Magdalena Reiter: Pars pro Witkacy

Photo: Borut Peterlin

The work and character of the Polish writer, dramatist, painter, photographer and philosopher Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz – Witkacy give us an intimate and painful insight in a decaying, fragmentary space that belongs to him, and even more to us – to him as a premonition and to us as a fact. It is through this fragile and fragmentary expression that an all-pervasive, manifest and latent sentiment of emptiness, incompleteness and fragmentation comes to the forefront, mutilating and robbing also the body. It divests the body of content and context, sweeping it off its feet and reducing it to traces, remnants of ideas and thoughts.

From this exact state of mind the desire arises to fill in all the gaps, to solve/ation, to fill (up) and to exceed.  The urge and the instinct, constantly sliding through the cracks of time and space in their fragile constitution, thus becoming an insatiable force that – in its desire to surpass the boredom and the emptiness, in its fear against the banality of this world, its pettiness and commonness and mediocrity – leads to an unstable and inconstant arena of transformation, where the subject comes to perpetually objectify itself, form itself, redefine itself, pushing towards destruction in its need for accumulation with the speed of light.

Concept and choreography: Magdalena Reiter
Co-creating artists and performers: Lada Petrovski Ternovšek, Maruša Majer, Magdalena Reiter, Dušan Teropšič
Text: Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz – Witkacy
Music and sound design: Aleš Zorec
Set design: Marko Japelj
Lighting design: Simon Žižek
Video design: Gašper Brezovar
Project manager: Andrej Berger
Production: Anton Podbevšek Teater