About the Creative Residency Programme for Mayar Aleksan in Slovakia

Feb 2017

Actor and director Mayar Aleksan completed his participation in the international programme for creative residencies in Košice, Slovakia, in October and November 2016, in association with K.A.I.R and with the support of the Goethe-Institut, Bratislava and Ettijahat-Independent Culture.

Mayar shares the following words about his experience:

 

I had not visited Slovakia before or any Eastern European country for that matter. All I knew about the country is that it used to be a part of Czechoslovakia, before separation, and a I knew a few footballers from the region.

Arriving at this unknown place and working on a performance for two months in a small city like Kosice was an attractive idea, especially within the context of my questions about the relationship between places’ memories and bodies’ memories; what happens when a body and a place from very different worlds meet?

As such, I started to meet with the city’s local artists in different specialties (visual arts, painting, theatre, poetry, etc.) and ask them:

What is the most important place in Kosice and why? What memories do you have of that place?

I linked the answers with answers of my own about memories I have of similar places in Damascus. My aim was to build on answers a live performance in places mentioned by artists.

With time, I started learning about different places in the city. The places were full of personal stories of individuals. The result was several ideas for projects, the most important of which was in association with Oto Hudec, a local artist, to create a performance near the Hornad river, which crosses the city (the project is under development).

 

Incomplete, a performance

Incomplete is a performance created in association with Petra Houskova and Juliana Sokolova. The performance explores the dynamics between completion and meaning in order to ask: what happens to incomplete ideas? Do they die? Or do they wait their turn somewhere? What concerns do we have when we are at the end?

The idea for the performance started when I met painter Petra Houskova, during my residency programme in Kosice. We decided to examine the theme of ‘the place’ in Petra’s work. We chose one of her paintings and decided to reproduce it as three-dimensional object. The object is a giant, irregular paper ball, with highly-realistic drawing. Through shadows and light on its surface, the object represents terrains of a parallel world.

Afterwards, I based a performance on the proposed painting. The performance tells the story of a person stuck amidst the wrinkles of the aforementioned paper ball, because the writer did not finish writing the last few lines to complete one of his fleeting ideas. The performance’s script was developed in association with poet and philosopher Juliana Sokolova.

The performance began to take form initially through the Shopa exhibition on November 26th, 2016. In mid-2017, I will return to Kosice to finalise the performance.

The residency programme was supported by Ettijahat-Independent Culture, the Goethe-Institut, Bratislava, and K.A.I.R in Kosice.

Mayar Aleksan was awarded a production grant under the second edition of the Laboratory of Arts programme for his performance, Ticket to Atlantis, presented in Beirut in September 2016. The performance will be presented in the Dancing on the Edge festival in November 2017.


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