Director and dramaturg Žilvinas Vingelis
Set designer Neringa Keršulytė
Production Consultant Engineer Deividas Dzikevičius
Composer Andrius Šiurys
Video artist Tomas Stonys
Puppet choreographer Eugenijus Slavinskas
Producer Darius Vizbaras
Starring Airida Gintautaitė
It is a one-act mono-performance created using the technical and creative solutions discovered during the five Kosmos LAB workshops that have taken place every year since 2019.
A wide creative team including a robotics engineer, a set designer, a puppet choreographer, a video artist, a composer and a sound designer, as well as a theatre director working with different formats, develops a one-actor constructed narrative through laboratory work, immersing the audience in the surreal world of Jean Cocteau’s work.
Jean Cocteau is a hardly fully comprehensible personality of the first half of the 20th century, whose dilettantism in different fields of art overflowed like fragments of a particularly rich poetic world – incomplete, unfinished, strange, authentic, resembling nothing else.
He is a playwright, a poet, a painter, a drawer, a novelist, a graphic designer, a music manager, a boxing manager, an opium addict, a lover, an enemy of Andre Breton, a homosexual, a husband of a woman, a traveller and a friend of Igor Stravinsky, Marcel Proust, Nobel Prize winner André Zidt, Diaghilev, Pablo Picasso, Jean Paul Sartre, Edith Piaf, Erik Sati and others.
The suicide of his father, the paradoxical combination of Catholicism and surrealism in his work, his opium addiction, the death of his young lover, his travels around the world, his friendships with the most extraordinary artists of the time and his work – poetry, drama, prose, cinema, theatre, circus, music, and much more – these are the main themes of amazing siurrealistic Cocteau’s life, which will be expressed through a complex audiovisual storytelling, creating a scene for each theme, like a musical composition for different instruments. And these instruments, in the hands of one female actor playing the middle-aged male Cocteau, will be video mapping, a magic closet where objects appear and disappear, robotic parts of a surreal object, puppet and object theatre, sound art by installing speakers into the object, and other dreamlike stage manipulations to recreate the genius of the early 20th century, who was lost in the haze between the dream with his eyes open and the intoxication of the opium high.
The work freely improvises on motifs from Jean Cocteau’s graphic work, paintings, poetry images, the novels Opium, Potomac, The White Paper, Jacques Maritain and Jean Cocteau’s letters “Art & Faith”, his plays for theatre The Human Voice, Orpheus, The Infernal Machine, images from his films The Poet’s Blood, Orpheus’s Testament, and his biographical facts.
Presentation 2023 12 10 @ARTS PRINTING HOUSE
PARTLY FUNDED BY
