A Report to the Academy
Your monkeyhood, honored guests, if you have something of the sort in your past, cannot be any more remote to you than my own monkeyhood is to me.”
If Darwin was right, and humans are related to monkeys, then God is dead and humanity is not defined by mercy, but by its distance from all that is animalistic.
“As for me, though, I never longed for freedom, not then and not now. By the way: Freedom is all too common a delusion among humans. And just as freedom is considered the noblest of states, the delusion of freedom itself is also noble.”
The Monkey´s lecture before the scientific academy. A description of the process of self-optimization. A situation which, for the Monkey, presents no other solution than merciless adaptation.
This production deals with issues of identity and explores the animal within humans. For the creators it is, among other things, an exploration of power discourse, the basis of which is language and the acquisition of language. The story of the Monkey is the story of education. The path from animal to human is a process of merciless self-perfecting.
The production is conceived as a theatrical installation, within which the audience moves. The path from the inability to speak to the wielding of language is reflected in the directing choices of the production – like the use of voice-over to express the inner voice of the main character.
Zuzana Stivínová and Ivan Lupták in a play about what we call civilization from the point of view of a monkey.
reviews:
The production expresses itself through movement, gestures, and other visual means rather than through language. It also has an intentionally slow rhythm, which is caused by a certain degree of repetitiveness, that sometimes leads to a kind of numbness in which dramatic situations seem like exercises in style. It is also, however, Zuzana Stivínová´s one-woman-show, in which she plays a monkey – it is mainly she who brings a certain amount of light humor and sarcasm to the production. Ivan Lupták however, is a good cueing-partner, capable of subtly emphasizing the absurdity of the various situations.
Jana Machalická, Lidové noviny, March 6th, 2018
