The staging project of the Polish director Wojtek Ziemilski with the provocative but also mundane title Sex represents a unique space built by six performers who weave a branched literary landscape together. Internationally acclaimed director, choreographer, and pedagogue Ziemilski likes to test the boundaries of theatrical language and its interfaces, intersections, or friction with other artistic disciplines. In the latest project Sex, in which the actors build a two-dimensional textual space in a shared document, he decided to work significantly with a live event and the way of its problematization through new and currently dominant forms of online communication. It fulfills its process of creation, discussion, and the act of writing in the digital environment of a spreadsheet, but also through a strong scenic form with the obvious presence of performers, artistic gesture, time frame. Even writing proves to be exciting, sensual, shy or defensive, and full of masks, especially when it can be observed as a process, dialogue, an attempt to communicate or share loneliness, fragility, and intimacy. However, writing about corporeality, love, sensuality in the inert environment of a computer spreadsheet is never neutral - it can excite, offend, disrupt expectations, downplay things, but mainly spread and grow in many directions, arise in blocks, but also isolated islands. It is a collective act, but also an author's interplay of six significant individuals.
Sex is not only a theme but also a form of communication. Sex is a springboard for a textual performance, which, however, also touches on the format of the gallery installation, as the six actors actually physically meet and create in the gallery space of the Brno House of Arts. The production, in its scenographic gesture, flirts with the events of live meetings of computer game players, in which the audience is shown their game operations. Ziemilski with writers, musicians, artists and editors Bernardeta Babáková, Markéta Lisá, Zuzana Fuksová, S.d.Ch., Ivan Palacký and Vojtěch Staněk open the possibility to perceive the work Sex only as a literary act, as the work also has its online form, where the emphasis is put on the text itself and the process of its creation. In theatrical form, the project touches on the border between gallery installation and performance with an important dimension of its now and here, but with the knowledge that communication itself takes place in a virtual environment. The scenography of this lush event works with several forms and degrees of representation of the written.
BIO:
Wojtek Ziemilski (*1977) is a theater director and visual artist. His performances have been performed in more than twenty countries, for example at festivals such as the Ruhrtriennale, the Prague Quadrennial, and the Boska Komedia Festival. He has won many awards, including the Zürcher Spektakel main prize and the main prize of the Fast Forward festival in Dresden.
Ziemilski expands the idea of documentary performance. His works are often associated with problematizing the role of the spectator and the very possibilities of the event. With the help of the principles of auteur theater, real-time composition, but also references to the world of visual art and other media, he creates forms that combine aesthetic experience with intellectual exploration. He teaches contemporary approaches to performance with a specific focus on the techniques of auteur, i.e. devised theater, the connections between the world of contemporary dance and theater, and the use of media in theater. He lectures at the Theater Academy in Warsaw and the University of Warsaw. Among others, he has also given lectures and led workshops at the Prague DAMU, UNIRIO in Rio de Janeiro, and the State University in Kraków.
