Archived: Staging a Play: Truffles

Zagreb Youth Theater and Zagreb Dance Ensemble – Staging a Play: Tartuffe Directed and choreographed by: Matija Ferlin

After staging the play Tennessee Williams' Glass Menagerie, which functioned as the basis for creating the first work in the Staging a Play cycle, in the second work in that cycle, choreographer and director Matthias Ferlin devoted himself to one of Molière's "classic" comedies. Although Ferlin is already signing several works that include some form of performance text (Singles, At the Same Time Others, We Are Kings and Not Humans, Now Sam Lucky), in this cycle the author is confronted for the first time with canonical works of dramatic art.

Of course, in line with the specific poetics that Ferlin has so far developed in his work on other projects, the mode of their staging within the Staging a Play series calls into question the very foundations on which the concept of staging is interpreted in dramatic discourse. More specifically, in this case, it implies the transfer of the dramatic template from the textual to the choreographic domain. More specifically, verbal replicas have been replaced here by physical vocabulary, and the dramatic text, instead of as a textual template, is used as a layered choreographic score.

Ferlin thus creates a space on the stage in which the traditional modality of interpreting Molière's play based on what is said is suspended, in which the narrative is deprived of "ownership" of the performance. Instead, the body takes over the means of manifestation of concrete meaning that is inscribed in a particular replica, but does not try to reach either the same level or the same type of transmission of the content of communication.

As stated in the explication of Staging a Play: The Glass Menagerie, this means that: “a dramatic action inscribed in the situations, statements and relationships of dramatic characters, here goes beyond its synopsis as a carrier of dramatic dynamics and takes place in an unmarked and abstract transposition space. speech code in choreographic.

The conflict has been moved from the dramatic space to the stage space, to a wide field of negotiations between speech and movement ”. In other words, bodily movement becomes here not only the dominant but also the exclusive mode of communication. Of course, by moving the performance material from the dramatic to the choreographic field, the potential for exploitation of a specific interpretive layer that verbal communication, and with it dramatic theater, includes is annulled, thus changing the very nature of the whole interpretive apparatus in which the dominance of auditory perception decreases. visible.

The characters thus become their own bodies and movements instead of their own language and words, and the relations between them cease to be primarily mediated by speech and begin to unfold in the domain of the performer, while the persistence of their views seems to insist on establishing this new mode of view.

Although this inversion is inevitably valid in a large number of works, in this project the perspective of the original dramatic text gives its interpretation a new, interesting connotation. For here at first it was still a word, but it was then transformed into a movement, and the sentence had already become a dance.

Retaining the entire performance of all nine characters, all nine performers, dancing during all five acts, or thirty-seven scenes, Ferlin created a complex performance apparatus in which bodies in space are the only bearers of narrative, which constantly moves between attempts at deconstruction. and attempts at reconstruction.

Body expressiveness does not follow dramatic conventions, but arises from the conceptual treatment of a movement that vibrates on the border of the illustrative and the abstract, repeatedly demonstrating the possibilities of its expansion. Avoiding the literalness of gesticulation, with constant allusion to it, allows the creation of a subtle choreography of meaning whose registers are never strictly fixed, and which is joined by the parallel orchestration of the presence of an entire dance ensemble that never leaves the stage.

Engaging a sophisticated choreographic mechanism that he developed in previous dance projects, Ferlin collides with concisely elaborated choreographies, which, together with almost constructivist costumes, add a new layer of wonder to the dramatic template and thus open additional possibilities for its staging and interpretation.