Performances

Dramaturg’s Note

 
On an island, everything is disappearing, gradually and soundlessly. Ideas, events, objects vanish from one day to the next, leaving the islanders’ memory an empty, useless void. The community comes up with special, improvised ceremonies to bid farewell to everything that has disappeared.
 
A community of traumatized people facing up to their loss and disappearances; a community seeking to communicate with spirits from the past or future in a last-ditch attempt to find answers from on high to counter their ever-growing instability and insecurity.
 
Inspired by Yoko Ogawa’s novel “The Memory Police”, “Absolute Magic” seeks ways to penetrate the subconscious and retrieve the places we can escape to and the moments at which we can interact with the mystic universe around us.
 

 

Director's Note
 
“Absolute Magic” is a ceremony.
 
A ceremony to which the audience are privy as onlookers.
 
Spirits fill the space. Some are real, others fake, and no one knows which are which. Some are acted, others magically move chairs around or switch on television sets and appear on their screens. Or answer the questions that keep us awake at night.
 
The protagonists’ island is constantly emptying, emptying of roses and basketballs, of boats and books. Objects, people, ideas and memories vanish into thin air, leaving an absurd void behind them. Central power is becoming ever more cynical, ever more incompetent and dangerous. Just as it is in our own, non-fiction world. And reality seems to be emptying of meaning. Just as it is in our own, non-fiction reality.
 
The protagonists live in a liminal state, a grey zone. We can’t know if they believe in what they’re doing, if they find some meaning in these rituals; or if all they actually want is to be with other people, if all they seek is love or simply the warmth and protection the group can provide. The rituals they stage combine recreation, faith, obsession, nonsense and a desperate need to communicate, with our fellow human beings as well as spectral forms unknown. It is the only way they have found to understand the bizarre disappearances taking place around them, their only route to a mechanism through which they can react and hope.
 
The staging walks a fine line between drama, farce and metaphysical thriller. It employs, and often parodies, the tricks and special effects of the horror genre and seeks to strike a balance between revealing theatre’s deus ex machina and elevating theatrical illusion to the heavens. You can never be sure if the wonders taking place on stage are real or staged. Just like in real life. No one is sure if the horror is real or staged. Just like in real life.
 
“Absolute Magic” is a funny and moving public rite at which the city’s inhabitants gather to bid farewell to what they’ve lost and pose the new questions that will form the foundations for whatever New World is to come.
 
And above all, to find love again.
 

 

Info: National Theatre of Northern Greece | www.ntng.gr | Τ. 2315 200 200

 

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