Living Room - a Room that went alive
The furniture inhabiting the room was tired of their roles and tasks. They decided to break free. They are moving jumping transforming, losing their pieces and combining them again.
They exist independent of their context.
They exist on their own, free to become what they want, to leave the place and come back again. Or not to come back.
What we considered 'home' is not that anymore.The only thing we can also do is to finally free ourselves as well and get out into the world.
LIVING ROOM looks at the ways the environment affect us. The title should be understood in a double way. On the one hand, living room is an allegory of the place we live in. On the other hand it can also refer to a living room, an environment that is living and therefore affects us in many ways. This relation will be the subject of the performance. It will follow a dramaturgical principle I often use: the dramaturgy of the performance doesn’t unfold in time but in space. It is the space that change and makes the performance develop, not the story. Space is the main actor, while the performers are rather adapting to the changes.
Archeologist Chris Gosden suggests that in many cases it is not the mind that imposes its forms on material objects, but rather that the latter gives shape to the forms of thought. In a similar fashion Bruno Latour gives an example of a speed-bump on the road, causing the driver to slow down, having an agency that substitute itself for the one of the traffic policeman. In a welcoming environment this is something to rejoice about, as the mind will be elevated by the environment. But, what when the surrounding takes the shape of a nightmare? What are our thoughts going to become when the living room breaks computers and shuts off lights? When walls come together dangerously and when carpet starts to interact aggressively with the sofa… In the piece our living room becomes a terrifying monster. Here the Latourian bump starts to hunt the driver.
The transformation of the living room into a hostile environment can be read as a metaphor for our environment. It depicts the nightmare that are foreseen in regards of the climate change. In this prediction our cars with their production of CO2 and fine particles are attacking back in the form of illness, cataclysm, desertification, rise of see levels, immense migration of species etcetera. In LIVING ROOM we indulge in the worst apocalyptic nightmare, the inhabitant of the room have to deal with quotidian elements which have gone completely mad, without any detour the light bulb gives back it’s effect to environment by crashing into the wall in a distorted manner. While, the performer, like refugees on the “Raft of the medusa” try to avoid and survive the unchained element of our daily life.
