Bitef

by a circling man from a ballet box in the game of seduction. The chest conceals hope at its bottom, but it closes up before hope has the chance to escape to where people exist, and where all the troubles, ailments and pains have already fled. Hades and Zeus are born from the two opposing, mutually completing yet never really united principles. Chronos has castrated his father Uranus with a sickle, saved his brothers and seized power. Since he fears the same fate, he devours all of his children, but Rea substitues Zeus with a pebble. Zeus overcomes Chronos and saves his brothers. He keeps the Sky for himself, and gives Hades the underground. Uroš Maček wears his own death-mask. With unfailing calmness he builds the wall of time separating eternity from events. The underground world is the time of silence, the time of humans turned to stone by Gorgone’ look, the time of tombstones. Naked, covered only with his mask, he moves as if drifting on the air in the rhythm of reconciliation. Hades, measuring time. Robert Prebil’s mask is the letter A, drawn onto his face. He strives towards articulating the phoneme through physical force of his body, and make the word flesh, engendering screaming, thunder and lightning that crush the stone and the world. The cycle is in motion, creation of the new world destroys the former, the cyclical current spirals to constellations where we remember the past worlds. Zeus is the father of the new generation of gods, ruler of the sky, the creator, avenger to his father. (One of the Slovene expresions for futher reads »ata« [pronounced with a:].) Segments are linked together by stenography, costumes, music, sound and lighting effects. Sparse scenic installation makes use of paper, stones, bricks, and of the spiderwed as the building blocks of the world: fire, earth, water, and air. Costumes are limited to the most fundamental signifiers; modern materials are transformed by improvised, hand-made creations into elementary covers of nudity. Mozart’s musical backround is complemented by voices, breathing, noises made by the actors, and by echoes. As if in opposition to his former performances Taufer now speaks about silence, about the actor’s subconscious - the subject of the performance, about the origns of the theatre and the world itself through highly reduced means. The continuity is seen in his work with the performers whose unpretentious exploratory efforts in Silence Silence Silence reveal dimensions that were covered by palimpsest-like etudes in Taufer’s previous works. Silence Silence Silence descends from Shakespeare’s verse to elementary signs. Silence is not a denial of the word, language, nor theatre, it is theatrical representation of the word. ■ Boris Pintar

THE SILENCE proclaimed in Silence Silence Silence, directed by Vito Taufer, is a reaction to the »crisis of language«, which Beckett and lonesco tried to put into words (how paradoxical) in their texts. Antonin Artaud had already talked ecstatically about it; Octavio Paz expressed it within his poetry of silence; John Cage brought the crisis of music into the sphere of a silence sowed with sounds. From being horrified by the poverty of the word, Silence Silence Silence tries to restore, at least for the moment, the regime of silence in the theatre and in its own way answers the question of how to perform silence as the form or way of communicatin after words have lost all their power to conjure; how to perform silence as a form of dialogue with itself, with Oneself or with eternity? On the horizon of absolute silence, from which we painfully emerge and into which we return, intimidated, netween sigh and cry, woman and man, the transitory and the eternal world of images, the endless sound of silence is uncovered. In the silence of the labyrinth of the unconsciousness ghosts of our personal and universal mythologies, they are shockingly recognised and are woken up with a cry, out of one dream into the other. For there, where »silence and the solitude expand their plains« (Octavio Paz), the archetypes radiate, archetypes in which we are reflected and which we peel, layer after layer, out of our subconscious. The sound of silence takes us back into the sphere of stage poetics, which is the only one able to express the inexpressible. The sound of silence has recourse to elemental body language, so it could lead us to the sphere of primal states, emotions, passions and instincts. The sound of silence is the language of the transitory, but its images, circling through time, are always, as soon as they recognise themselves, inspired by eternity. And only in the encounter between the sound of silence on stage and the silence of the spectator, will the images, which the Silence Silence Silence project reaches for, be revealed. ■ Marinira Poštrak