bigNOTWENDIGKEIT + László Fülöp + NANASTROVA:
Hysterology

As if she were aiming a spotlight on the spectator, who, until then thought he was safe

in the velvety darkness of his seat in the orchestra;

Yet she is only explaining to him, that the quality of her own pain will bend to the pleasure

of his own figurative desire.

She entirely looses herself in the spectacle,

demanding that every spectator be a true director.

(Georges Didi-Huberman)

We treat hysteria at its favorite place, the stage. Here it is invented as a disease, as an art form, as protest. Here it occurs as a symptom without cause and speaks in signs that mean NOTHING. Here it shows itself as what it is: the great teacher of contradiction. Nothing is certain, except for one thing: the hysteric needs her audience and seeks her viewers. Hysterology is presentation and self examination, lecture performance and melodrama. A web of relations between bodies, knowledge, desires and denial sets the stage for the stars of la Salpêtrière. The famous seizure of the classic Grande Hystérie repeats itself in its disturbing beauty.

How can a seizure be rehearsed? How to find a form for something intangible? How to reproduce a phenomenon, which has as many faces as the people trying to understand it? In collaboration with the Hungarian choreographers László Fülöp and Anna Biczók bigNOTWENDIGKEIT investigate the great quick-change artists of Western history - hysteria.

BY Anna K. Becker, Anna Biczók, Katharina Bischoff, Alice Ferl, László Fülöp      

A co-production with schloss bröllin e.V., the AQB-Art Quartier, Budapest and SOPHIENSÆLE. Funded in th escope of Szenenwechsel, a programme of the Robert Bosch Stiftung and the International Theatre Institute (ITI), the ministry for education, science and culture of the Land Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and the Workshop Foundation, Budapest. media partner: Missy Magazine

photo © Zsófia Hevér