Three insignificant persons stand in an insignificant space and do nothing. They do not act. They hesitate. They hesitate in front of a pile of insignificant memories that won’t go away. When words are said, they sound like an insignificant farewell. Despite the world’s utter indifference to them, time takes pity and rests in Pidzamche until they find their perfect goodbye.
PERFORMANCE TAKE NOW WITH YOU
It starts with light. Natural, non-theatrical light. The kind of light that always seems to be coming from somewhere else. From outside of where we are. From a place that promises something different. Not better or worse, but simply different. Different enough to stay with us, to make us
wonder. To make us hope. If you absolutely must use words to describe this performance, you
could call it a study of illumination.
A study of the illumination of time. How do you design illumination of minor time? Time that is seemingly insignificant, unimportant, irrelevant. Time that tries (tries, but does not succeed) to hide from History and Politics? Small. Time that tries to frame millimeters of joy and pain and loss and sadness and laughter? Millimeters of crushing loneliness that you feel in line in a supermarket, millimeters of redemption you feel singing karaoke with your friends, millimeters of tears you shed in a taxi because the world is beautiful but that is insufficient, millimeters of empty space that used to be filled by your favorite body.
Some possible instructions: first, you cover all windows that bring light from somewhere else and make sure you are in that perfect darkness that makes time pretend to stop. Then you take that pile of irrelevant, extremely important minor times and you light it up and magnify it. You
don’t care about order or chronology. Look at them in any order and they will start making sense. You lay down on the carpet like you used to do it when your eyes and your friends’ eyes were red. You leave the big, bright lights for the stories that have heroes. Here, lamp lights are enough. Finally, you begin to feel.
Eyes from the outside could say, if they absolutely have to, that the choices of lightning design, visual composition and mise-en-scene quote from Rembrandt and Caravaggio and the contrast between this method of visual representation, mostly used for scenes of so-called historical greatness and importance, and the scenes of utter banality in the story underline this intention of bringing the little life that happens in the shadow of enormous Life to the forefront in order to compose an intimate, analogue multimedia love-letter to small fragments of Paradise, as Jonas Mekas would say. If you should hear any of these words, ignore them and know any of this was absolutely accidental. All you wanted to do was remember that time you and your best friends were eating corn chips on the carpet.
— director Alin Uberti
Based on the play ‘Three Cripples Came’ by Dmytro Levytskyi
Slide on a poster: Vil` Furgalo // Urban Media Archive // Center for Urban History
TicketsTEAM
Director: Alin Uberti
Actors: Anastasiia Lisovska, Vasyl Vasylyk, Oleh Oneshchak
Set and costumes designer, light designer: Cosmin Stancu
Composer: Alyona KOMA
Production manager: Vlad Bilonenko