity, in its dispersion along the channels of time. The cloud (see Boyan Manchev, Clouds, Sofia: Metheor, 2019) is a blessing for us because its speed is not habitual to us, because it changes faster than we are used to and, feeling lost, we seek permanence in it. The cloud is in constant metamorphosis, metamorphosis is its form.

Metamorphosis is that state of form in which a form both is and isn’t “itself”. It is form as change of form, form in its “in-between”. In metamorphosis, the plasticity inherent to form is revealed– a property that, because of our inertia, we are accustomed to overlook. Matter is miraculous and is never what it seems. In metamorphosis, the intelligible becomes surprising. The solid becomes plastic. The soft becomes solid. That which flows out upon dissection becomes stable, while that which bursts on impact persists, bends, changes. The one becomes many, and the many merge into a whole.

There, where form loses itself and rediscovers itself in the formless. The final phase of metamorphosis is the permanent metamorphosis, the impermanent matter that does not persist in any form, a dense cloud, Lovecraftian shoggoths, a non-Newtonian fluid, the temporary outlines vibrate, irritate, having been left uncompleted and incompletely begun. Form in absolute flux, pre-form and post-form, permanent in its impermanence (see Boyan Manchev, The Body-Metamorphosis, Sofia: Altera, 2007 [in Bulgarian]). The formless is our limit of perception and the limit of our imagination. Just as we cannot imagine the cosmos as infinite (or finite), so we cannot perceive the formless, for in our gaze accustomed to form it either fades into mist or crystallizes into a form. The formless is a paradox, an elusiveness that is always at the edge – at the edge of focus, at the edge of the field of vision. At the edge of the visible, at the edge of the discernible, at the edge of form. There, where the in-between forms live, where there is a figure in the shadow and the formless is hidden in the light.”

Ani Vaseva

* * *

Lovecraft was created with the support of the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture and Cinema House.

Excerpt

TOTAL DAMAGE is absolute expenditure of existing. Destruction, from which our phoenix rises – ruin is our oeuvre. The place where existence is possible only as permanent apocalypse. Revealing of what is hidden, manifestation of what is double, triple and multiple, discerning of what is single. We are moved by desire, which is totally expended, without being exhausted. Desire that gives you fever and has no purpose, besides actualizing itself. Not to attain its object, because there is no object, but to be constant reality. Desire has no perspective, doesn’t meet the dark melancholy of its accomplishment. Its world is absolute and it motor is perpetuum. We are trotskyists of desire.”

Ani Vaseva

– – –

Total Damage was created with the support of Sofia Municipality’s Culture Programme for 2016 and DNK/National Palace of Culture.

Total Damage Song

stage version of the text: Ani Vaseva
director: Ani Vaseva
theory: Boyan Manchev
graphic design: Georgi Sharov
photography: Boryana Pandova

with: Leonid Yovchev

Premiere – October 2015, Institut Français de Bulgarie

Les Chants de Maldoror, the legendary for the last centuries avant-gardes oeuvre was published in 1896 under the penname Comte de Lautréamont by the enigmatic Isidore Ducasse and re-discovered half a century later by the surrealists. The macabre hallucinations of Lautréamont are not only haunted by inherited from the Romantic repertoire ghosts – dark heroes, strange creatures, hybrid monsters, rampant elements – but they also introduce a new idea of poetic language, tensed between authenticity and artificiality, truthfulness and irony. Thus Lautréamont opens the horizon of a world with endless potentiality (of imagination), in order to close it just a few months later with the corrosive auto-parody of Poésies. This new form of poetic language and its dramatic potential are of specific interest to Metheor. That is why Maldoror is performance focused in the first place on the text: performance, based on constant and exhaustive work on the grammar of movement and the vocal score, in order to embody Lautréamont’s anxious fantasies, transforming them into contemporary theatre. Thus, continuing the experiments of the explored by the group genre of theatre oratiro, Metheor aims to experience the possibilities of a literary or poetic theatre, opposed both to the poetic reading and the stage adaptation. Through the physical and technical mobilization of the text-material the literary theatre attempts to actualize the potentiality of literary fiction language on the same level as the transformed intensity, strived at by the last century theatre oppositely through overcoming language, narration and representation. Poetical theatre beyond the machinery of conflict, catastrophe and catharsis. The nightmarish world of Maldoror as upside-down world of pleasure. Monsters are accomplished desires.

