Performing Arts Festival Groningen 2019

Groningen (NL), NP3 – The White Cube
16 November 2019 h 16.00

SO, WHAT IS YOUR QUESTION

a performance in three parts or acts,
which is a reflection on a creative relationship and process
a poetic dialogue / made visible / through interactions
with oneself, with the other, with the audience

by and with
Marina Kazakova and Sara Maino

Did you have a good tête-à-tête with yourself today? What images go through your mind when you’re alone with yourself? Whose hands do you see when getting asleep?

Let’s add some more questions we usually pose to ourselves: What is it that you say to yourself when you’re driving a car alone? Do you recount your past experiences in your mind? Or are you regretting what you wished you’d said to… you know who?

On the whole, the performance “So, What Is Your Question” is uneventful. The plot boils down to a dialogue between the two poets: Sara Maino and Marina Kazakova. The main conflict is the clash of the visible and the invisible, the inner and the outer, the internal and the external worlds.

First, we see the poet’s outer – the observer, who’s dreams, thoughts and imagination are verbal and out loud. Then, we see the inner, claiming its place and revealing itself through the smell, the emotion of fingers over a typewriter, through the poet’s eyes and, most importantly, through her magic interaction with the spectators. In the end, we try to feel the balance between the two: the visible (Marina Kazakova) and the invisible (Sara Maino), the poet and the spectator, us and the universe.

Creation is the experience of the duality of the observer and the observed. Therefore, in this performance the authors’ point of departure is the interplay of the two selves as well as the interplay between the poet and the world. The idea is a conversation as the core of a creative process, dialogic structure as the heart of our creative thinking, and also of building relationships.

The authors show poetry as a response to your inner self, poetry as a response to the presence of someone else in your life, poetry as a response to the universe, in general.

The stage space in the performance is by no means limited to the stage alone. It is changing between the 2 perspectives, the external and the internal, as well as it involves the spectator who is either a part of the scenography or sitting in front of the poet who is writing a poem, here and now, for the spectator. In this interactive part of the show the poets pose the following questions: which role does the audience, the spectator involved have in the action of being observed? Does he/she have any questions at all?

In this live poetry act, the artists display their instant thoughts on their creative relationship and why it and how it has unfolded the way it has, they come to see that there is a point within ourselves when we turn inward or outward in response to what we experience. The question is: when should we look inward for the power and when should we look outward – or maybe it is the synthesis of the two… In the closing poem ‘L’Uomo Vitruviano’ the poets appear in multiple superimposed positions, focusing our attention on the problem of the balance within ourselves, between each other, between us and the universe…
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