News

PRESS RELEASE / ELEUSIS

04.04. 2016

Post-Internet Myth, Mystery and Opera in Handa Gote’s New Performance.


On Friday 15.4 at 20:00 the Alfred ve dvoře theatre will present the premiere of the Handa Gote Research & Development group’s new performance Eleusis.

As its subtitle "a post-internet opera" suggests, the Handa Gote group set out in this work to explore the depths of the internet interface, and work out how much today’s virtual chaos and the society of speed's instant time has invaded our daily lives, both forming and deforming it. In a world where reality is organically intertwined with visual representation, it asks if we are still even able to experience a great narrativeand whether we even still function according to the rhythm of night and day, or whether we have been swallowed up in internet timelessness and multisensory delirium. Here, the “blue screen of death” is perhaps a harbinger of the new ice age. And cute cat images on social media timelines may be prophecies, which we are not yet equipped to understand.

"Today the walls of Plato's cave are full of projectors, mirror balls, plasma screens and halogen spotlights that you can't even see the shadows on the wall," says Dutch philosopher Koert Van Mensvoort in his essay "Society of Simulations." In this impro-opera (sung in Italian and translated by Google Translate into English and Czech), Handa Gote sets out on an ambitious journey through both ancient myths and the techno-cognitive conditions of the present day, perhaps even allowing us to witness Orpheus or the goddess Demeter navigating through Hades with their Google Earth app enabled.

In Handa Gote’s Eleusis, the Underworld is a sort of strange lounge ideal for wallowing around in virtual flotsam and jetsam, a place where just about anyone can enjoy themselves to death, unless of course they are already dead. Music here has mutated into fragments of musical data, complete with singers connected singers directly into the computer through the monitoring of their brainwaves. What’s most important, however, is that that data stream keeps flowing, like the waters of the river Lethe.

The Handa Gote Research & Development group is devoted to experiment with dramaturgy, the inclusion of non-theatre elements in its work and the development of its own concept of post-dramatic and post-spectacular theatre. For many years the group has taken inspiration from science and technology. The group conducts continuous research of theatrical language, laboratory work in the fields of sound and light design, all the while questioning these disciplines. Eleusis, a post-Internet opera was created as part of the Alfred ve dvoře theatre’s open call for 2016, the theme of which is: "Play With Possible Worlds / Multiple Horizon Vertigo".


Premiere: 15. 4. / 20.00, Alfred ve dvoře
Repeat performances: 16. 4., 17. 4. / 20.00, Alfred ve dvoře