Sibiu Review

FITS 2009

by: Cristina Rusiecki 10. june 2009. 

A few days ago, the 16th edition of the grandiose International Sibiu Theatre Festival came to an end. For ten days ISTF focused, as always, the interest of the community upon the arts of performance, theatre, theatre-dance, lecture-performances, workshops, expositions, book releases, conferences, street and music performances, at a dizzying pace. I shall depict only two, for the sake of the time-old technique of point-counterpoint: Mongered and Triptych: it is time that prints on wax ......................................

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In the world woven in aggression and noise, in the sonar pollution (of the jackhammer placed outside my balcony over the past ten days, for example) that ruffles up the being in successive layers, the Irishmen (sic) Ursula Mawson-Raffalt and Anthony J. Faulder-Mawson seek out peace for one hour and twenty minutes: "Triptych: it is Time that prints on Wax"

Their interdisciplinary experiment is a result of a collaboration almost two decades in the making. Better said, of a simplification of sixteen years.
Nothing exterior except the video projector in the back with clear water trickling steadily and washing rocks. At intervals, in the middle of the screen a coloured square is centred. In fact, the only colour in the ambiance. 

The three performers are dressed (by Elena Scelzi) in colours of a perfect neutrality (black or grey), each with an element that reminds one of The Matrix . The veil from which the costume of Ursula Mawson-Raffalt is made is also grey, without nuances. 

Below, either a black triangle within a circle, or a white square define the beams that "set" the flux of consciousness.

The space is made up like an empty zone, without stress, without syncope. A land where discontinuity has not penetrated. Only occasional whispers, a profound breath, a listing of numbers, then a text that sounds as if emerging from the last barricade of modernism.

The assistance is slowly submerged into the core of the interior life. The flow of consciousness is rarely paying attention to itself. A murmur here, a movement there, a discrete crack, but every time surprising, provoked by the two choir singers of silence, they break the rhythm in order to bring the throbbings of the interior life and of the memory that is re-taken over and over. 

Beside that, a mechanical flow of sounds with silence, indecipherable chutes, breathing and movements that are repeated over and over. 

The choreographer's wrist wriggles with the grace of a ritual Indian dance. The finesse, the distinction, the delicacy, the concentration, all her gestures, from an aesthete of movement, seem to be remains leaked

out from the mythical inheritance of the great dancers of the past century.

Steadily, the sensation of silence invades all the layers of the being. Defalcated from the collision with the exterior, she descends in the marrow of the lack of asperities. The silence makes permeable the interior layers, dilutes the crusts of the analytical into the spectator. With the same repeated words, with circle turnings of thoughts, with fetish-numbers, with whispers, with foretold breathings, "Triptych: it is time that prints on wax" it penetrates the concentric circles of the interior flow in order to reach, at one point, the warm core of which the inspiration and the poetry drips. "My function, as artist, is simply to inspire the individual rather than to entertain the masses!" - this is the statement of the creators.The pale powers of the description cannot reproduce the syntax of silence. 

The multimedia language from "Triptych: it is time that prints on wax", is one of the most moving and melodious performances that I have ever seen, it therapeutically accesses each sense of the spectators. The result is to be cast in a cool and calming background.