The performance uses excerpts from Rodrigo Garcia’s Scatter My Ashes Over Mickey.
“So that I am a being that presents itself, appears, not just a series of images created by others”. – Rodrigo Garcia
april 31 – a day suspended between today and tomorrow, between true and false, present and absent. Between a life lived and a life that is dead, empty, pointless. A day that does not exist. Or maybe a day that repeats itself endlessly, until you change something, until “something” happens?
Gradually, together with the performers we explore the characters’ memories. We enter the space of human existence, searching its roots for a state of absolute freedom and compliance of what’s demonstrated outside and what’s inside – a harmony that has been denied.
april 31 is a road from a human to what’s left of them. It is a journey between beauty and ugliness, true and artificial, harmony and deformation, you and me, individuality and community. Interference with the self, the human urge to change, improve nature (both one’s own and the one around us) is also mentioned in the performance. By departing from it, we depart from the truth, from genuineness. And so, what’s left are just empty representations of persons, situations, instead of living people. Yet a human is still behind these projections, “series of images” (as Garcia writes), and we are observing this fight for filling the form constituted by their body, and strategies of coping with what they in fact have created themselves.
The performance also poses the question, how much of what we call “our life” results from conscious decisions, and how much from the decisions made by others or from actions in the zone of generally accepted “safety”? How many of our actions are limited to safe experiences whose only danger is that they might overshadow the only human and interesting things left? The performance is also a study of loneliness, based on the alternating effects of closeness and distance between the audience and the performers.
april 31 becomes a regular ritual performed by people seeking the essence, the sense, freedom – an attempt to define them. Each of the characters is striving for something even though they don’t know how to name it. Each of them has a feeling that there’s more than this, but they can’t find it. With each attempt, all they see is deformation they have applied to themselves, and they’re far from what they’re looking for. But maybe next time, maybe the following day?
