Authors: Siniša Ilić (visual artist) and Bojan Đorđev (theatre maker)
Text: Goran Ferčec (writer)
Voice: Paul Leonard Murray (actor)
Sound: Nina Levkov
Extras: Čarni Đerić, Ivan Acović, Bojan Đorđev, Dorijan Kolundžija, Iva Milikić, Vladimir Popović, Nebojša Vukelić, Miloš Ranković, Aca Ilić, Ivan Jovanović, Bojan Klaparević, Dragan Milić, Žaklina Antić, Darko Nerandžić, Zorica Jovanović, Boris Pavlov, Miodrag Nerandžić, Jelica Nerandžić, Dejan Vilić, Ana Sević, Boban Bojković
Live video editing: Filip Mikić
Live audio mix: Ivan Acović
DP: Milan Tvrdišić
Live performance supervisor: Dorijan Kolundžija
The piece was performed in March 2011 from three locations in Belgrade (Serbia)
Duration of the performance: 20′
The black box is the zero degree of staging—tréteau nu—an empty space that craves performance—the meeting of various kinds of stage texts: images, sounds, performances, narratives. According to the concept of Displacement, it becomes an ideal physical site of cooperation, a medium whereby geographically remote materials and artists may meet by way of Internet streaming, a place to study the formal relations between stage texts that define, rearticulate, and confront each other.
The black box of theatre also represents traditional theatre as that safe place where one may observe the unfolding of other people’s destinies as if through a keyhole—without interaction. The place where ignorant people are invited to see suffering people (Plato). But what happens when one disturbs that safe place? What happens when that place is staged, bugged, performed? What happens if the gaze is offered panic and paranoia, instead of the safe excitement of voyeurism? If the spectator’s ear is served wired thoughts that cause fear? The boxed figure elopes and evades our gaze, hides in the multitude, in the public, collective, and anonymous body. The everyday street social choreography—of walking, waiting, sitting, protesting—morphs into drama, hides an intruder, stranger, terrorist, danger.
To pinpoint the intruder in the image. In the image of the public or in the public as an image.
In this case, the black stage box is also a form of public space that stages public space. Using the pedestrian, untrained bodies of actors to perform everyday social choreography in unspectacular situations becomes an object of fear when it is re-signified with a series of five short monologues—typical products of the early-twenty-first-century society of fear and surveillance. What is actually performed is the contingency that every encounter with public space causes fear. The fear of a potential disaster or hardship serves to veil the state of permanent disaster or hardship. An ongoing explosion.
Black box also designates the device used to establish the causes of plane crashes. It contains all that occurred prior to the explosion.
***
This project is part of the outlines, proposals, and other artistic materials produced over the years to deconstruct A Letter to Heiner M, a performance text by Goran Ferčec. The preceding drafts include the theoretical text The Weak History of (the Body of) a Superhero (2008), the storyboard score A Letter to Heiner M. Draft 2 (2009), and the audio guide The Passage (2011). For this draft, Ferčec wrote Additional Scenes to the ‘Train Carriage’ Situation. The following draft is a staging of the text produced at the Zagreb Youth Theatre in October of 2011.
B.Đ. and S. I.
Siniša Ilić
Siniša Ilić works in the fields of visual and performing arts. Through his work he deconstructs social phenomena and mechanisms, such as forms of labor and violence in society, concepts of education, etc. His works are often oriented towards collective and collaborative self-organized projects with co-authors from different artistic fields of visual arts, but also theory, theatre and performance. MFA in painting at Faculty of Fine Arts, Belgrade. Artist in residence at Kultur Kontakt, Vienna, ISCP, New York, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart. Born in 1977 in Belgrade.
Bojan Đorđev
Bojan Djordjev is theatre maker active in both institutional and independent theatre. His interests in theatre and performance include collective authorship, working with experimental playwriting and post-drama theatre. MA in Theory of Arts and Media at the University of Arts in Belgrade, BA in Theatre Directing at Faculty of Drama Arts, Belgrade. Artist in Residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Les laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paris as part of TkH project How to do Things by Theory and Artslink. Born in 1977 in Belgrade.