Press File - Kunstenfestivaldesarts

“It’s about solitude and abandonment, a subject painful for them to broach. Life is busy and fastmoving,
they don’t have a lot of time for things they don’t feel deeply about. They are part of
Open House.” (Daniel Veronese)
For their first appearance on stage these ten very young actors approached Daniel Veronese, a
leading Buenos Aires writer and a director-founder of the group El Periférico de Objetos. They
modestly venture to break the silence. With guitar, piano and at the microphone, they sing and
murmur about being cast adrift. But they are still floating. Accompanied by the voices of Lou
Reed and John Cale and made iridescent by Starlight, these sensual and fragile young actors
are wandering somewhere over the rainbow…
... MACHINES OF POETRY...
(Reflections at the end of a troubled afternoon. 15/5/01)
This is what Karl Kraus says about logic: “Logic is the enemy of art. But art needn’t be the
enemy of logic. Logic has to have been savoured at least once by art and totally digested by it.
To assert that 2 X 2 = 5, you have to know that 2 X 2 = 4. But someone who only knows the
latter statement will doubtless say that the former is incorrect.”
I’ve thought a bit about this. I think we should try and create a machine of poetry. A machine for
constructing perceptions, for creating feelings removed from logic. A machine for making 2 x 2 =
5.
We would have to build an individual machine in each of our hearts. The performance could be
the entire machine, all of it. I’ve always liked defining performances as machines for producing
perceptions. Let’s try not just to think of coldness when we think of a machine.
What are the machines like?
We could see them as a concentration of functions (or dysfunctions) that produce theatrical
actions. Action is everything that allows me a state of change according to the probable (don’t
confuse ‘the probable’ with ‘the possible’) and according to the necessary. Leave to one side
what’s necessary for achieving a particular aim, beautiful as it is. Action has to produce a
disequilibrium of forces. Action as a quality giving colour to and making an impact on what the
spectator perceives. It’s good always to think about what the spectator perceives. To put
yourself in his place. He’s going to take everything as if it were coming from the character (even
if we do nothing other than stage our own moment of uncertainty, confusion and improvisation).
Tumult and physical movement don’t always mean development or dramatic growth. This
change has to produce something. If you do nothing, if you don’t move, equilibrium remains
static. And you get bored – it’s as simple as that.
If I elaborate speech X, I can entertain (or not). If I add my personal secret to it, which comes
and goes like a wave in the spectator’s perception, I can say that I’m beginning to create a
machine of poetry. Something that covers up and reveals almost at the same time is going to
impress the spectator. His way of thinking is going to be on the alert. Playing with the meaning
of the text and the revelation of the secret. Playing quite simply means deceiving. When the
spectator stretches out in his seat, thinking he has already understood and is understanding the
game… you have to upset him. Change the rules of the game. Begin to reveal the game. Or
hide it. Maybe it’s also the moment to show this talent you’re so proud of. Or maybe you’ll try to
make sure he has no idea about this game being played out in front of him.
Everyone’s waiting for ‘the idea’ or at least ‘a clear idea’. Shatter expectations. Peel the onion.
Put it back together. Make its layers disappear. Find things in order to deceive, so that the
machine starts running and doesn’t stop. Not stopping the machine doesn’t meant that it always
has to be moving. The machine has more to do with the spectator’s perception that with our own
perception of time and space. We need to think that the lady or gentlemen in this seat sees,
hears, thinks, distrusts, decodes, tries to anticipate events, to find references in this group of
expressions that I am, with my body, my voice, my clothes, my objects, my music, but also with
my silence and my immobility. It shouldn’t be forgotten that a shout can be heard more clearly in
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