Avtorski projekt Nataše Matjašec Rošker
Hic sunt Leones – Here Are Lions
Following the immensely successful multi-award winning project by Nataša Matjašec Rošker Do tu sega gozd (The Forest Ends Here), 2012, the artist continues her explorations of authentic performance constructions and movements between artistic strategies. In the process of questioning the existence of every individual and possible ways of (co)-habitation, horizons of the autonomous power of the theatre – stories, singing, songs, dance and visual images, come alive in space and time.
The title of the project is suggestive of an adventure as ancient cartographers used to label undiscovered places on maps with Latin words "Hic sunt Leones” (Here Be Lions). Nataša Matjašec Rošker and her team study the dangerous area that is the line where human fragility, sensitivity and evasiveness reveal themselves clearly. The fact that she placed Schrödinger's cat in a box in the opening scene predetermines the performance by implying the concurrence of life and death, the experiment that not only the cat is exposed to, but all humanity and every individual whose possibility of escaping and thus surviving, has been taken away. The wandering and feeling group of bodies – limited by the "cat” boxes on their heads in the second scene point to the fact that a human being will not let go of the rope, which is the connection that can draw them to this or the other side, despite the clearly set limits in their heads or the "boxes”. The five individuals in the performance Here Be Lions move along these coordinates, looking for their essence. They are looking for themselves despite the unstable intangibility and they are also looking for the others despite being distinctly different. The questions that the scenes of isolation, love, physical exhaustion, freezing, unification, conversation with friends, passing monologues, the search for oneself and the others, connect in one simple story and give a more simple answer to the question: "What does one lobster mean?”
In the interview Nataša Matjašec Rošker says that she was interested in making a performance that was like a touch, a juncture, a look, or a breath. A performance in which existence replaces presence and which foregoes the big gestures and the big "arc", the big and especially, the current topics. A performance that takes its time; time for extended time, time for time. Time for imagination, fantasy, illusion and utopia.