NOVA DRAMA 2024: Grand Prix to “History of Violence”
History of Violence by LUDUS theater is based on a well thought and elaborated stage concept of a young director Barbora Chovancova. The famous novel by French author Edouard Luis about the very possibility of verbally expressing a trauma, Chovancova stages in an appropriate, refine metaphorical way. Instead of playing different fictional characters, four fantastic actors, Alexandra Palatinusova, Marian Chalany, Tadeaš Bolo and Jakub Švec, are incarnating different perspectives to the trauma. That’s why the director, in collaboration with dramatrug Martin Kubran and light designer Michaela Beniač, put the actors in a situation to constantly switch from one position to another, from one character to another, from spot light to darkness. This made a spatial, atmospheric and dramaturgic dizziness, a kind of abstract, geometrical “rachomon effect” in which one can hardly take an unambiguous stand towards the case of a homosexual rape. At the same time, the staging functions as a metaphor of both the police investigation and victim’s reenactment of a trauma – a double attempt to reconstruct the truth. With the set design by Anna Chrtkova which refers to a photo studio, the final scene is a clear reenactment of the police photo shooting on the spot of crime. But before this final picture there is a scene which is the climax of the show. As Edouard Luis suggests, trauma can hardly be talked about: it stays inscribed in our body, in our flesh. That is why Chovancova finishes the show with a non-verbal scene. Instead of a realistic reenactment of a rape, which would be rather banal, she makes, in collaboration with Daniel Raček and two great actors Bolo and Švec, a strong, energetic, poetic, abstract physical intercourse which at the same time act of love and act of violence, sex and fight, cuddling and rape… But first of all, our desperate, unsuccessful attempt to discover the Other.
Prof. Dr Ivan Medenica, president of the international jury
