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Room with No Echo
DELO, CULTURE, 29 October 2010, Zala DobovšekBetween the unbearableness and exuberance of observation
The theatre performance The Room with No Echo by Miha Erman, a production of Muzeum Ljubljana, premiered within the framework of the project Focus on Art and Science in the Performing Arts that took place as an international platform between 21 and 29 October in Ljubljana. The experimental nature of the project, which is rarely seen in Slovenia, tackles the research of the perception represented by the performance with the processes of radical revaluation of the sensations of movement, time and space. Through the almost painful silence and extremely slow movement by Bor Pungerčič and Primož Bezjak in the first part, a double-edged relationship between them emerges: they see each other, although they never really look at each other; they feel each other, although they deliberately avoid any touching. The basis and meaning of their relationship is precisely the negation of it. Their identities are hollow, similar to some extent, but still nameless, the physical investment veers towards the effect of objectification the body appears as an apparatus that causes time to stretch on painfully and at the same time adds nuances of uneasiness to it due to the distinctive absence of sound and space abstraction. In the solo performance by Bor Pungerčič the previous (conditionally) reciprocal communication shifts to strict individuality, to a dialogue with one's own organic rhythm which the performer regulates with the help of a stethoscope and interprets through the pulse heard through a loudspeaker system. The externally instrumental intertwines with his internal dynamics through the dancer's movements. The heartbeat surpasses the external physical appearance and the deliberate heart arrhythmia outlines this essential organic regenerator as the mysterious, inconsistent and not-easy-to-decipher other side (of existence). The Room with No Echo, which was inspired by an anechoic chamber (which besides the phenomenon of the absence of echo and the sterility of its content eventually also intensifies panic fear), insistently evoked cognate effects of such a chamber by exaggerating what is overlooked in the pace of everyday life and suppressing everything that could appear spontaneous.m The performance with its anatomical unfolding of movement and sounds constantly oscillates between the unbearableness and exuberance of observation. However, it is very hard to determine whether the uneasiness is intentional or whether it is at times nevertheless the result of a not perfected enough concept.
DNEVNIK, Debates/Commentaries, 13 November 2010, Primož Jesenko
Completely different sensory code
(...) The Room With no Echo by Miha Erman translates its allegorical existence to the minimal presence of movements and sounds. This is the staging of a situation in which the subject experiences his social context as a variation of an anechoic chamber. The erasure of identity which remains without a possibility of communication with the environment comes to an end in the dried-up presence of coexistence. Primož Bezjak is quietened into a dosed dynamic by the body which is in his immediate vicinity, and they almost touch, but at the same time do not see and sense each other. Although Bezjak's presence is less used, with a microphone equipped naked torso of Bor Pungerčič evokes, despite his less intensive stage persona, associations to figuration in fine arts (a statue-painting-photograph-video), especially in the sense of Francis Bacon's way of painting, as well as to the broken bodies from Sarah Kane's plays. Accented is the sum of the lines of space and the body that moves under the form of the visible body. The sound of the internal body that is invisible to the naked eye surfaces as though he moves with microphone equipped tube over himself.
