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BEASTS

2015
  • Ann Mirjam Vaikla
  • Lærke Grøntved (DK)
  • Inga Aleknaviçiute (LT)

Performance 2015

By Rosetta Theatre

Duration: 40 minutes

Who is the good one and who is the bad? Who is the living beast? Why is it often misunderstood? If we silence the beast, is it then defeated or will it fight back?
She is not real. Who? Revolution? Last survivor? Or surrender?

Visual performance created in the genre of the “theatre of images” allows a space for a spectator to project his/her own ideas resonating pictures from an imaginary dream worlds and topical society.

Theater critic Dr Philipp Schulte writes after he saw Beasts premiering at Independent Festival at Norwegian Theatre Academy / Østfold University College in May 2015:

Beasts promised some beasts on the stage, but I think what I got was more like ghosts. A ghost, to put it simply, is a disturbance in your perception. Something is rotten in the field of your vision, there’s something you can’t deal with, what is unsettling, uncanny. I think art in its’ best moments can be like this: questioning our perception, what we take for granted, what we consider to be normal.
Beasts is something I’d call a well-made symbolic performance, and I mean well-made not in a pejorative way, but in the best sense of the word. You found a clear symbolic language, clearly recognizable, but highly enigmatic, and you gave me a lot think about, to associate, to play with in my head. I liked the actions on stage, the costumes, the set design, the indirect lighting, the projection – and most of all I liked how all of those elements fitted together; and how you organised the transitions from one sequence to the other. You opened up a space of conundrum and of thinking using a clear theatrical style and design.
I enjoyed a great show, which in its best moment was really uncanny. And I don’t use that very term recklessly, because when I’m saying ‚uncanny‘ I’m thinking of Sigmund Freud, who said that the uncanny always is a mixture between the familiar and the unfamiliar, with the suppressed that enters our daily routines.