A Telepathic Sunny Window Overlooking All Dreams

“Standing in a forest and throwing stones at trees. If I hit that tree with this stone, Rousseau says to himself, then all will go well in my life from now on. He throws the stone and misses. That one didn’t count, he says, and so he picks up another stone and moves several meters closer to the tree. He misses again. That one didn’t count neither, he says, and then he moves still closer to the tree and finds another stone. Again, he misses. That was just the final warm-up toss, he says, it’s the next one that really counts. But just to make sure, he walks right up to the tree this time, positioning himself directly in front of the target. He is now less than a meter from it now, close enough to touch it with his hand. Then he lobs the stone squarely against the trunk. Success! he says to himself, I’ve done it. From this moment on life will be better for me than ever before.”
J. J. Rousseau, Confessions

We start lying very early on our childhood, even before comprehending whether a statement is believable or not, and growing up, lying can go from something that is being punished to being rewarded. Often, we end up lying not only to others, but even, or especially, to ourselves.
Lying can also be simply not accepting the reality for what it is and daydreaming about transforming the world through the semantic of naming things and situations what we wish them to be. A visionary utopia that becomes poetical text and twisted realities.

“A Telepathic Sunny Window…” will explore, in a peculiar blend of politics, poetics and humour, the notion of truth and falsehood in theatre and everyday experience, bringing forward an investigation started with the performance “Hardly Ever”, successfully premiered at Dansens Hus in Oslo, in 2015, and that lately toured in Sweden, Norway, Romania, Japan, Latvia, Cuba, Canada and UK. More touring is planned for 2020 and the piece is currently invited also to La Mama Theatre in May 2021.

“A Telepathic Sunny Window…” will build on the experimental playground grounded by “HARDLY EVER”. By listing and accumulating questions, the piece will invite the leap of audience’s imagination. It’s all about believing and making believe, even just for a few instants. It’s an inner guessing game. It’s about creating expectations and triggering empathy, while allowing the unexpected: slight mismatches in what audience might have thought or recognised, twisting what they had visually or conceptually anticipated.

The piece will be presented in a gallery format, articulated as an ongoing stream of scenes, over several hours, interweaving semantics and performativity and focusing on the transformative capacity of the performers, who constantly re-negotiate their own creation. The work will involve 12 dancers/musicians, and visual artists, that will perform different scenes in spaces across exhibition halls, galleries/museums, or even theatres, approaching the spaces as site specific, and performing also in the foyer, corridors and other rooms within the facilities. The result will be a performance that will alternate between being a participatory act, a video-photo installation, a reflective moment on the edge between lecture and performance and meta-theatrical enactments of the rehearsals process, believable and artificial, straight forward and deceptive.

Wee (Norway)

Wee was established by Francesco Scavetta and Gry Kipperberg in Oslo (Norway) in 1999 and have, since the beginning, marked itself for its original style and an extensive international activity. Wee has produced 20 performances -and several commissioned and shorter works – and toured in 36 countries in Europe, Middle East, Asia, North and South America.

The projects have been produced with the support of Norwegian Culture Council and other public bodies, in cooperation with national and international organizations. In Norway, the company works closely with Dansens Hus in Oslo, which figure as a co-producer in six of the company’s productions. Wee’s work has received numerous awards, most recently in Croatia, in 2014: Best Dance Performance for the Surprised Body Project – Zagreb.