Wojtek Ziemilski: Sex

Offline premiere of the Polish director Wojtek Ziemilski and six performers who weave a branched literary landscape together. Performers: Bernardeta Babáková, Markéta Lisá, Zuzana Fuksová, S.d.Ch., Ivan Palacký & Vojtěch Staňek.

The staging project of the Polish director Wojtek Ziemilski with the provocative but also mundane title Sex represents a unique space built by six performers who weave a branched literary landscape together. Internationally acclaimed director, choreographer, and pedagogue Ziemilski likes to test the boundaries of theatrical language and its interfaces, intersections, or friction with other artistic disciplines. In the latest project Sex, in which the actors build a two-dimensional textual space in a shared document, he decided to work significantly with a live event and the way of its problematization through new and currently dominant forms of online communication. It fulfills its process of creation, discussion, and the act of writing in the digital environment of a spreadsheet, but also through a strong scenic form with the obvious presence of performers, artistic gesture, time frame. Even writing proves to be exciting, sensual, shy or defensive, and full of masks, especially when it can be observed as a process, dialogue, an attempt to communicate or share loneliness, fragility, and intimacy. However, writing about corporeality, love, sensuality in the inert environment of a computer spreadsheet is never neutral - it can excite, offend, disrupt expectations, downplay things, but mainly spread and grow in many directions, arise in blocks, but also isolated islands. It is a collective act, but also an author's interplay of six significant individuals.

Sex is not only a theme but also a form of communication. Sex is a springboard for a textual performance, which, however, also touches on the format of the gallery installation, as the six actors actually physically meet and create in the gallery space of the Brno House of Arts. The production, in its scenographic gesture, flirts with the events of live meetings of computer game players, in which the audience is shown their game operations. Ziemilski with writers, musicians, artists and editors Bernardeta Babáková, Markéta Lisá, Zuzana Fuksová, S.d.Ch., Ivan Palacký and Vojtěch Staněk open the possibility to perceive the work Sex only as a literary act, as the work also has its online form, where the emphasis is put on the text itself and the process of its creation. In theatrical form, the project touches on the border between gallery installation and performance with an important dimension of its now and here, but with the knowledge that communication itself takes place in a virtual environment. The scenography of this lush event works with several forms and degrees of representation of the written.