SLANT – Performance evening
Aurora, Budapest
2017.02.25.
15 min
We, the exploited of the semi-peripheral colony of the global production chain, celebrate the inauguration of the global capitalist imperial leader, the US President Trump. Long live Trumpia! Long live plutocracy!
Action. Many small events, yet they seem to be constant. The time of the ritual is the stopped time. Three performers and a visual artist work simultaneously.
Video is continuously shown and sound material is heard.
The master of ceremonies (performer 1) reads excerpts from the Vedas, the creation of the world as ordained by the gods. His voice is loud, unstoppable, like a machine, the ancient text is repeated over and over again. In the text it returns as a refrain: what is in the spirit? Every word is intelligible, yet, by ordinary logic, incomprehensible.
Collected sound bases, female speech voice articulated into a rhythm, this is how the goddess sings in a language beyond speech (performer 2). Her voice sounds like a renovation of screwed up, misunderstood or meaningless sentences. Can speaking above any human languages be like this? Meanwhile, as a goddess of fate, she crochets a round shape out of white rope as she sings, hooking the ball of yarn from she crochets into the round shape she crochets, creating a mise-en-abyme world-unity.
In the goddess’s hair are round white tallets, flat versions of her white globe, bearing emblematic press photos cut out of newspapers (The Air Filter from Vacuum-packed Zen now belongs to her after the trees).
Trumpia’s rite blue rider(performer 3), with his face and body covered by a blue raincoat, wearing slippers, dancing in slow motion on his sled. The goddess places a white Western hat on his head. The goddess’s song is then sung to the tune of “A cowboy rides across the Mexican prairie…”. then he can ride into the eternal summer, where Trump will be the emperor.
In the projected images, we see again and again Trump dancing with his wife in a live broadcast of his inauguration ritual as Prime Minister, entertaining the people he will rule. Botero’s naïve, clear-eyed paintings of the torture at Abu Ghraib by US prison guard soldiers. Long live the US Army!
Video reportage, situation report from the colony: gatherings of green activists, and their fight for the trees. Photo portraits of tortured children’s faces in deep poverty in Hungarian villages. They are the VIP spectators of this ritual, watching the audience from the screen as the celebrating VIP spectators stare at the Trump party in America.
The ancient text should be understandable, because every word is understandable, but it is not. So is action. Is ritual also renovation? Can ritual still be renovation? Can it still be restored, or is it only mourning and forgetting? Is it the unquestionable destiny of gods, or just the predictable consequences of a system that aspires to plutocracy? Hooray for the new American living god!
Just as it was, it will pass again.
