VANISHING ACTS 1 & 2
VRUM and dance_lab collective in cooperation with Teatar &td
VANISHING ACTS 1 & 2
Act I
Choreography: Petra Hrašćanec Herceg (SSP)
Performed by: Sanja Tropp Frühwald
Act II
Choreography: Sanja Tropp Frühwald
Performed by: Petra Hrašćanec Herceg (SSP)
Dramaturgy: Saša Božić
Music: Damir Šimunović
Costumes, scenography: Zdravka Ivandija
Lights: Igor Petrovski
Graphic design: Dinko Uglešić
The play uses chapters from the „Poetics of Adolescence“ by Bodgan Malešević and „Der Struwwelpeter oder lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder“ by Heinrich Hoffmann.
The project was realized in 2009 inside the premises of the Liberdance, Zadar Dance Ensemble and the Teatar &td, as a part of the Choreoroom 2009 Programme and the Eurokaz Pogon.
First Performance: Zagreb, Teatar &td, on 2 October 2009.
Duration: cca 60 min. + break and entrance of the audience after the break
Acknowledgements: Rajko Pavlić, Nataša Rajković, Till Frühwald, Antun Herceg, Nensi Lazić, Juraj Aras, Zadar Puppet Theatre, Oriolik d.d, Modern Dance Studio, Zadar Dance Ensemble, Peggy Olislaegers, Amy Gale, Rosemary Butcher
The Project was supported by the City Office for Culture, Education and Sport of the City of Zagreb
Vanishing acts try to take the act of individual destruction, being the frame of the theatre act, as a starting point for researching the theatre as a medium. Can an act of destruction, of spilling identities, revive potentials to create new identities? Disempowering of the body becomes the source of endless narrations on one hand, while the unveiled body on the other, is shown as a Chymera; we have been invited to listen to its non-human pulse. Formally, this is a case of two solo performances which, through theatre and dance as media, investigate the same topic.
The received findings are surprisingly disparate and face the spectator with a complex association game and mutual connecting of the two works. Sanja Tropp Frühwald approaches the issue of disappearance from upside down; the solo performance deals with the issue of residues, traces warning us about the presence of a person who had disappeared just before the performance started. The work itself seems like a twisted, unconventional, detective fairy tale trying to disclose a crime of childhood.
Choreography has been marked with constant repeating of one and the same scene, reconstruction of an event evasively escaping into different perceptive layers or actions designed by the media: sound, image, sign, abstract dancing. Petra Hrašćanec Herceg deals with the idea of a subject trying to be non-identical (incomparable to the general). The performance subject is located in a type of a Becket, enigmatic landscape, and while it is progressively disappearing in the softness of space, we are witnessing identity shells being discarded, which becomes the theatre construction. And while the performer is continuously fading right before our eyes, we are invited to taste other elements of the event, to watch a subtle change of the scenery, listen to its remote echoes or simply observe changing of time.
From the point of view of every (even theatrical) mediation to common moments, concepts, assumptions and conventions Vanishing Acts seem to be warning us „that each one of us has been „released“- released in a way that might seem hopeless to those who want to shape their life reasonably: finally alone .“ (Peter Strasser)