For my director's graduation piece from the Academy of Theatre, I started to make a performance on my own apart from a work placement. Starting from the players in relation to each other and the space, I started working with four men from totally different backgrounds. A dancer, an actor and two players without any experience in the arts, represented the search for contact.
Inspired by a personal urge to make contact negotiable and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman's views on 'liquid contact', the idea for this performance was born.
A performance in which the actors seemed more like creatures than human beings, where the boundary of contact with the audience was explored and where the basic necessity of 'contact' was put to the test.
We are slowly losing real human contact and we don't even seem to stop to think about it. What happens to us humans when we completely lose touch with each other? Will we still be able to function normally? Has the time come to make a choice? Perhaps, that's where we are now.
Perhaps, that's where we are now' is a physical performance in search of contact in today's society. Because maybe contact only exists if we believe in it ourselves.
Because of Covid, this performance was unfortunately not allowed to play. It felt like a totally powerless situation and it gave me a feeling of raw. In order to still be able to graduate, I have, among other things, personalised my performance. For example, together with my actors, I wrote letters to the performance, I made a raw card after the official death of the performance and, just like a funeral, I closed my replacement presentation full of rituals.
FROM PERFORMANCE TO PRESENTATION...
Actors:
Martijn van Lith, Omar Mostafa, Tristen Theunisz & Wannes Wynants