Maldoror – Recording

Premiere – January 2015, Sfumato, Sofia

Which is the Red Planet – the one we presuppose, or another, completely different and brand new? Isn‘t this the place where time and space begin to overlap, where unexplained effects and behavioral crashes occur, where the flesh of reality begins to bend and wears out?

“A being that itself makes no effort to be real, can not be subsidized with a credibility for reality.”

Where science fiction ends, “The Red Planet” begins – far beyond the frames of the genre, in the plush darkness of the mysterious cosmos. The crew of the unidirectional science-mission flight Utopia reaches the edge of the Galaxy. There they encounter a ship-capsule drifting unmanned. It seems that the two spacecrafts originated in the same humanoid civilization but came from different points of time space. Aboard the ship-capsule there are no survivors. Yet the robot keeps a tremendous amount of information. It is a story about the events on Earth and the Solar system that occurred before or after the Utopia mission began. The final of the solar evolution and the transformation of the Sun into a red giant that absorbs the planets around us is traced. The encounter between the two ships causes a collapse in space-time matter, as one comes from the future of the other. And from now on, all events are beginning to develop in an absolutely unpredictable direction.

At the same time, some parallel events take place on Earth. The cinema industry is in a global product crisis. The resource of shooting sites is critically limited due to the effects of global warming, the diminishing of the earth’s atmosphere, the demographic catastrophe, the wars. The film industry is looking for cheap and appropriate locations for new science-fiction productions, as well as cheap living masses for mass scenes and statists. One director prepares a new platform for the 13th Star Wars episode and starts shooting.

The Red Planet was created with the support of the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture and Theatre Laboratory Sfumato.

Excerpts

text and costumes: Ani Vaseva
graphic design: Mira Tisheva
photography: Boris Delchev, Vassil Tanev and Metheor archive

with: Leonid Yovchev and Alexander Uzunov

Premiere – October 2014, French Institute in Bulgaria

A Play For You is performance about the indistinct point, where future becomes past, expectation – memory, childhood – old age, new beginning – repetition. Beyond the misty horizon of melancholy a new world forms. A world, where the cosmos will be created for the first time and in the same time bursts in spectacular final explosion. In this temporary universe age, gender, personal biography, and memory are ambiguous, unclear and mutable notions. There everything floats between the most concrete and the most abstract.”A Play For You is beautiful and grand only as Ani Vaseva’s plays are. Incomparably different from everything happening in Bulgarian theatre, her work should’t even be thought as part of it. In the process of this work Ani Vaseva creates other forms, other techniques, her own genres. And this demands new way of looking and completely new way of perceiving.”
Monika Vakarelova, Literary Newspaper

“Thus the beginning is the end. Ani Vaseva’s plays always end very quickly. Applause and you wish everything would start from the beginning. The only thing you can do is to acknowledge the genious, but this sounds unnececary.”
Alisa Clemente in alisaclemente.com

“Through Ani Vaseva’s directing Leonid Yovchev brings to life strong, memorable images of vivid bodily super-expression.”
Elena Angelova, Literary Newspaper

Trailer

Recording

Phaeton: Miscreants was created with the support of the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture.

Trailer

Ending

Director: Ani Vaseva
text: Miroslav Hristov
design and photography: Georgi Sharov
sound: Nino Tiberio Gomes (DataTransporter)

with: Galia Kostadinova and Nino Tiberio Gomes (DataTransporter)

Premiere – November 2012, the fridge, Sofia

THE ALLEATER is the hard, but volatile mass in which we immerse our hand only to find out that our fingers are legs and our mouths – asses. THE ALLEATER is the edge beyond which gender, size and matter does not matter, because are in the same time male, female, in between, miniature, gigantic, consistent and fragile. In Alleater’s mouth stalks little, sexy black hole, blazing in its estrangement and in it the nothing yawns.

