THE PERFORMANCE
(Premiere December 9 at the Theatre of the Athens School of Fine Art)
A Man walks down the HOTEL stairs. Exhausted from his chronic insomnia, he is ready to check-in at the sleep service that will help him feel better and finally manage to sleep tonight. The entire personnel are ready to welcome him to the HOTEL facilities and assist him in reaching the serenity he has been longing for. The two Women of the night shift, having acquired the necessary information from his personal diary, are ready to bring to life the selected memories that their guest has chosen to relive with them. Within this controlled environment, the guests have the opportunity to change, if they so desire, the story of their lives, amending past mistakes but also gaining a better consciousness of it, since they have the chance to relive it. Simultaneously, a live audience (the spectators) watches the “life”, the spectacle offered by the personal life of each customer.
In HOTEL, the Man has a second chance: to relive moments that he has missed, to see beloved people, to change things for the best. But how easy is it really to relive moments of your life, even when it comes to the happy ones? Are good memories as good as we remember them to be or have we missed something? What is real and what is constructed? What is really happening in HOTEL? What is true and what is false? What secret is the Man hiding?
A particular feature of the performance is the original composition of the theatrical and cinematic codes: cameras placed in specific points of the performance space and connected to a video mixer will allow filming and editing the live performance on the spot. This way, the spectators will be able to watch the performance live every night, but also as a film.
THE SERVICE
HOTEL is an artistic fictional project. It concerns a night resort dedicated to those suffering from insomnia and sleep disorders. The guests have the opportunity to follow a specific treatment program. The HOTEL method is simple: the guests are asked to relive moments from their past, bringing to life their memories and the people in them, but also recreating various fantasies and hidden desires. This way, the guests of the HOTEL take a deep dive both into their conscious and unconscious, while the hotel staff, extracting information from the guests’ personal diaries, accurately impersonates important people in the lives of their guests by following their life “scenario” as closely as possible.
Through the life of the guest of the HOTEL, in an indirect and surreal way, we, as spectators, experience all the emotional landscape of today’s reality: the lack of sleep, the chaos of public services, the conflict between personal ethics and survival, the emotional difficulty in connecting with other people and the introversion caused by difficult social conditions to those assuming them
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INTERNET – VISUAL ARTS PROJECT
Many remarkable young and renowned artists coming from varied artistic disciplines have collaborated for the creation of blindspot theatre group’s new project. An integral part of the project as a whole is the website of the HOTEL, which advertises the services of this peculiar hotel, provides various programs and information concerning sleep, and hosts the works of important Greek artists, created especially for HOTEL and contributing to its therapeutic services. The interactive action of ΗΟΤΕL has already begun long ago and is on-going on the Internet where it has been met with warm response. The works of the artists will be also available for the spectators to see at the HOTEL physical performance space.
michalis konstantatos 