War, game and a scar morphing boundary
There is a game that involves 2 identical characters.¹ There is a war that involves 2 different categories of human beings.² Troops of soldier are in good order with houses, Santa Claus, small birds, citizens, vehicles, jewels, flowers and yet heavy, long and really sharp nails stick out from the floor, infiltrating the playground uneasily but in an orderly fashion. The installation is a war on red carpet. All strips in the room link to a blue cocoon in the central territory.
The conflict starts and nobody knows why.
The room is pitch dark. The only openings in the space are a small window at the back and a door. An audience of 120 people has been invited but shut out. Some struggle to get close to the door in order to peep into the room, others see the performance through a TV broadcast. The sovereignty of the staged situation belongs to the performers. 3 musicians are playing funeral music … … so sentimentally beautiful as to raise the dead. Suddenly, a light source appears at the back window, a face-less black hair human being jumps into the space holding an oil lamp and a knife. |
 | Wearing a yellow raincoat, this human being starts to cut the strips and unwrap the blue cocoon. Sounds of dramatic, confused, scary, heroic, tragic, epic emotions ring through out … Not long, another human being with the same face and hair is disclosed under the cocoon. This human being’s whole body is covered with black balloons. Their explosions are echoed by the symphony. When nearly all the strips are cut and the balloons are either exploded or drifted away, the human being on the ground, with little explosives left, suddenly bounces back up like a springboard, and walks ever so slowly away, jumping finally, out the back window.
The raincoated human being walks ever so slowly towards the door, only to slam it so hard it stays open.
The confrontation between the performers and the viewer, the live action and the broadcast, the staged and the reality starts at this point. The physical boundary of the opposite territorial condition cease to exist. The human being still holding the oil lamp and knife walks slowly home.
The end. |
Remarking the Character, the Game and the Horror Elements
Site specific installation and performance with 2 violinists and 1 celloist A.K.T.III . Between fiction and reality, International Festival of Performance Art, Gallery Eskort, Brno, Czech, 2002 All
Content © 2007 Amy Cheung |
