press
Time folding
Exhibition - theatre Muzeum - 20 years, 2014-2015
A review: Time Folding: Theatre Muzeum - 20 years
The visitor is led through a long and dark exhibition space by the "sand path", a wide strip of unrolled paper, which folds along the walls into a drapery, paper rocks, into symbolic wrinkled temporal loops.
A discrete display cases with documents are set as intermediate stops along the "sand path", with a few stage props among them, while the black walls with photos of the performances and some small monitors with recordings address the beholder.
An emphasis in the space is generated by the half unfolded paper roll, pointing out at the very first performance, at the same time intorducing the visitor to the world of the Muzeum Theatre conceived in April 1994 by a director and actress Barbara Novakovic Kolenc.
With colleagues she was devoted to the study of five forms of art and the relationships between them: art, architecture, drama, music and movement. In the first performance, Cricket in the Fist, a female figure unrolled a large manuscript roll of paper and created an atmosphere of the time passing bz, oozing into infinity. The Cricket figured as the first theater miniature of the authorial theater earned a kind of nickname: the conceptual, the non-verbal, the physical, the atmospheric, the abstract, the physical and dance, the theatre of post-dramatic projects with highly personal poetics of theatrical images with fragments of verbal structures, strongly supported by theory of theater.
It is difficult for the exhibiton to encapsulate twenty years of activities of such a unique and peculiar theater. Despite extensive archive of documents and references of the Muzeum Theatre, the exhibition invariably remains fragmentary. It is still only a document of a past event, even though the event was remarkably impressive, suggestive, excellent or historic.
At the exhibition a visitor is confronted with the ephemerity of theatrical art. The performance is living as long as it is on the repertoire, while being alive. When its time has passed, it lives in memory treasured by performance leaflets, photographs, dusty costumes, damaged stage props and the director s notes.
These dokuments and artifacts, if they are fortunate, find their place in archives and await their contextualisation on a retrospective exhibition. Unfortunately such overviews are quite rare. The exhibition Folding time was prepared by theater creators themselves.
During the last two decades the performances have been recorded, credits for moving image documentation goes to Tone Stojko. Hence the exhibition features also excerpts of video recordings of the Theater Muzeum performances. Exactly these records incite desire and a sense of regret for not seeing the performances we had missed. For others the exhibition presents a recollection of what they saw, how they perceived or how they felt it, and what actually lingers in memory.