Excerpt 1

 

Excerpt 2

text: Ani Vaseva, Boyan Manchev, based on Mary Shelley
director: Ani Vaseva
dramaturge: Boyan Manchev
critique: Monika Vakarelova
stage design: Aglika Terzieva
costume design: Maitia Cibulka
graphic design: Georgi Sharov
photography: Georgi Dimitrov

with: Leonid Yovchev, Petar Genkov, Galya Kostadinova

Premiere – February 2012, Sfumato, Sofia

“The dead body is more alive than the living body. In the dead members we can find everything we need to create a new, more perfect instrument. Shinier bones, stronger hairs, bigger members, more precise mechanics. From inert matter we will create a taller creature, closer to the titan, bigger, harder. The creature will be the most precise product of physics and mathematics, nothing liquid-organic, nothing moist and mucous. Dry, solid matter, sparkling in symmetrical crystals. The dead body is more alive than the living body. From chaos we will arrange a new order, all cavities filled, all inaccuracies fixed. Smooth as a piece of ice, sharp as a stone, rearranged, already having been but created anew, the creature will be my contact point with the world of dead matter, the transition between organic and inorganic, the human chain to the lunar landscape my skin is striving towards as towards a saving blade, a relieving superficial cut, a healthy blood-letting. It won’t give birth through torn organs, it won’t ooze snot and spit brown secretions. Our creature will be pure, like crystal, like frost, like angel wings fanning mortal cold.”

Frankenstein was created with the support of the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture, ETUD Foundation and Theatre Laboratory Sfumato.

Trailer

Recording

“Throughout life, we constantly delude ourselves that things are this or that way, that they are “as they are”. Yet space flows just as much as time does. The earth is not stable, the earth rotates at one thousand five hundred kilometers per hour, the earth flies around the sun at one hundred thousand kilometers per hour. The earth, the symbol of stability, hurtles through space at a speed we cannot even imagine, one thousand five hundred by one hundred thousand. The earth’s core is growing, its interior and surface are restless. Everything is in perpetual motion. Whence, then, the illusion of stability? Everything around us is falling, flying, tumbling, flowing, scattering. Nothing ever stands still.

The atom is much more nothing than something. Protons, electrons and neutrons, though very different in size from each other, are all very tiny, infinitesimal, the rest of the volume of the atom being empty space. The atom is a void with particles darting about in it. We are made of atoms, therefore we are more empty than full. But then how are we substantial? How do we live as solid bodies in a solid world, how do we push, hit, hurt, tear each other apart? How can you exist at all? How can you have shape and substance if atoms are more empty than full? You close your eyes and feel how the structure of your building blocks becomes porous, how you merge first with the objects around you, then with larger objects, buildings, streets, highways, road networks, cities, mountains, fields, continents, oceans… Some whim, a quirk in the physical laws of some here-and-now that is entirely questionable and random, and that may disappear at any moment or its laws may change, has determined that these atoms connect in this particular way and not in any other. That you can differentiate yourself from your environment and not freely blend into it, that you are constrained within your skin, that your hair cannot grow into the wall or the pillow.

It is a fiction that things are the same, that our body is one and unchanging. We are the sort of things that do not stretch but break. Yet we are changeable, fluid, unstable. We just need to be caught at the right moment. And in the right place. The theatre is the right place, and it brings together within itself a series of right moments. There the fissures of matter and its illusions can open up. Theatre itself is constantly changing its form, it is metamorphic. Form is an illusion. “The cloud is not a changing form; the cloud is a persisting change,”^[1] writes Boyan Manchev (on his critique of the transformation of change, metamorphosis and process into a flexible ideology and its connection to neoliberal discourses, practices and economies, see The End of Contemporary Art? [in Bulgarian], Sofia: Metheor, 2023). Theatre is cloudy. Theatre is capable of changing and persisting at the same time. Theatre as the reproduction of established forms is as much a fiction as is the stationary earth.On stage, there is both space and time for change to unfold, enabling us to see and feel the earth fly at a hundred thousand kilometers an hour, to visualize and illuminate the fact that our idea of possible and impossible, of usual and strange, of cause and effect, of luck and chance, of predestination and destiny, is old and weak. We need strong ideas to think the world.

