Aga Beaupré

   Within the space of an immersive dystopian theatre, the role of a passive spectator is questioned and fiction fluently amalgamates with reality. Trapped in-between it’s cylindrical walls, the audience unwittingly begins to participate in the monodrama performed by a torpid actor who gradually begins to embody plentitude of personalities.

The main character is a Sisyphus-like figure, who’s ambiguity lies in the condition of his body, which is permanently disintegrating. His unfamiliarity perceived by the audience comes from the depersonalizing qualities of the progressing decay that makes him linger somewhere between human and animal, man and woman, child and adult. The latter is being persecuted by his alter-ego the Stranger. Throughout the play he begins to embody divine qualities gradually becoming omnipotent; in a world devoid of God he accuses, adjudicates and executes. Meanwhile, the audience becomes actively engaged in the spectacle of cruelty. Obsessed by the thought of punishment they gradually turn the stage into the ruin of a monstrous quasi-civilization.

While Bataille points out how human awareness registers the moment of passing from life to corpse, here this terrifying moment of transition, falling and descending is being prolonged into an eternity of an infinite loop. Presented in a form of two screens audio-visual installation, Komoedia repeats the familiar shape, of the morbid and grotesque world once again trapping the audience between the stage and their own gaze.