Project Spinoza / Goce Smilevski: Spinoza

The dance-theatre performance Spinoza is based on the play written by Macedonian author Goce Smilevski. Through the entire novel with multiple layers of narration, visually powerful descriptions, interweaving biographic facts and fictitious situations, the author highlights and implements Spinoza's philosophy, from the substance of the rejection of affection to virtue itself.

The dramatic structure is built around five acrobatic acts, which are offered to Spinoza as an opportunity to play his life anew; the philosopher is compared to the acrobat, who walks a tightrope, brandishes on the trapeze and disappears in one of his favourite act. Spinoza is able to choose from five key situations that could change the course of his life.

The text brings into Slovenian space topical themes, which a philosopher Spinoza addressed in the 17th century already: freedom, affection, nature, God and the essence of man. The words represent here the musical score that exchanges direct speech with an external environment. These procedures also address the question of the appearance or absence of theatrical speech and the relationship between the visible and the invisible on the stage. In the period when Spinoza lived, it was characteristic to connect artistic genres and to integrate them into complex Baroque artworks. The mastery of painting light and the spatial compositions of Rembrandt and Vermeer are the starting point of a stage study in which visual and lighting elements will be the basis for the performance, as the geometric method traverses the Ethics as a whole.

The play consists of ten sequences that are strung around the centre like pearls on a necklace. The sequence of articulations or peripheral and unpredictable scenes that act as an "environment", is the unbearable of the Real. The central scenes determine the story, but the environment undermines them continuously, as if the beads strung on a string were flunked round the room, thus disturbed the reliability of the centre. Sound (speech, etc.) is shifted from the off-field to the centre or invades the periphery - it is a symptom of space relativity. Between the stage realism and the mechanisms of the unconscious is the gap bridged by the body on the trapeze swinging between the two points of perspective: the point of the actor and the point of the viewer. (Huygens invented a pendulum clock in the 17th century.)

The fragments that composed the gallery performance "Spinoza's lens" (2016) expanding into narration/the play (drama), in the play Spinoza are transferred to another medium (dance) in the theatre space.

The basis of theatrical processes will be mathematics as a language of nature and more specific geometry and optics with emphasis on mirroring, the convex and the concave, oscillation/swinging/pendulum.

Goce Smilevski (born 1975) was born in Skopje, Macedonia. He studied at the Ss Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, at the Charles University in Prague and at the Central European University in Budapest. Two of his novels have been translated into English: Conversation with Spinoza, which won the Macedonian Novel of the Year Award in 2003, and Freud's Sister, which won the EU Prize for Literature in 2010. In the year 2015 he wrote the novel Heloisa: The Return of the Words. All three novels have been translated into Slovenian language.