2015 » Estonia » Student Section

A Report to the Academy

A hybrid installation with live action and a digital mediatized performance by students from the Department of Scenography at the Estonian Academy of the Arts.

In Franz Kafka’s A Report to an Academy, an ape named Red Peter (Rotpeter) delivers a lecture to a learned society in which he gives an account of the life he led before he became an artist. Captured on the Gold Coast, Peter is transported in a cage to Hamburg where he faced two alternatives – the zoological gardens or the variety stage, of which he chose the stage. Through a series of efforts to escape being an ape, he gradually achieves what he intended: “My ape nature fled out of me, head over heels and away…”

Examining the drama of the main character and the fragile line that separates ape and human within the light of Kafka’s story, the current installation questions what it takes to become an artist while simultaneously commenting on the fragmented nature of the contemporary art education system.

The pre-recorded performance is presented to viewers in film format, but is also organically integrated into the spatial installation. Along with the mediatized version of the story, some acts are performed by the students themselves, thus transforming the tiny room into a performance space in which the main character – hands in the pockets of his trousers and with a bottle of wine on the table – half lies and half sits in his rocking chair, gazing out of the window into the evening twilight. Walking through the installation space, the spectators simultaneously walk through the life story of an ape’s painful efforts at becoming human.

As the central character himself describes:

“I engaged teachers for myself, established them in five communicating rooms, and took lessons from them all at once by dint of leaping from one room to the other. That progress of mine! How the rays of knowledge penetrated from all sides into my awakening brain! I do not deny it: I found it exhilarating. But I must also confess: I did not overestimate it, not even then, much less now. With an effort, which up till now has never been repeated, I managed to reach the cultural level of an average European.”

His stage performances as a variety artist enable Red Peter to enjoy a much desired lifestyle that he considers to be distinctly human. As the report goes: “When I come home late at night from banquets, from scientific receptions, from social gatherings, there sits waiting for me a half-trained little chimpanzee, and I take comfort from her as apes do.”

The three characters of the story – Red Peter, his nameless chimpanzee wife, and Busenau the impressario – occasionally make discreet appearances in full costume in the late afternoon and disappear soon after.