untitledUntitled (performance with the participation of Mary Beth Heffernan)

Situations arranged by Veaceslav Druta offer an opportunity for observing interactions between people and relations between human begins and their environment. Druta situates mundane, prosaic actions in unusual conditions; as a result, to enact their assigned roles his actors must be concentrated and involved; some physical effort is occasionally required as well. Their gestures and movements, enforced by the particular situation, are usually exaggerated; so are their facial expressions, which betray concentration and a range of emotions resulting from unanticipated circumstances in which the performance unfolds.

The video Untitled (performance with the participation of Mary Beth Heffernan) records a struggle with ocean waves. Actors involved in the project attempt to sit in armchairs by a small table in order to read some books together. Their attempts, however, are repeatedly thwarted by water running onto the shore. The waves overturn the table and the chairs, knock the actors down and damage the books. It is only for fractions of seconds that the participants in the performance manage to keep an unsteady balance; a moment later they are again forced to fight the unstoppable element. While the repeated attempts to set the furniture straight, cover the table with a tablecloth, sit in the armchair or open a book are recorded on camera, mutual sympathy begins to dawn between the two people involved. They try to cooperate in their fight with the ocean, to intuit and anticipate each other’s movements and to communicate by means of intelligible gestures.

The short Untitled (performance with the participation of Mary Beth Heffernan) tells of the search for harmony and of the fight with opposing forces; of empathy and the need for togetherness. In their fight with the force of water and wind, the actors experience a range of emotional states. They feel disquiet, fear and resignation on the one hand, and excitement, hope and joy on the other. Their unequal struggle with elemental forces is, in essence, a fight against loneliness and alienation, and a fight for closeness and a sense of security. Druta has constructed a poetic image of one of the many possible situations where the desire to retain one’s autonomy collides with the need to attain a compromise; where the individual approach to reality clashes with the need to find a shared vision of the world. The shared act of reading, which in Druta’s narrative is not achieved, is an emblem of stability, peace and the attainment of mutual communication.

Izabela Kopania

translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz