crowds and power / lecture
(in collaboration with Christian Weiss)
Formation: 1 actor/performer and live electronic (4 channel)
Creation: june 2010
Premiere: 26th june 2010. Bitef Teatar, Belgrad
Duration: 12 min.
The crowd, suddenly there where there was nothing before, is a mysterious and universal phenomenon. A few people may have been standing together – five, ten or twelve, not more; nothing has been announced, nothing is expected. Suddenly everywhere is black with people. (Elias Canetti: “Crowds and Power”)
One of the most interesting issues of Canetti’s text is the attempt to illustrate the irrational and quasi aesthetic nature of crowd movements. This overflowing of the logos, of the rationality, constitutes the main element of the present piece. It shows a materialization of crowds into a discourse that goes from the pure text towards the immediacy of sound and movement, coming back again to text and overflowing again and again into the soundness of demonstrations and recordings of other crowds phenomena… The discourse in itself is conceived as a surface from which the phenomenon of crowds floods other perceptive realms: words, rhythm, movement, emotion, sounds and images of reality, anger…