Emily

“I find ecstasy in living”
Emily Dickinson
The state of concentration in which words flow through the head without being aired from the mouth and change into a stream of thoughts which, uninterrupted, travels throughout the body. The speakable becomes unspeakable and remains unsaid. Rationality becomes intuition.

The key means of expression in our project is sound. The composition is made of authentic sounds, fragments of music; noise and bustle is composed directly on stage, making a whole with motion and projection.

We drew great inspiration from the poetry and fate of Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) and other true loners. Another important source of inspiration was the internet as the encyclopaedia of the human loneliness of the new era. We saw the authentic texts in blogs and adverts as serious testimony to the man of today and his existential anxiety. The performance will include, besides texts by Emily Dickinson, a woman who decided to live outside society, also adverts posted by people who are afraid of loneliness and are looking for someone.

“Sound and image have an effect on us, but we feel frustrated from the start. The urge to identify the characters and their story is strong. Apparently, the elements of the performance have been reduced in such a way to create tension in the deprived audience and a feeling of the need to create a whole picture themselves. Handa Gote refuse to use simple, superficial manipulation of feelings. Rather a shattering of expected methods (audio and visual) provokes the spectator to observe his or her own, spontaneous response.”
Magdaléna Platzová, Lonely Play (RESPEKT no. 27/2008)

“Handa Gote do not attempt to create a staged illusion; the group like to let us see into their kitchen during the actual performance. The stage pretty much resembles a laboratory, whose operations we explore from various angles. This does not devalue the project, but rather shows that a multi-layered image is an adequate medium for processing poetry.”
Ondřej David, Fragile Images of Exacerbated Loneliness (A2 no. 38/2008)