Wanda & Nova deViator - Frozen Images

ABOUT PERFORMANCE

The process of freezing is a break between movements. As such, the structure of the concert, perforated with suspensions – breaks between points, is an emergence of a performance of frozen images, full of texts, contemporary electronic rhythms, exasperated guitars, noisy oscillations, and hypnotic bass lines. Along with the performers’ actions, tactile interfaces, and moving pictures, the performance raises questions about hypersexualisation and pornification, fetishisation in consumerism, mechanisms of the image and visual culture, idealisation of love, and the meaning of art and culture. Movement, text, and frozen images open up in their primary way precisely based on contemporary organised noise. The music, ambivalently contextualised through the video image and movement, stretches out to the body and its vibration, rational and affective. Frozen images get broken by the vibration of the word and the moving of the actual flesh/body in all its resistance.

Technical raider

CREDITS

Authors, concept, directing: Wanda & Nova deViator
Advising: Maja Smrekar

Music:
Vocals, keyboards, electronics: Wanda
Vocals, electronics, guitar: Nova deViator
Audio advising: Irena Tomažin
Movement/actions/space: Wanda
Programming, sensors, real-time video: Nova deViator

Light design: Urška Vohar
Video: WNdV, Boštjan Božič, Miran Bratuš, Ivana Gregor
Performers on video: Matej Kejžar, Boštjan Antončič, Jianan Qu, Andrasz Dobi, Katja Kosi, Irena Mikec
Costumes: WNdV, Matija Ferlin/Artikl
Design: Mauricio Ferlin
Photography: WNdV
Visual intervention: Multipraktik
Translation: Katja Kosi
Language editing: Simona Ana Radež, Eric Dean Scott
Promotion and coordination: Sabina Potočki
Office coordination: Nina Janež
Executive production: Andrea V. Atwood

SUPPORT

Production: Emanat
Supported by: Ministry of Culture RS, Municipality of Ljubljana - Department for Culture
In collaboration with: Delavski dom Trbovlje; KUD Mreža - AKC Metelkova mesto
Partners: Radio Student; K 6/4; Kliping; Mladina

REVIEWS

(...) The performance Frozen Images goes beyond the mere form of a concert by adopting the form of contemporary variety show, in which the authors refer to, with movement, visual, and textual elements, various literary and theoretical texts – from Mina Loy, Clarisa Pinkola Estés to Amelia Jones –, which problematize gender and identity, (non)integration of the body in the universe of media images, failed realizations of the imperative of pleasure, acting out of the hyper-sexualised, cross-dressing style, which did carry a subversive charge in the 80s but was during the last two decades, as nearly every cultural strategy, profitably encroached and “tamed” by fashion and popular industry.
The authors also broach the question of originality, namely through the etiquette of originality, with which the centres of capital power feed themselves on artistic paradigms from the margins of mainstream culture, appropriate them, and profitably authorise them as their own inventions, while the original incubators of ideas as a consequence unlawfully, though actually justifiably, attempt to regain their rights to use the common cultural legacy with “pirating”, thus resisting the elitist usage and commercial abuse of their own ideas. (…)
excerpt from To Speak and Sing Through One's Body, Mojca Kumerdej, Delo, 03.03.2010

Concert or Performance? Performance Art or Happening? Not or. And! (...) The aesthetics of Wanda and Nova deViator is based on trashy-kitschy-cheap-porn look, which aims to subvert the reification of persons and their sexualisation. At the same time, the texts build on an open talk about sex and explication of different sexual practices, problematising women's indoctrination into pleasing men to the extent of simulation of pleasure, which is an even bigger violence over one's body as supposedly deviant forms of sexuality, such as BDSM practices.(...)
(...) Besides subversive feminist considerations, the theme number two of this tandem is precisely the tackling of topical cultural-political issues, bound to the neoliberal capitalist logic. The critical moment in a song about copyright issues is equally strong as in the critique of post-feminist representation of women in the media. As a matter of fact, it is about the one question of contemporary society, which is poured out as a powerful performative cry. (...)
excerpt from Theatre Frozen into a Concert, Pia Brezavšček, Radio Študent, 26.02.2010

(…)The authors tackle a complex examination of the two key features for identity construction, the roles of the observer and the observed, (she is filming him, while he, dressed as a woman, follows the instructions of a woman-coach from an American TV show, etc.). In front of the lens of a camera, we constitute ourselves in a pose, attempting to construct a different body – image, which either brings the body to life or makes it lifeless.
Individual scenes are performed with humour and distance. Through confrontations of different media, the self-reflective gaze over the construction of own identity turns out to be inevitably bound between the image of the body and its remnant. The associative character of words, images, and sounding outlines sexual identities at increasingly evasive borders between the public and the private. Ultimately, we are dealing with an ethical question about the status of reality beyond technical and aesthetic questions. Does reality disappear because the eye is incapable of preserving it? What does the image preserve or, better, freeze? What is concealed in the process? Such questions reflect a tendency toward an open, interdisciplinary treatment of images. In this sense, the mediality of images reveals the experience of the body, while every image embodies a way of seeing. (...)
excerpt from From the Edges of Images to the Folds of the Body, Mojca Puncer, Dnevnik, 01.03.2010

06.03.2010, Wanda & Nova deViator @ Red Dawns Festival, Ljubljana, SI
09.02.2010, ThePerformers:Wanda&NovadeViator@labsofperception.blogspot.com
09.05.2010, LAC2010@HKU-Utrecht, rncbc.org aka Rui Nuno Capela
09.10.2010, Flickr photo gallery, Actfest, Čakovec, HR
01.11.2010, Interview Radio Fro, Linz, Simone Boria, Uschi Reiter, Anne M. Liebermann, AT
17.11.2010, Frozen Images di Wanda & Nova; Corriere, Claudia Rocchi, IT
15.06.2011, Frozen Images: Wanda & Nova deViator, Theatre Bristol, Phil Owen, GB
05.06.2012, Trouble 2012, l’impureté sans conditions, Mouvement.net, Sylvia Botella, FR