Supporter

Supporter

19 February, 2018

Eka Mazmishvili – “The moon has the other side, that we don’t see”

The choice is ours - to be oriented on one side of the moon all the time or to do something impossible - to touch the other side of the moon.

Theatre can do it.

Let us imagine such an adventure:

You are somewhere in a cafe or at home, maybe in a car on the road, there are other people with you. And they are talking about the emotions that some play in the theatre evoked in them. They talk about the thought that is still pounding around in their brain - "I'm still thinking about that" - even if it's a play they saw 10 days or 1 month ago. And emotions are contagious. You immediately respond to that emotion and search for that "play" online and buy a ticket (hopefully it's available). Then you wait for that date, for that play, you run out of the lecture and run along the streets filled with cars, outside the windows of minibuses and blue buses - waiting for something special. You are in a hurry. You arrive on time, enter, sit in the seat reserved for you by your ticket (perhaps not alone, but with a friend), and.... that's the end of your ordinary life: everything that connects you with your world disappears from your thoughts, and your mind is occupied only with what's happening on the stage.... and little by little you become part of the play. You are Hamlet, and you don't know how you would act in his place - and then you think .... yes, of course you're Tybalt - very charming. You're an "enemy of the people" or not, but “Bakula's pigs” get in your way and ruin everything for you. You're opposing "Tartuffe" or a documentary text is written by you, when suddenly the light blinds you and the color takes over completely. The music intensifies and you already hear the text as if it were your own.... Your emotions follow the emotions of the characters, intensify, weaken, intensify again, and then comes that magical moment that will make you return to the theatre again and again - the merging of spectator and actor. There is no longer a boundary between the stage and the auditorium - it has already disappeared, and "the whole world is theatre"....

And then the end of the show brings you to your senses. It's time for you to go home. But you're not the same as you came - you're different. You have thought about something you had not thought about before; you have found a new emotion in yourself; you have seen that someone else is thinking about the same thing you are thinking about, but their opinion does not coincide with yours, but you like it; you like it because it is an opportunity for renewal, a degree of freedom that you

could not have achieved on your own if it were not for the theatre, if it were not for the courage of the theatre and the courage of the artists.

And you go home from the theatre, let's say, and get on the blue bus again, and that world, that text, that mimics and that movement follow you....

And then you definitely want to go down this path again and become involved in new ideas and aesthetics - you already know more, you can do more than you did yesterday, before you saw the performance.... And your world has also become wider and more diverse....

And this is exactly the kind of adventure that will take you out of the everyday, out of the routine, that will raise more questions in you than you had before, but will not give you answers, only hints.

This is how you can see the other side of the moon - theatre. The theatre that makes us better.

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