THE EYE

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?

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