Shadow Meadow

Jan Mocek’s performance combines elements of visual art, object theater, and dark ambient. It explores situations in which the non-presence of objects or people creates an impression of their intense presence. Performers Irina Andreeva and Jan Mocek appear in the empty space of the Alfred ve dvoře theater in order to discover hidden spaces, dark matter, or black holes, and to transform them in a manner that is ironic, poetic, and humorous, but also unpleasant, pop-cultural and avant-garde. In today’s audiovisually oversaturated world, they present a somewhat radical gesture: emptiness, silence, darkness, negation, nothingness, pause. When you look into the darkness, the darkness begins to look at you.

How do we relate to things that we don’t know or that are not present? What do we use to fill in the gap of their absence? Is the product of all that is unknown always fear, or can a lack of information be used or abused?

“There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.” – Donald Rumsfeld (former US Secretary of Defense).

The performance moves on the very margins of visibility. Through the original use of LED lights, stroboscopes, and smoke, it creates an immersive environment that offers the audience an extreme theater experience – vibrating space, physically perceived sounds, images on the retina, and a sense of timelessness and other dimensions.

Warning: The performance makes use of a stroboscope and othes extreme light effects.