Eight characters onstage, presenting Society, are visited by the extra-terrestrial being, coming to learn about democracy. The expected normality of the people versus the strangeness of the alien, is challenged by the outcome of people’s interpersonal relations. The world of violence they create, produce a gap between what we call humans and their inhuman behaviour. What our perception takes for granted? How is idea of the human to be made and analysed onstage? How the difference between natural and social functions in the language of theatre?
If we agree that every identity inside society is not naturally but socially constructed, so is what we perceive as natural and further on human.
The actors start being dressed in theatrically made “human skin” envisioning the idea of natural through neutral. A bunch in tan-coloured suits, entangled as if some pre-creational mass, slowly ejects one by one from this united body. By putting on differently shaped and coloured costumes they become more clearly recognisable; singularized and thus seen as individual, they are produced into members of a society. By swapping most recognizable items, ascribed to particular characters, they change the roles. The clothing object contains the idea of a subject. Being strongly established as the character itself, the hat of the Girl being mistreated is experienced as abuse of the girl itself. – Maja Mirković
“We’ve tried not to challenge the accuracy of diagnoses theatre and not to deprive of their credibility. But for years the theatre has not started any revolution. It has not created any patterns for new institutions.
It has not reformed the language of a public debate, has not eliminated social inequalities. This is not the theatre that brings people to streets. We must have overestimated the strength of its impact. Or we may have been questioning it too rarely.
The German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, known for his distrust of conventional languages of art, easily used to give his films a gangster, melodrama or science-fiction frame,used to explore genre cliches and reveal their violent structure
It is a story of violence and fascism emerging in small communities, in individual relationships, on the set – seemingly ephemeral and interpersonal relations free from consequences. Blood on the cat’s neck invites the audience and actors to participate in a hyper-realistic game. Is any look woven through the grid of glances thrown from the stage onto the audience and from the audience onto the stage innocent? How are the roles in the theatrical reality assigned? And why do theatrical revolutions tend to be doomed to failure?” – Anja Suša
