Description by Filmoteka Muzeum
This performative action by the Sędzia Główny group was staged within the curatorial programme “TR Actions”,organised by Joanna Warsza at Warsaw’s Rozmaitości Theatre in 2006. The curator invited visual artists, such as Anna Baumgart, Sędzia Główny group, Paweł Althamer and Katarzyna Kozyra, to carry out performances in a traditional theatrical space.
Sędzia Główny proposed to “infect” the spectacle Magnetism of the Heart, directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna, with a “virus”, thus disturbing the staging in a performative way. The actors were informed that the performance artists duo would join the stage that night, although their exact intentions remained unknown. The spectacle witnessed a unique confrontation between performance art and theatre. The artists from the Sędzia Główny group carried out the instructions of initiated viewers, disturbing the actors. At times, the intensity of the duo’s actions threatened to disrupt the spectacle. Eventually, however, the actors managed to carry it through to completion – the theatrical organism “resisted” the virus. The performance investigated the limits of theatre and demonstrated the different laws that govern the two art disciplines whose encounter was staged on this occasion.
(DM)