The fixed body with its unchanging functions, reproduction and procreation, gender, are weak, feeble ideas. We are beyond gender and beyond form, we are where miraculous organs thrive, where sexual organs don’t serve, don’t serve for reproduction, aren’t subject to violence and rupture, don’t turn subjects into objects, aren’t divided into stupid and helpless pairs of opposites. Our understanding of gender, our expectation that our organs should be permanent is obsolete, the constructs in which we clothe our scattered, sensitive, multi-organ, multiple bodies are ineffective.

Our idea of form is weak. Our idea of metamorphosis is stronger, it can make up for the deficiency of form. Metamorphosis is where form is lost and found as new. There, where form is outside itself.”

Ani Vaseva

^[1] Boyan Manchev, Clouds. Philosophy of the Free Body, Sofia: Metheor, transl. by Katerina Popova, 2020, p. 19.

Trailer

Actors’s Chorus

director: Ani Vaseva
consultant: Boyan Manchev
sound: Lubomir Brashnenkov
costumes: Neli Miteva
photography and graphic design: Ivan Donchev

with: Iva Sveshtarova, Elena Dimitrova, Petar Genkov, Lubomir Brashnenkov, Georgi Sharov and Cats Under Cars band.Premiere during the „Antistatic” festival, April 2010, „The Red House”, Sofia

Teaser

Ending

text: Ani Vaseva
director: Ani Vaseva
author of the music and the sound design: Assen Avramov
editor: Ina Vulchanova
studio team: Dimitar Vassilev, Jivko Marev, Vladimir Trenchev
artist: Aglika Tеrzieva
graphic design: Georgi Sharov

with: Valentin Ganev, Vesselin Mezekliev, Joreta Nikolova, Ekaterina Stoyanova, Alexandra Vassileva, Assen Avramov Daniela Manolova, Elena Dimitrova, Petar Genkov, Leonid Yovchev, Yavor Borissov, Delian Iliev, Stilian Jeliazkov, Srebrina Georgieva, Galia Kostadinova, Katerina Keremidchieva, Maria Petkova.

2010, Bulgarian National Radio, “Hristo Botev” programme, Radio theatre.

Sick is scary fairy tale about the sickness as extraordinary form of live. In our radioplay the sickness is transforming power, creating its own, parallel world, where the sick people can’t live out of the sickness. Black comedy of the body in its most unpredictable emanations.

text and directing: Ani Vaseva with the assistance of Boyan Manchev
stage design: Desislava Bankova
photography: Ivan Donchev

with Elena Dimitrova and Petar Genkov

Premiere – January 2010, the fridge, Sofia

Is the human being a double of the demon or vice versa? Where is the warped mirror? Or are two warped mirrors placed opposite each other? There is no real object, those are just reflections of the reflections. A double of the double, a demon of the demon. Where is the double? In the synchrony or in the discrepancy? Where do we see the repetition, in the coincidence or in the non-coincidence? Coupled bodies, or bodies and their shadows, or that which is itself, but other than itself, or joy, a double of desire, or a double of the body, the other, mutated body, or that one over there which is also this one here. One double body or two coupled bodies? Whose is the brain, whose is the decision, whose is the mouth? Two mouths acting in sync, two welded voices coming together and separating. The coupled doubles lose their boundary, they are one and two separate ones at the same time, you don’t know which is the body and which is the shadow, whether they are two bodies or just two shadows.

At first, the voice was one. Then the voices became two.

 

The voice split in two is a demonic voice. A split voice, a voice that is divided and that divides. A voice of two, a voice from two that is also one voice. Two voices that coincide and diverge. Two voices fused into one, which splits into two when it wills and when it wills magically fuses again, without a trace of a seam, without residue, into an indistinguishable, unified, homogeneous whole. Something that is both one and two. Two voices can form one voice much more than two bodies can form one body. Two bodies can assemble into one body, but two voices can become one common voice. One voice with double possibilities, with double strength, with a double range, multiplied by two variations.

