video stills
INTERHUMAN + INTERFORM
2023
multimedia theatre performance
duration: 45 min
Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York City, USA
Credits:
Zbigniew Bzymek + Kuba Falk
Interhuman + Interform
Text: Witold Gombrowicz
Performed by: Danusia Trevino, Viva Ruiz, Alessandro Magania, and Kuba Falk
Video and directing: Zbigniew Bzymek
Set elements and movement: Kuba Falk
Music: Omar Zubair
Additional Music: Kuba Falk
BAC Story video interview with Bzymek + Falk
"Gombrowicz, who might have simply called this frock coat a straitjacket, similarly derided what he called Form, capital F. Such imposition contrasts with little-f form, the articulation out of the base that we humans struggle to achieve. Bzymek/Falk wryly pair a narration on the subject with a sequence in which the performers traverse the floor like primordial ooze, crawling on their bellies, overhung with a projection of motes flitting like the view of a drop of pond water under a microscope. At other moments the performers run back and forth over the same expanse. The contrast created between the fast and the slow suggest a clash between the human and the technological, scientific development outstripping our ability to assimilate it. The frenzied back-and-forth leads nowhere. The human recognizes itself in the mirror but remains severed from that other world, the one of representation and an illusory freedom, as the performers do in other sequences, pressing themselves futilely against the long, planar expanse of dancers’ mirrored wall in the John Cage and Merce Cunningham Studio.
The notion of struggle, and a struggle with technology in particular, extends to the show’s ingenious use of video as both an image and a prop. Most of the show’s video is shown on two monitors that are lugged around by the performers. Comically but necessarily padded around the edges and linked to the directorial cockpit with a similarly swaddled umbilicus, the screen is hefted as if it bears a weight much heavier than its real one. The actors carrying it seek help or lift it onto their shoulders like Atlas supporting the world. Elsewhere in the script: “We must remain persons, our role depends on the fact that the living, human word not stop sounding in a world that is becoming more and more abstract.” "
read the full article by Domenick Ammirati
Video documentation BAC
Rehearsal photos by Maria Baranova
