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CHORUS, A fragment after the first week’s process

22. 08. 2017, Jan Krmelj

The text offers a glimpse into the creative process behind the Chorus performance/project, which was selected in 2016 to receive the Kulturni evro funding for that year. Kulturni evro is an obligatory contribution in the amount of two (2) Euro, paid by every accreditation recipient (guest list, press member, yearly pass holder or prize winner). The contributions are collected in a special account, with the entire amount each year going to the selected author.

We are still time machines. And desiring ones as well.
It all started as micro-politics: that is, with the full presence of desire.

It is all about balancing energies, about balancing the personal and impersonal moments, about balancing the anonimity and the characters of the performers.

It is also about insecurities, misunderstandings: it is where everything emerges.

This process is fundamentally a task of carving out the essences: a specific kind of minimalism, not the aesthetic kind, but the one beyond image and the visual, even beyond representability. It is about the corporealities and the Absent space they fill up with the dynamics of their will. Even if they are not aware of it. This will is the very minimality of existence, of willing to move, of willing to connect

There are two basic principles in structuring the performative space: the horizontal and the vertical. The horizontal communicates, it is always in between people, it is a dicrourse. On the other side, the vertical opens a revelation. There is no communication, only a vertical excess, an exception, a differance.

The structure is specific too, this time. As a director, I have always focused on the spatial narrative, where the bodies and objects are equal means of constructing an inexistent reality. It profoundly moves me, each time, this most fundamental performative situation: witnessing the void – the absences, emerging out of the open mouth of a theatre stage. There was always something about the image: about inventing impossible entities, about transposing ideas and corporealities, about building an autonomous Reality, separated in its specificy – for the Reality has always yet to be built. For me, it was primarily about the form.

This time we are embarking on a specific journy, a risky one, since it is dealing with the absence itself. It is about the process of technical solutions which manifest as aesthetic consequences. As if the form and the content were internaly linked, still one, separated by no means. As if the autonomy that this group of bodies will gain will not be the one of this world. It goes way beyond, or perhaps into the very core: perhaps it is a new community, formed in our confused bones, our ever-changing DNK. We see the bodies, but we percieve something completely else. It cannot be spoken. It cannot be seen.

It is a meditation. It may sound naive, but it is free of any informational garbage.

There is no source: the source is the Chorus itself.

We are entering an organism, as if pre-tragic, where the form has not yet been separated from the content.

The time is before the Differance. Before Tragedy. Before disfunctionality.

With traces of it, to be sure.

We are witnessing the traces of a future.

8. 8. 2017, Ljubljana

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