Nice Guys Win Twice (2018)
jessie marino : concept/composition/stage direction — Constantin Basica: video tech/design — Performed by SCENATET
50’ experimental music theater piece for 10 performers and video projection mapping..
Nice Guys Win Twice travels through the many spectacles of the everyday uncanny. The performers shuffle through micro-managed mundane gestures as a form of choreographed self-care, render the language of political dramas into sputtering piles of abstract glitch and push around projections of everyday technology which slowly build up a mediated veneer of the real which keeps us at safely at our desks away from the action.
In Part One - the performers are sequestered to small illuminated boxes onstage and asked to repeat combinations of everyday gestures, such as touching your toes, adjusting your glasses, lifting your arm, or pointing. These gestures are organized into rhythmic frameworks and repeated in various combinations.
In Part Two - SCENATET stages a political address, modeled after the most recent State of the Union Address in the US. The language of this political spectacle has been filtered, removing all of the vowels from the language, and making percussive the remaining consonant letters. By altering the language and adding to this repeated physical gestures, the line between political drama and cult following begins to be blurred.
In Part Three - The ensemble pushes cardboard boxes around the stage. On these boxes is projected different everyday video footage - making the boxes look like moving televisions. They move the boxes around in different configurations and eventually build up a stacking wall of blinking, glitching television sets.
This piece is about the difference between building and fabrication. The realms of the real vs the realms of the virtual. The difference between memory and nostalgia. An interpolation between the home space and the screen space. Transforming the entirety of the theater from a stage, to a screen, to a tiny domestic habitat for a fish. Can the digital is swallowed by the physical?
photo credits: Kristof Lemp @ Darmstadt International Ferienkurse 2018
