materiali Bad Bugs Bite

Review by Ben Spatz

Tue, 25 Feb 2003 10:34:56 +0100

"Bad Bugs Bite"
by Ben Spatz

A woman is dancing another woman. It is some kind of interrogation. The woman being danced is naked, she is moving reluctantly, her energy spent, following the other's lead like the victim of an interrogation. She is positioned and repositioned until she ends, standing, at the center of the darkness. Then she is scanned. A thin green line, vertical, slides across her naked body. She is read like a barcode, her body undressed by the light, her humanity pulled apart by the inhuman dance.

At its most disturbing moments, "Bad Bugs Bite" by Andrea Paciotto undresses and dehumanizes the human body using the power of theatrical technology at its most invasive. This is at times particularly difficult to watch in light of the fact that the bodies onstage being undressesed are all female, while the bodies offstage that run the undressing and dehumanizing technology are all male. In any case, the design and deployment of technology in this piece is incredible, overwhelming, and immersive. The audience sits in two partitions, watching the performers through screens, between screens, and onscreen. Live interactive audio and video feedback completes the totality of the environment, and in these many layers of image and re-image it is genuinely possible to become lost, as in a dream.

Paciotto seems to be purposefully uninterested in sympathetic characters or meaningful storylines. He is going somewhere else, away from person and plot and into nightmarish abstraction. "Bad Bugs Bite" is a deeply haunting modern-surrealist montage.

In such a montage, the hallucinatory and visceral power of the component images are of central importance. A nightmare is a nightmare because of the intensity of its visions, not because of the events (if there are any) that take place within it. In this regard, "Bad Bugs Bite" seems like the first step on a journey that can go much further. In his exploration of this innovative theatrical technology, Paciotto is embarking on a very interesting journey. He uses his new media in new ways, and this by itself is a radical proposition. We watch a woman play out a live-action video game, scrambling around herself and falling down as she is killed over and over again by computer-generated assassins. We watch a woman cut another woman out of a skin-tight latex shell, and the cutting is intense, and the revelation of her nakedness underneath is quite disturbing. This involves a level of virtual reality integration that I have never seen onstage. [Spatz]

Review by Brook Stowe

Mon, 24 Feb 2003 10:44:06 +0100

reviewed by brook stowe

It may be just my present place in this thing called life, but one passage from the program notes of The INdifference Project's "Bad Bugs Bite" jumped out and nipped me as I staked out my space on the unforgiving bleachers at La MaMa's Annex Theater in the East Village: "We do not suspect all we are capable of; we come into being and pass away without ever recognizing all we could have been and done."

Hear, hear. The passage, from Serbian Nobel Prize winning author Ivo Andric's fable, "Aska and the Wolf", is one of three sources fueling INdifference's hypnotic new performance piece. The others are the "viscerally disruptive" sculptures of American artist Kiki Smith, and three short stories by "Bugs" director Andrea Paciotto.

Utilizing a dazzling array of mobile and stationary video cameras, video projectors, motion tracking devices affixed to the performers, and a phalanx of interactive computer tools fused to the driving pulse of composer Jan H. Klug's musical soundscape, "Bugs" seeks to explore the impulses of violence and aggression the human body is capable of.

Yet, though spawned by the Balkan conflict, it is the exploration of the essence and purpose of human memory that forms "Bugs'" compelling core, at least at this point in its evolution. Recalling a dreamlike pursuit (projected upon large, opposing scrims) of an elusive figure fleeing through dark tunnels towards beckoning expanses of light both inviting and sinister, a character wonders, "do these memories belong to me? Or am I the memory of someone else?"

Later, another character is gunned down before a cold backdrop of anonymous, pounding industrialization. As she lays dying, she recalls the memory of seeing herself standing in the crowd she was shot in, watching. Then, in an extraordinary melding of live performance and video/computer technology, the woman's spirit rises up from her fallen body and sprints towards the heavens across a dazzling urban dreamscape.

Director's Paciotto's greatest achievement here is his smoothly masterful integration of the sophisticated technology -- led by filmmaker Zlatko Stojilovic and media programmer Sander Trispel -- with the explosive improvisation of his athletic and tightly disciplined performers, Charlotte Brathwaite, Jelena Jovanovic, and Monika Haasova.

The result is a swiftly powerful 50 minutes of exciting, mesmerizing theater. Fresh from its premiere at the Grand Theatre in Groningen, Holland, "Bugs'" American engagement is brief: it plays at La MaMa only through February 9 before returning to Holland for a run in Amsterdam.

If you're in the NYC area and looking for something different, intelligent and intriguing, by all means let these "Bad Bugs" bite you all over your five senses. It's the stuff memories are made of.

"Bad Bugs Bite",
presented by the INdifference Project at La MaMa E.T.C. Annex, 66 E. 4th St., NYC. 7:30pm Thu.-Sun., thru Feb. 9. $20. 212.475.7710.

Copyright © 2003 The Write Word, Inc. All rights reserved.

About the INdifference Project

Mon, 20 Jan 2003 18:44:51 +0100

The INdifference Project was initiated in 2000 out of an urge to react, within the frame of a creative process, to the complex international political events surrounding the conflict in the Balkans. Given the increasingly rapid transformations our world is experiencing, we thought it particularly relevant to explore the ways in which an artist today can contribute his/her particular point of view to deepen awareness and understanding on social fundamental issues. The project whished to rise questions about man’s destructive and violent actions and behaviors and the occurrence of indifference towards such behaviors. The INdifference Project wants to provoke the participating artists, as well as the audiences, to not remain indifferent. And through the physical experience of the performance, it whishes to seduce them into an intimate confrontation with their own individual attitudes.
The project was developed under the auspices of DasArts Center for Advance Research in Theatre and Dance, the Grand Theatre Groningen, New York’s La MaMa E.T.C., Amsterdam’s Gasthuis Theatre and the Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen. Additional support was granted from Trust for Mutual Understanding, among others. Since its inception, The INdifference Project has presented various events in collaboration of artists and organizations in Europe, the Balkans and the United States:

Greetings from Serbia
Video documentary – Belgrade (YU) Dec 2000

The Identity Crises of Emir Kusturica
Installation performance
La MaMa Umbria International, Spoleto (ITA) Aug 2001
with the collaboration of Belgrade’s Center for Cultural Decontamination and Radio B92

IN EMBRYO
Experiment with interactive web-script
DasArts, Amsterdam (NL) Jan 2002

Aska and the WolfPATCH
Installation performance
Grand Theatre, Groningen (NL) Apr 2002
The piece was the result of a research period on the application of interactive computer programs in live performances carried out in The Netherlands through residencies at De Waag, Stichting Steim and the Grand Theatre.

3 Patches (A Work Demonstration) & Prototypes
Workshop performance
Belgrade National Theatre - Beton Hala, Belgrade (YU) May-Jun 2002
With actors of the National Theatre and students from the Film Academy

Bad Bugs Bite
Audio visual performance
Grand Theatre Groningen (NL), La MaMa E.T.C. New York (USA), Gasthuis Theatre Amsterdam (NL), Nederland Dancedagen Maastricht (NL), Pumpenhaus Munster (D) Jan 2003-Nov 2003

Did anyone see you Arrive?
Film-documentary  By Zlatko Stojilovic and Andrea Paciotto
Belgrade (YU), Amsterdam (NL) September 2003

Il regista dei due mondi di Francesca Sancin

Sat, 4 Jan 2003 11:41:24 +0100