Flying Attempts

Original works, lying on the border between drama, performance, visual art, on the frontier between art and humanity sciences and polytechnics, very often cross these boundaries and in a positive sense they contest the possibilities of theatre art. The Divadelná Nitra offers such para-theatre delicacies quite often. The Box with Holes was a unique play with an individual who, cooperating with the artist, became an active partaker, spectator and person involved in “the celebration of the ordinary touch of hands”. The American Dream was even more distanced from a traditional view on a dialogue and confrontation between an artist and audience. During the supper, prepared and served by the author of the project to a small group of people, reality was changed into theatre quite naturally, inaudibly and without any disturbing.

Flying Attempts are different from its predecessors and different from all theatre productions of this year’s programme. It connects exclusivity, intimacy and uniqueness of an experience (limited number of spectators), creative confrontation of living art and multi-media (screening), constant negation of reality and creation of the illusion of a dream, a dream-like vision, adjusting the mind in another dimension (static and moving pictures, emerging and disappearing on the principle of the camera obscura) and also unrepeatable interactivity in the possibility of absolute succumbing to the illusion and the following uncovering of the principles, mechanisms and technologies of the creation and functioning of the production.
Romana Maliti

“Flying Attempts were created within the What’s Next project at the Spielart Festival 2007 in Munich, curated by Romeo Castelluci. It is a compact analogical mechanism able to produce and inspire individual imaginary poesis, based on the mechanism created by Alessandro Panzavolta – this optical device consists of a lighted room for actors, light sources, magnifying glasses and a dark room for the audience.”
Exibart.com, February 2008

“Flying Attempts do not have any direct literary relation; they are not based on any particular source of inspiration. The starting point of the project may be the experience that the memory of the night flying remains with the dreaming person until the waking-up. This picture is present in works by Goya, which we came across to only by coincidence, but we were inspired mostly by the text – The Psychoanalysis of Air by Gaston Bachelard.”
Alessandro Panzavolta

“It is neither theatre nor visual art, not even performance or film. It is a projection of lighted bodies sunk in the darkness behind the screen. The pictures are captured by seven different magnifying glasses and moved to the screen like moving pictures. The audience is given the definition and power of the bodies, distant, disproportional, defocused and ephemeral. This work, inspired by night flying, creates an impression of a dream, spoilt by acute sounds or decaying faces which change into pictures of animals and plants and which by the compositions of nude bodies, remind of the Baroque Art.”
Massimo Marino, Lo Spettacolo

“Flying Attempts radicalise the research of a hybrid language of painting, photography and film, they more likely change the film adaptation of the visual content of the idea to the painting or sculpturing usage of the picture, with the idea that it creates the process of generation of forms through the oscillation of the indefinable.”
Exibart.com, February 2008

“Quite surprising is the referring to various painting schools… these references seem stronger and more precise in the compositions of the nudes. They remind mostly of exciting painters of Tuscany mannerism. Pontormo, for example, similarly deformed the limbs of his apostles, saints and virgins. The whiteness of the bodies reminds of neo-classical sculpture full of the fragile refinement of the ancient Greece ideal. You will also remember the demonical squatting being in the picture L´Incubo by Henry Fuseli.”
Accrocchio, October 2007