WEST WING / Ondřej Lipovský

no language barrier
performance length: 70 min
Powerless in Dreams
no language barrier

West Wing is an imaginative visual performance, a deconstructed illustrated book, a hallucination, a collage of living images, visions, associations and references. It is an explorers' journey to unknown lands, like opening the archive of an etymologist who passed away before he could explain it all to us.

Inspired in part by the illustrations of Edward Gorey

The performances is like an absurd art nouveau gallery – characters' costumes evoke past times with a stage dominated by flowered wallpaper, light and darkness. In spite of the extremely slow tempo with which each image appears, the performance holds much more dramatic potential than a one-dimensional story. We see images which are sometimes everyday, sometimes of ritual, sometimes celebratory – at first they don't make any sense, but soon, after a deeper examination they convince us to think about them, intensely.
The West Wing allows audience members to look into their own internal gallery of images and experiences.

The performance is inspired above all by The West Wing, an Victorian-style comic book by Edward Gorey, which tells the story of abandoned rooms, all frozen in a brooding sort of suspended animation. The physical procession of former residents pulse constantly on the rooms' flowered wallpaper patterns... Great yellowed windows overlook the pimply skin of majestic, pale white light... Looking through an empty box allows for a being of flesh and blood to be seen in a new way, though not all of us will find it pleasant to admire a decorated animal in the map of our empty derangements...

A second impulse for the performance is artistry of the mentally ill, as described and documented by the psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn in his book of the same name, published in 1922 in Heidelberg.

This performance is part of the New Web project 2012.

www.novasit.cz