Sašo & Mojtina Jurcer:
Medea's
Scream
The myth
re-envisioned by Inner World Theatre
Directed by:
Sašo Jurcer
Performed
by:
Mojtina Jurcer
“A show of
powerful and exciting images. A challenge to the rules of
the theater, the acrobatic proof of an interpreter who,
with her mastery of gesture and animal expression of her
voice in a ritual without words, as in a malignant dream
makes concrete the last hours of Medea.”
Teatro VASCELLO Season 2012/13, Rome, Italy
The myth of Medea’s revenge – the murder of Jason’ s
children she gave birth to – is one of the most tragic
stories emanating from early European civilisation. Out of
love for Jason, Medea the Hecate betrays her father,
sisters and homeland; she kills her brother, disgraces her
family name and honour and lives in insecure exile to be
ultimately abandoned and deceived by a man to whom she
sacrificed and gave everything possible in the domain of
human existence.
Sašo and Mojtina Jurcer take the horizon of Medea’s myth as
the material for a journey into her mental landscape, and
tell a story from the perspective of her demise. When, at
her magic table, Medea looks back at the ruins of her life
and – for the final time – or who knows how many times –
embarks on an impossible journey; wondering about the blind
necessity of her fate, she takes another walk through her
life to the crossroads where in the geometry of tragedy the
elementary force of faith in love ruptures into the force
of destruction.
"inner world theatre"
»The inside
becomes much more interesting than that which is visible on
the outside,« concludes the director Sašo Jurcer, who,
together with the actress Mojtina Jurcer, established the
Inner World Theatre in 2005.
Through a series of original theatre performances and by
transposing the boundaries between performance, physical
theatre, contemporary dance and modern opera, they reject
the mimetic foundations of the western theatre tradition,
and on stage ever more intensively pulls down the curtain
of a material world by shifting away from the notion of the
theatre as the mirror of the world to the theatre as a
gesture to the world – from the actor’s body on stage to
body as a world.
During research process of “inner world theatre” they
developed a theatre system and acting method, which – on
the basis of temporal decompression and spatial
decomposition – liberates the actor’s body from the
physical confines of the outer and – through the bodily
calligraphy of inner mental states – connects it to the
dramaturgy of manifestations of human inner motion.
Today, the Inner World Theatre is a moving company, which
builds and modifies its performances through intense
exploration of the nature of theatrical contact in
dialogues with audiences of various cultures, from St.
Petersburg and Moscow, to Rome, Budapest and Yerevan, as
well as from Alexandria, to Chicago and Shanghai. It
primarily deals with the development of the universal
language of theatre, and, through extensive international
activities, gradually transforms into the theatre of the
world.
With Medea’s
Scream Sašo and Mojtina Jurcer turned from post-dramatic
theatre to a pre-dramatic framework and restore it to
nearly forgotten ritual pre-modern origin, when a man
stands among fellow humans in order to share with them a
mystery of his pain. In this act that goes beyond the
playing or portraying the character and storytelling they
returned once more to the acting of the vertical axes of
human existence.
"reviews"
Medea, a
sorceress jealous and murderous mother, silently enters in
a semi naked scene. A large table becomes the stage on
which the tale comes to life. A tale of inarticulate
sounds, rustles amplified by a microphone that makes grave
every breath.
On the table covered with a sand Medea shaken off
inexorable slowly and with impassive face the small limbs
of a doll. Movement dense and glance unperturbed accompany
the abstraction of infanticide most tragic of theatrical
literature.
The actress approaches the little body of the doll without
the head to her face and the screen displays the foreground
sinister of a sorrowing mother. The video amplifies the
action that takes place on stage, selecting details,
exaggerating the expressive face of Mojtina Jurcer,
investigating in a more intimate look.
Detachment, anger and a strange stupor are alternated the
soul of the character and the face of the actress. The slow
movements become jerky at times. The cold strategy with
which the actress moves three bloodied cups, drawing on the
table trajectories that seem to evoke the dynamics of the
protagonists of the tragedy, alternating with moments of
despair.
The plastic doll limbs, torn with studied calmness, will be
buried with violence, discovered with horror and
reassembled with the same dreadful tranquility.