Two voices that are one, yet still two. They are alien to each other and yet they are common, in intimate proximity, without any distance. A voice containing its echo. A voice that has its thousands of possibilities multiplied by two. A voice that can want and not want at the same time, that can pull and give, squeeze and relax, desire and flee, shout and whisper, die and be born. The voice of simultaneous opposites is a double voice. A voice that is both synchronous and asynchronous, a voice of dissonance and harmony, of the common strength and of disintegration – a demonic voice.

Theatre is faced with its own inherent paradox – it works with the infinite, the indomitable, the impossible and the mutable, yet its material is the finite, insufficient human being with its finite, insufficient human body. How can you work miracles with the misery of the human body, a body that is so unmiraculous? A body that has a finite number of limbs which cannot be increased or decreased with impunity, a body that cannot be stretched and shrunk, a body whose capacities are not at all unlimited? The human body is rigid insofar as it is impervious to change and frail insofar as it is so fragile, so vulnerable. A body that cannot do without a head, a head that cannot do without a body. Non-autonomous organs doomed to perpetual and multiple dependencies, susceptible to sabotage by others and by themselves. The body is a waterskin, too simple to exceed its form and too complex to be self-sufficient. A wretched, lonely, doomed human body.

The misery of this Great Creation of Nature is shocking. The most imperfect, the most desperate, the most naked and wretched body is the human one. It sags, droops, rots, sours, scrapes, withers, flakes, peels, buckles; it is incapable – its incapacity is far greater than its capacity. A body designed to bring disappointment, a body that fails, a body that takes much more than it gives.

Human skin, this organic rag, this rotten stomach that contains us. It is so tragic, so impossibly frail and tied to its beginning and end. Bruised skin, hopeless, sad skin, skin comical in its reactivity, skin on which red marks of fingers remain. A screen of shame and defencelessness. A book of scars, of failures, of the accumulated marks of the teeth of time and space. A helpless receptacle containing the helpless organism.

 

The human body is hell.

 

The body is locked in nightmares. In nightmares, in nightmares, in the night, there, in that nightmare, the body comes out of itself, it cannot fit, the body fails, it can no longer come out of itself, the failure of the body, this is hell, here, now. The body in its unresolvable crisis, abandoned, shaken by spasmodic fits of incapacity. Indomitable, terrifying images branded on the pupils of the eyes, this is hell, this is not being able to stop seeing and hearing, there’s no point in closing your eyes because the image and the sound are on the inside of your eyelid, curled up in the inner eye. The human body left to itself, torn apart by the blazing images layered within it, ageing and doomed to die.

The hell of the naked human body, a defenceless, infantile old body spread-eagled between the slime and scream of birth and the slime and scream of death, in this its only instant-long life spat out into eternity, a notch disappearing while being cut, a lonely, sad body, a staring foot, an eye in a wound. The silent hell of the body, where there is time and it is irreversible, of withering skin, of shortened tendons, of the inability to embrace the world, of failure. The body sprouts, the body sags, the body is hell. “Why bodies mutate. This is what hell is. Bodies become traces of themselves”(Boyan Manchev, Roadtrip to Hell).

Flushed, sweaty bodies with hairs and pores, bodies with orifices and limbs, bodies breathing, bodies that are here today and gone tomorrow. Bodies driven by desires, bodies that are barely born and already aged. Clumsy bodies, uncomfortable bodies, so simply human, so abandoned to failure, to their own failure. Bodies that can’t coalesce because they aren’t there, because they are missing bodies, present only in their insufficiency. The human body crashing into other human bodies drawntogether by their common misery. Jostling, grim, frantic bodies, helpless, abandoned to their desire. New ways must be devised for these bodies to be together. The other way round. Interlocked not in the usual way, filling each other’s hollows not as they should. A knee in the crook of the neck, an ankle in the elbow. How can the bodies find each other in their blind chase, what will they stumble upon? Bodies lost in what is present, bodies struggling with themselves, bodies forced to find ways to transcend their form.

What can the wretched human body do? How can it follow desire, transcend itself, overcome itself, discover itself as other? Where does the human body end, where does the inhuman one begin? How can we invent the new body that will overcome its insufficiency?

– – –

The Eye was created with the support of ETUD Foundation and the fridge.

Excerpts