traditional collages into three-dimensional space. Here, for the first time, the collage characters move on a stage. Roepstorff's collage characters are personae or symbols who invest the contexts in which they appear - and reappear - with a specific theme or idea. The character Balance, for instance, is a female acrobat, skilled at juggling balls while balancing one on her head. Whenever she appears in a collage, performing her balancing act, balance enters as a theme. Other characters include Stop Lady, Resistance, the Moment Man, The In Between and a dog called Loss. These characters, who also figure in the traditional collages on display at the exhibition, are intended to trigger a mood or suggest a theme, which, in the case of Stille teater, feeds into the dramatic action.
Kirstine Roepstorff
Stille teater is an ongoing theatrical installation in the exhibition where a seated
audience is confronted with a stage occupied not by actors but by a collage
sculpture. When set in motion, the sculpture combines with dramatic lighting and
stage effects to provide the starting point for the narrative. The play itself is spun
from a dialogue for two voices, Image and Space. One voice, Image, is down-to-earth, rational and committed to maintaining some sort of cohesion. The other, Space, talks in abstractions, letting everything hang in the air, untouched but observed.
Likely background inspiration to Roepstorff's theatre includes the Dada collages
of the 1920s and Oskar Schlemmer's - German artist and stage director at the
Bauhaus - conception of theatre, where the stage is a 'metaphysical meeting place': a nexus where plays, craftsmanship (often in the form of dolls) are combined with mechanics. For Kirstine Roepstorff there are important parallels between collage and theatre: "Both are fragile. This is true of theatre, existing as it does only in the now of performance and in memory, and of collage in that, created from magazine clippings, its content is fixed in time and its material frail." –SHO
Source : U-turn