The word is banished from the scene. The barbarous Medea
does not speak our language. Foreign, distant, different
and yet so close with those glances and wheeze, to a
reality deeply rooted in underground layers of
consciousness.
The spectacle between performance, physical theater and
contemporary dance proposes a new intimate reading of the
myth, searching for a primordial essentiality that is
impossible to put into words and that succeeds to exist on
stage thanks to the live sincerity of the actress.
Second
day. The festival is gaining momentum. Two "Medeas"
"The
performances played today will inevitably be compared.
"Medeas" are based on different sources: the Yakuts
(Stepanida Borisova) founded upon the text by Heiner
Müller, and Slovenes (Mojtina Jurcer) turned to myth, to
the deep layers of world culture. Even outside these
actresses can create two completely different images.
Context - a familiar audience of Moscow Ginkas’s "Medea",
hack the form of tragedy."
Medea’s Scream" plays at the junction of sound-drama and
"theater of cruelty." Not a single word does not say during
her mysterious magical manipulation of table, which
constitute the main stage design discovery of Slovenian
performance, Mojtina Jurcer: only whispers, noises, knocks
and sounds of running water and rolling in the sand, cries,
the resonances create a unique symphony of this performance
experiment. …. Final artist plays on the table; rising
vertically from top to bottom passes through the whole
world, but then that table - it is also the prototype stage
in the European theater culture.
Expressive
performance: The goal of Slovenians - to hold the audience
into the inner world of Medea. Symbolically important task
is contained in the name of the theater "Inner World
Theatre" - this is an extremely subjective experience, an
attempt to break through the limits of the visible world to
the hidden nature of things."
http://celimena.livejournal.com/
"What is the
core of Mojtina Jurcer's acting virtuosity? It is the
virtuoso technique of talent, i.e. the technique that per
definition cannot be learned and cannot be distributed as
it is absolute and self-sufficient – it is the individual
result based on the 'internal wealth' of the artist and on
the direct rendering of personal expressiveness."
VEČER
Slovenia
"The church Santa Maria dei Battuti, packed as ever,
welcomed and applauded the hard "Medea's Scream," a
co-production Slovenian, Croatian and Montenegrin, with the
sole protagonist, Mojtina Jurcer, who has explored the
tragedy of Euripides, proposed with an acting full of verve
and pathos, making the current figure of Medea while
renouncing the word as a means of communication. Sašo
Jurcer is a director attentive to detail, innovative and
scratchy, full of ideas, a show well packaged that never
expire in rhetoric and repetition."
PANORAMA Croatia
"Especially impressive were symbols, physical objects and
materialized tragic and agony … representation and only one
actress, which articulated the whole tragic of this ancient
drama with movements of the body and voices, vocals,
screams that caused the hair on skin stand on end. In every
voice, every movement there was painfulness, tragic and
tragedy that expressed actress Mojtina Jurcer."
POBJEDA Montenegro
"Revenge, which
was simultaneously a betrayal of her own being, vibrated
through the actress's taut body filled with anger and
despair trying to set off on a new self-search via the
rituals on the witchcraft table. ... slow
meditative movements suddenly turn into a succession of
stormy modern-dance elements; the scream slams into the
painful reality the distant voices of spiritual levitation;
objects on the ritual table symbolise a transcendental
journey ..."
RADIO STUDENT Slovenia
"Solo performer
Mojtina Jurcer ... expressively conjures up the inner
landscape of Medea’s world."
DNEVNIK Slovenia
"The
Slovenian actress Mojtina Jurcer enters on scene with a bag
of jute from which throws a dismembered doll on the table,
and gives life to a performance without words expressing
the rage and madness, revenge and redemption denied, in a
paroxysm/oxymorons game in which the maternal caresses
followed obsessive-compulsive disorders (movement of
objects which clash on the boards, filling glasses,
drowning the doll's head). The proof of an actress is in
any case extraordinary: Mojtina Jurcer captures with her
eyes and through body movements and ability to convey the
agony of heroin noir par excellence, who kills his brother
for love and kill her children in revenge for Jason and
prevent him from having offspring."
MESSAGGERO VENETO
