Concept: Adriana Gheorghe
Performers: Alexandra Pirici and Adriana Gheorghe
It premiered at MNAC (The National Museum for Contemporary Art) in October 2011 with the support of the Romanian Center of Contemporary Dans (CNDB) and artsf.
Text: Franz Kafka, Ionuţ Chiva, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Mircea Ivănescu, W. H. Auden, Gummo
Music: Mondo Cane – Il Cielo In Una Stanza
The piece dealt with the attempt to represent the concept of glimpses, brief revelations or quick catches of something else (unworldly, unspeakable of) than what was being presented/made visible/insisted upon. We worked with a state of extreme availability, both physical and emotional and with texts as props and music as obstacle. In between the possibility and the impossibility of delivering all the desired data, working with obstacles as tools and with props as obstacles, we aimed at making present bits of something of a different quality. The costumes under the costumes – something in between golden 30’ swimming suits, kitsch stage glamour and alien gold skin – were but one clue.
Introductory text:
Darlingest A.,
You left for Paris without saying a word.
This is how I began my letter to you, a few days ago, just fighting with you. In the meantime you called and we fought live. So, my introduction will sound as deja-vu, but I decided to keep it anyway.
No more phones from now on – we decided to write letters, and that if we don’t manage to actually meet. Let’s say this last call has been one useful exception, and now I know where to post my letter.
About my exploits, in brief: I got myself a white house with a view – if I stand on my toes and look above the fence – towards the lake. It’s just what I always wanted and now I have to get used to living the over-fulfillment of a wish, which is not actually an easy task. I feel guilty if I’m not happy and other such irritations.
I also have a small garden, and almost all of it is cemented, but with a few lost roses and, in fact, perfect. It also has a marble little bench, dirty and chipped, also perfect. I can’t wait for the winter here, or next summer. This autumn is kind of hard to endure.
Last night was the fourth night in the new house and I can almost touch the different way that time feels here. You can’t hear anything, maybe a rooster at times, I don’t know where from, and the wind. I have no close neighbours, just an old wall and the water.
Don’t worry, I’m keeping my word and I exercise your way of speaking every day. Especially a technicality: sometimes, not very often, you twist your upper lip in the right side, something between the promise of a diva smile, a rictus and a simptom of a mouth that learned how to speak first in English, then Romanian. This is something to be kept. I don’t care if you agree with me or not on this, you absolutely have to. There’s also your delightful „fuck shit” in moments of strain and hardship… 🙂
Truth be told, even if I try my best, I know, and you also know, that between the two of us, you’d better outlive me. Otherwise we’re both gonners. What a word. But by doing this, we’ll both be preserved for a while. I’d like to know what you chose to exercise from me, but it’s better that you don’t tell me.
As a matter of fact, I could give up what I just told you and choose other things, I have enough recordings of you, plus you made the promise that we’ll see each other again this year, or we risk spoiling everything. We’ll just end up doubling things for no good reason, or who knows what. And then I’ll have to kill you. (This is just about the level of humour I can reach today, if I manage to unbenumb until I mail this, I promise I’ll astound you with my acid charm).
Sometimes, the exercise takes up my whole day and I forget where I am. Then my eyesight hits the white yard and it’s so beautiful it hurts. I kind of don’t know how to spend my days in places that are pure and simple beautiful. Today I’ll mend the flowers, I hardly restrain myself from cutting them off. It would certainly be easier if this house had an imperfection.
p.u. (post unbenumb) If I tilt my head to the right, very early in the morning, when I go into town to shop, I start seeing RECOGNIZABLE ELEMENTS everywhere. First it’s like I lost the reality codecs, and the world suddenly becomes a pink blur. Then I begin to make out amiable, affective available faces, seductive bodies that try so hard to express themselves that they run off the tracks, they contort like a burning pellicle, beautiful mouths that say delightful phrases on a delightful background that somehow manages to jam any intelligibility and especially, oh Lord, especially those corny suits made of alien skin. Those make everything so certain – when I recognize them under the clothes (metallic, incandescent) it makes me grind my teeth. It’s better I keep the focus on you, on learning someone else by heart. Anyhow, I have to focus on keeping my head straight up.
Yours,
A.
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