2011 » Estonia » Student section

Department of Desire

The Department of Desire is a curatorial attempt at creating a spatial collision of paradigms in which cinematic experience is shamelessly superimposed with theatrical expression. The state of contemporary human consciousness is driven and projected into a luminous reality in which the notion of “liveness” no longer stands for the here and now. The audience’s desire, its longing for a primal endgame, is projected into the virtual realm, which only simulates the return of the catatonic gaze. The project aims to expose and explore the rupture between the suggested liveness of the performers in the flesh and the fleshless-ness of the virtual cinematic experience. It seeks to cure the horror vacuums of the screen (virtual or imagined) and to investigate human desire through a hybrid performance in a confined space. In other words, it aims to place desire under a turntable of perception while at the same time putting it on a display for the spectator. The result is moments of drama within a communal anagnorisis, failures and calamities performed by the students as they strip bare the hidden desires of a monadic spectator. By bringing to light hidden fantasies, new ones are immediately triggered in the minds of the audience. The Department of Desire is constructed in order to investigate how the apparatus of desire can be performed and offered to the audience, using a case study of a confined space with a restricted number of people and a limited budget. Such is the current context in which the meta-Department operates. The Department of Desire is an attempt at treating cinematic obsessions via the therapy of theatre, and vice versa. Through a theatrical representation of embodied desires, audiences will witness the fulfillment of human drama. Members of “Department of Desire”: Eve Ormisson, Sander Põldsaar, Ele Krusell, Kristi Soe, Kristel Maamägi, Henry Griin Director: Mart Koldits, Von Krahl Theatre Curator: Lilja Blumenfeld, Professor of Scenography