MONSTRUM_and here I am blind / DFKH 2020

CONCEPT, DIRECTION, MASKS Sara Bocchini
MUSIC Elia Moretti, Jakub Štourač
ARTISTIC COLLABORATION AND COSTUMES Helena Štouračová
LIGHT DESIGN Jiří Šmirk
PRODUCTION Petr Hromek
CAST Sara Bocchini, Elia Moretti, Jakub Štourač, Koza

Length of the performance: 45 mins
Prague premiere 12 November 2020 Theatre Ponec

To be awake when one is not supposed to. During a sleepless night the perception of the senses is shifted. The pain is more acute. The solitude is absolute. On the threshold between consciousness and falling asleep weird things occur: thoughts are digging into realms they do not dare to dig into under the sunlight; fragments of dreams confuse the contours of objects; the body becomes the terrain on which submerged tensions strive to manifest themselves. Mortality is a matter of fact as real as this very body unable to surrender to sleep.

MONSTRUM_and here I am blind deals with sleep, dream, insomnia, with the confusion of these three states. A level of existence in which it’s no longer possible to say clearly whether you have experienced something for real or you have only dreamed about it. “Only”: does a night dream not have any status of reality? Really?

How does what we are used to consider reality reveal itself in the darkest hour of the night? What does remain beyond the coming and going of fear, hope, disillusion, happiness, sorrow? How long are we able to stand this glimpse into darkness?

MONSTRUM depicts the anatomy of insomnia: a restless flow of under skin pressures, collapses, erosions, shifts. An embodied grammar of wandering, impulses, messed-up perceptions. The exhaustion provoked by the inability to switch off and drift into dreams, or into nothingness. An anxiety of continuity. An epiphany with the snug of a goat which means nothing more than what it is.

MONSTRUM tries out a subconscious approach to dramaturgy, to recreate the uncatchable logic we experience while dreaming. Things seem to pop out of a chaotic magma, juxtaposed side to side and claiming for being looked at. Moving through this magma is a stream of consciousness, a cluster of fragments, a presence that constantly re-shapes its level of existence into time and space.

Theatre Continuo

Theatre Continuo is an international independent theatre group led by Pavel Štourač, its director and artistic coordinator. Since 1995 the company has been settled in a little village in South Bohemia called Malovice in a former farmstead called The Plum Yard. Continuo’s productions cannot be easily categorized into genres. Movement, live music, puppets, physical acting, acrobatics, dance, along with striking visual stylization – all of these create the unique poetics of each individual production.

Members of Continuo research an authentic, personal connection between visual artistic knowledge and physical acting, rhythm, voice, and musicality. Everyday work consists of actors’ training, workshops in which they get familiar with acting, dancing and voice techniques, in both, collective and individual way of learning and researching.