NOT AT ALL

Performance by Elias Franz Benischauer

Time isn’t really a matter of reality.

What we believe in, feels real as well.

This way we always create our own truth.

If we are not quite sure, what to believe in,

then we cannot connect with a higher deity.

It wasn’t me, it wasn’t my fault, not at all.

I remember how the pie in the sky

could never be reached in my childhood.

For the active child there are still lots of possibilities.

We often lack the ability to seize the natural principals.

 

A child watches a huge serve of ice cream that slowly melts away.

While not allowed to eat or even touch it, the child gets confronted with something unreachable that creates frustration, which it starts to turn into anger towards the viewer.

This analytic video performance addresses again our thoughtless consumption habits and our permanent feeling that things never seem quite enough. We tend to lecture our children about how to share and urge them to give away their most precious toys, which they just started to explore, while setting not in the slightest an example to share or give something away ourselves. Instead, we bargain for the cheapest possible ways (by a long chain of exploitation methods, which we wittingly brush aside) to maintain an economic prosperity.

Children do not have a carefree childhood. They are very much alert about what surrounds them. They tend to absorb everything that comes their way and because of their pureness are hit by emotional up and downs in a much stronger way.

In all our busyness we must not forget the sensitive and innocent behaviour of a child and how it tends to paint its own world, how it tries to make sense of life itself, overwhelmed by all these impressions it gets exposed to. It is hard, maybe nonsensical, even impossible at all to try to keep a child untouched from its environment.

In our experimentally driven work, we want to make sense of the qualities of improvisation. This urges us to go back and listen again to our original powers that we are indeed capable to resuscitate.

We have to get rid of learned and accumulated techniques to be able to act and think like a child again, or even have to go further back than that: unburdened but very expressive, emotional but free from social restraints.

In freeing ourselves from conceptual thinking, we can allow ourselves to let something flow, and reach a state – in the process of developing the video performance – to find a direct line to the viewer, like the child in Not At All.

• Display of the Video/sound installation: HD-video on big screen – black room with Sound System over Blu-ray, room dimensions variable

EXISTENCE THEATRE Production Ⓒ ART IN PROCESS 2013

Tags: studio acts