Agmisterium (the last time)

Première: 2 November 2024, Bunker, Ljubljana

Durational performance

Director Klemen Kovačič
 

The Agmisterium is an account of the author/performer with himself, which unfolds on his body in the form of a one-time performance. It brings to the fore the question of the relationship between the tangible, earthly, everyday and the consecrated, poetic, transcendent. In doing so, with the desire to transcend one’s own individuality, one looks autobiographically into the past and spreads memories as a training ground for playing out universal questions: self-knowledge as a search for meaning; memory as a bearer of identity, its deceitfulness and simultaneous fatality; solitude as the basis of faith; and the surprisingness of excess feelings at the smallness of existence. We were clearly mistaken when we imagined God greater than us.

It is the wonder of life as a great mystery on the elusive ground between detail and universe, moment and eternity, step and journey. It is a liberation from one’s own subjectivity and thus a departure from a rationally guided narrative. It is an approach to the associative, intuitive, dreamlike and also spiritual.

It’s a farewell to the time when “we were loved like children, for no reason, for the very fact that we exist.”*

In terms of expression, he reaches for two theatrical means – performance in duration and butoh dance – and bets on both of them an immanent element: absolute presence. It is precisely and only with this kind of placement in the here and now that the possibility of a dimension beyond opens up.