The Promise of The Hour
A collaborative performance piece. Conceptual interpretation and scenography by Zacha A.
‘The Promise of the Hour’ is a movement-based performance that explores the issues of society’s power and societal control towards humans. Thematically, it is based on the principal of revolution inspired by Sergei Eisenstein’s ​‘Battleship Potemkin’ through the aesthetic lens of Andrei Tarkovsky’s ​‘Mirror’​. It portrays oppression, agony and the tension of mental and emotional state that the war generates. It concludes with a broken and undelivered promise of victory that could have lead to the alteration of the system and its power.
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The performance depicts the embodiment of revolution from its commencement towards its termination. Each of the characters represent emotions rather than human beings. It is a discourse and an interaction between the system, the working class, and the divine; the deity of the revolution that delivers and foresees a bloody dawn, while controversially is praying for peace by holding the tools of war.
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Sonically, it sets the ground of a dreamlike and dramatic reality. Live sound is used thematically as well as aesthetically – with the violin being explored outside its sonic role – as an ‘instrument of manipulation’, which controls the performers’ movements but also responds to the emotional aura that the characters reflect.
My personal contribution to the conceptual interpretation of the piece was the introduction of the fabric, inspired by the air balloons and the body levitation scenes of Tarkovsky’s ​‘Mirror’​, as well as the boat sails and hammocks from Eisenstein’s ‘Battleship’.
There is a bizarre association of the fabric’s materiality to the fluidity of the social systems; a continuous effort and will for change that never reaches a desirable and solid outcome, which benefits the society. The social system, similarly to the fabric, is uncertain, it changes, it moves, it is not stabilised or fixed, it controls and it is being controlled.
In the performance, the fabric is an element being manipulated by the workers who believe they have it under control by trying to alter it in order to bring the change to the social system. It connects them but also separates them by positioning them against each other. The weakening of their collective power enables the system to smother them. It represents the distance between them and the unreachable peace, but also the time between the beginning and the end of the battle.
