LOVECRAFT

Lecture-performance about Howard Phillips Lovecraft

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?

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“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

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

Excerpt