BERLIN (Belgium)

Holocene [#6]

MARIA MATOS TEATRO MUNICIPAL
10 and 11 May at 9.30pm (Thu, Fri)

^{Portuguese Premiere}

_{TICKETS ONLINE}

_{Technique: Live animation film and objects Language: Ukrainian, with subtitles in English and Portuguese For audiences over: +14 Running time: 75 min.} 

_{Presentation in the scope of the network Imagine 2020 with the support of the Culture Program of the European Union}

A multimedia performance for the stage by BERLIN and Cathy Blisson.

ZVIZDAL tells the life of Pétro and Nadia.
A filmic portrait about two people, living in a ghost town.
A story about solitude and survival, the results of a failed atomic experiment.

1986. After the Chernobyl disaster, about 90 towns and villages around Pripyat are evacuated.
The failure of an atomic experiment causes a drastic change in the lives of the locals. They leave their houses never to return.
Pétro and Nadia, a married couple of 60-year-olds who were born and raised in Zvizdal, refuse to be evacuated. They prefer to stay put in their old village, in their own house. A ghost town. All their acquaintances have left, their plundered houses bear witness to better days. Petrified places, overgrown by nature.
Between 2011 and 2016 Berlin follows Pétro and Nadia in an effort to portray the evolution of their story over the years. How does one bear years of isolation? There is the lack of electricity, of running water and heating. There are the superstitions, there is the vodka, the muttering, the cursing and praying and singing, the toothaches, the ailments of old age, the 20-km walk to the nearest shop, the wait for someone from civilization.
Zvizdal draws a portrait of solitude, survival, poverty, hope and love between two elderly people in their eighties surrounded by colourless, odourless but omnipresent radiation.
The performance mixes film with poetry, documentary with theatre, fiction with technology. The film plays out on a double sided screen, beneath which are three seasonally different models of the couple’s farm which rotate and become our window into their small world.

"All I can say is that those who left are dead. If you are born somewhere you should continue to live in your natural environment. If I were to move to another area, I would die."
-Pétro Opanassovitch, Zvizdal

^{"Fukushima was worse, Nadia and Pétro insist (...). How did they hear about Fukushima? The radio. When tested, all it does is crackle. Zvizdal is full of that kind of black humour. It is a poignant, flawless filmed portrait of two elderly people who seem stuck inside a Beckettian nightmare. (...) The Antwerp Berlin duo has built a masterly theatre installation for Zvizdal. The audience sits on either side of a film screen. Underneath it there are three scale models: the farm in summer, autumn and winter. A camera on a robotic arm hovers over the still life (...). What a striking contrast: today’s state-of-the-art visual culture comes face to face with the primeval forces of weed-infested nature and a raw survival instinct. (...)."
-Geert Van der Speeten, De Standaard ****}

^{"(...) Through this intimate documentary we get a glimpse into the elderly couple’s lives which is as heart-warming as it heart-breaking. (...) The forbidden world of the Zvizdal and its countryside is beautiful, and so is this masterpiece by Berlin."
-Henry Holloway, The Argus *****}

^{"(...) The result is an illuminatingly beautiful and multi-faceted visual feast. (...) A unique sensory experience which is breathtaking in its subtely and skill. The camera work and editing, realised expertly by Bart Baele and Geert De Vleesschauwer, is like an extra character in our midst. (...) The story of Nadia and Pétro is heartwrenchingly beautiful, and the this beauty lies in its truthfulness. (...) What is striking is the joy and love represented in this desolate space realised as a true work of experimental art.."
-Ciara L. Murphy, The Reviews Hubs}

_BIO

Bart Baele and Yves Degryse founded BERLIN in 2003 together with Caroline Rochlitz. The starting point of each performance of BERLIN is located in a city or a region somewhere on the planet. Characteristic is its documentary and interdisciplinary work methods. Focusing on a specific research question, it engages different media depending on the content of the project.

They started the series Holocene [the Holocene is the current geological era] with the performances Jerusalem, Iqaluit, Bonanza, Moscow and Zvizdal. A few years later BERLIN started a new cycle Horror Vacui [the fear of emptiness] of which Tagfish, Land’s End and Perhaps All The Dragons are the first three episodes.
BERLIN is currently working on new performances in both cycles.
The number of projects is not defined but the Holocene cycle will end in Berlin for the creation of a fiction–docu project with different inhabitants of the former cities of the cycle.

Cathy Blisson is a journalist, dramaturge and author. During her 8 years at Télérama she covered hybrid present-day creations on the cusp of stage and visual art. She has been freelance since September 2009 and hovers on the edge of the cultural and societal. She writes for Mouvement, Stradda, Evene.fr, Graffiti Art Magazine, Arts Magazine or Journal des Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers.
As a dramaturge she lends groups and companies (Berlin, le Théâtre du Centaure, les Cies In Vitro, Un loup pour l’homme, La Zampa, L’Eolienne, Le Clair-Obscur...) who are trying to find their own written and/or stage voice a helping hand. As a 'globe-trotter in an exclusion zone’ she travels regularly to the Chernobyl area. In 2016 this yields Zvizdal conceived with the group BERLIN.
As a ‘neighbourhood writer’, she thinks along with the multi-disciplinary association Studio Public about ways of intervening in the urban space: image/word bartering at La Villeneuve (Grenoble, 2010), sound harvesting with the Exyzt collective on the Marché des Capucins during the Biennale d’Art Contemporain Evento (Bordeaux, 2011), creative writing workshops and in situ textual interventions at the Microlycée 94 (Ivry-sur-Seine, 2013-2014).
Since 2012 she has been directly associated with various projects of the In Vitro company. In this context, she contributes as an author/witness to the Laboratoires de Traverse (multi-disciplinary collective experimentation sessions) set up by the director Marine Mane. Similarly, she is also helping circus artist Alexandre Fray (Un Loup pour l’homme) compile his Grandmothers project. Together they run acrobatics workshops for the elderly. They also explore the reciprocity between installation and performance; a process Blisson chronicles as they go along.
Parallel to the above, she is also working on a number of text/sound projects, first and foremost through the &. collective, which she founded in the autumn of 2014 with Anne Quentin to bring the friction between the journalistic and the artistic into play. She is currently developing Abrasion, an alphabet-primer performance that is to be published with l’Entretemps. The idea is to fathom the expansion of the performance domain as it ventures into the public arena.