Manipulations

 

Asking someone to kill his own son is a horrible game to verify the faith. Abraham was ready to pay the price, he trusted the will of GOD, and he was richly rewarded. Today we sacrifice entire national economies, which must pay absurdly high prices in order to regain the trust of imaginary financial markets. It’s the same game. Capitalism is a religion, capital demands trust and obedience. And we hope to be rewarded. After the former Hungarian prime minister publicly admitted that his government "fucked it up, not a little but a lot", he again succeeded to gain the trust of the Hungarian PEOPLE at the following elections. Trust is both rational and irrational, conscious and unconscious, willing and unwilling at the same time.

We all trade with trust, we all negotiate for trust, we all manipulate with trust. In this game, there areno innocent victims - we all know what it is about. Trust is a weapon to fight with fear, insecurity and uncertainty of the future. Trust is the fuel of power. And this is where manipulations begin. If there is no trust, there is no trading, no bankers, no politicians, no democracy, no love, no God. NOTHING. Trust is not a question of choice. It is a matter of necessity.

7 performers from Hungary, Romania, Serbia and the director Bojan Jablanovec met for the first time in January 2015 and from the very beginning they were faced with the question of trust. The performance is a series of images and situations on manipulations with trust. Trust is a wall of questions, which is impossible to climb with rational answers. Trust is a knife between the two dancers. Trust is smoke in the eye. Trust is a flower that nobody knows how to water. Trust is a chewing gum – when it loses its flavour, spit it out and take the fresh one. Trust makes no sense unless it is constantly put to the test. It’s a game. A very old game.

Bojan Jablanovec (1961) is a Slovenian theatre director, the founder and artistic director of Via Negativa. He graduated from the University of Performing Arts from Ljubljana and worked at several Slovenian theatres between 1993 and 1999. He then decided to give up working in state-subsidised institutions and started researching theatre in other ways. He founded Via Negativa in 2002, a creative and informal community of Slovenian and international artists (actors, dancers, musicians). In 2012 he founded VN Lab, a contemporary performing arts laboratory that functions as a workshop and is the home of open-minded young artists from all around the world who wish to improve their stage presence and artistic talent.

Via Negativa is a platform for research, development and production of contemporary performing arts, based in Ljubljana and founded in 2002. VN is focused in devising and exploring different performing strategies, with an emphasis on ethics and the liveliness of performance practices, procedures and genres. The VN creative field focuses strictly on basic performing elements and on the relationship between viewing and performing. VN deals with this relationship as a complex flow of points of view, expectations, judgments, conclusions, recognitions, stereotypes, prejudices etc. VN insists that performance should always consciously radicalise and relativise its own position with self-irony and humor.