Go back CuntsCollective – taking part in Riga Circus Residency program
29.03.2019.
In Riga Circus Residency program an interdisciplinary theatre project “ASK THE BREAD” by CuntsCollective will be developed in June 2019.
The name of the project is inspired by poem “Bread” of the Moldavian poet Liviu Damianu: “[…]the bread is not just a sign of joy, the bread has been a painful dream […]”.
Indeed, as a symbol of hard labor in the countryside, the bread is a secular image conveyed by many institutions, religions or philosophies. For this project, bread has been taken as a symbol of the double side of nature “covered by hard crust with soft pulp in the middle”. As a matter of fact, the countryside is often idealized in a romantic conception: a rural idyll, green, quiet and peaceful. People tend to represent the rural life as something beautiful and healthy, a dream, a utopian place where people escape crowded cities during holidays, a hoped Eldorado. But it also reveals a violent side, made of loneliness, isolation, and fear. To perceive the country of the workers and the peasant, we need to hear their “bread stories” and this is exactly what ASK THE BREAD’S team desires to do.
The performance takes its primary inspiration from the self-portrait project God Nature Toil of the photographer Vika Eksta. From 2013 to 2015 the artist pictured herself with a photo camera in an abandoned house in the Latvian countryside. Using the clothes and objects found in the house, she staged various situations, in order to re-create her own perception/understanding of the life of the previous inhabitant. The photographies also reflect on traditional Latvian countryside lifestyle and it’s an actual state.
ASK THE BREAD will investigate into the themes such as; migration from rural areas, woman’s life in the countryside, the loneliness and the physical and psychological consequences of the land work, traditions and rites, the connection between nature and human beings and finally the idealization of nature.
It is is an interdisciplinary theatre project piloted by CuntsCollective. The project will be the result of an international collaboration between the actresses Vita Malahova and Aude Lorrillard, the photographer Vika Eksta, the composer Alberto Barberis and director Tone Haldrup Lorenzen. Through the exploration of physical expression, photography, theatre, soundscape, and poetic act, the artists will create an interdisciplinary performance ASK THE BREAD.
Supported by: The Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme
