We’re closing, but the festival goes on

Live blogging from the Neu/Now festival (9)

And in the end it all drowns in blood. Robbe Vervaeke’s Erszebet is a phantasmagoric wet dream / nightmare in oil paint. It’s the only oil paint you will see in this festival really, and it’s oil paint that moves: Robbe painted out every still of his 5-minute film, from the red roof of Erszebet’s house to her bath duck floating in a tub full of blood. Frail in a white dress, she stands by the window with a glass of wine. The victim arrives, ties his dog to a tree, and comes in. He will not get out.

How to see everything

Live blogging from the Neu/Now Festival (8)

Everyone knows it’s impossible to see everything. Some things feature only once. Some always feature at the same time at different places. And if you go to see everything, you’ll be so over-exposed you won’t have anything sensible to say at the end of the day. Yes, we know all that. And still we tried.

Teaching for Now

Live blogging from the Neu/Now Festival (7)

The white horse head at the entrance where you can put your ideas is beginning to fill. While we are brewing ideas for next year’s festival already, there is another question to address: What should you do to get picked? Of course, the jury is not going to give you a recipe for how to make your degree work in a way that will get you into next year’s Neu/Now, but for them as teachers, the issue is rather what to ask from your students. A good deal of their adult life as artists will go into getting selected, attracting attention, making a difference. And for many of them, the degree work will be what launches them.

Do it yourself

Live blogging from the Neu/Now Festival (6)

Floor Plan

Last night Open Batch Theatre performed Floor Plan. They could only do one show because today they flew back for their graduation; Millie, who is doing the blog on neunow.eu, was there in time to have a short interview with them.

Live blogging from the Neu/Now Festival (5)

The Ten Commandments of the Arts Printing House

Linked to the Titanic building is the Arts Printing House, where we are having all dance & theatre performances. As a former newspaper printing house, it has a turbulent history as one of the places that was occupied during the fall of the communist regime and the short-lived Soviet army countercoup. After that, it lay vacant for a few years and then became a student/underground theatre venue – and it still has something of that athmosphere, particularly when you look at the pictures on the wall in the courtyard. With some underground nostalgia you could even say that the EU spoiled it with their regional support funds that pimped the building – though pimped with taste.

Live blogging from the Neu/Now festival (4)

Something about the opening, after all

So Europe’s got a new a president, and the Lithuanian president couldn’t be at the opening because she had to attend a certain long dinner in Stockholm – a dinner that started days before. Here, the festival goes on as before; I haven’t heard any cars hooting as when Obama won.

There hasn’t been anything so far on this blog about the opening. And rightly so, because openings are speeches and wine.

Live blogging from the Neu/Now festival (3)

Dance in the pocket hall

What a day. Where to begin? Let’s start at the end. We were packed together in the smaller hall of the Arts Printing house, appropriately called the ‘pocket hall’. People were sitting on the floor to see the dance. Well that’s nothing odd in informal settings, and I like the touch of underground or living-room performance it gives to our EU-logo-laden festival. (Anthony Dean tells me they also do it in the State Opera here in Vilnius, it’s part of the local folklore that people will use every aisle or step to sit on and “fully booked” is a malleable expression.) If the festival wasn’t free we’d be selling out.

Live blogging from the Neu/Now festival (2)

Marloeke van der Vlugt: Patchmaker

It’s as if you enter an anatomical theatre. Marloeke van der Vlugt is sitting there, with a camera and a mirror pointed at herself, serenely, waiting for you to press the sensors on her body. Around her are video screens, and windows that double as mirrors. In her installation “Patchmaker”, body contact calls up video and sound – while you are intimately close to her, touching her feet and belly and hand and shoulder and neck, you are also playing her like an instrument.

Live blogging from the Neu/Now Festival

Koji Wakayama’s robot gardens

What you see here is a robot garden. In fact, it’s Koji Wakayama’s installation works with robots pushing around flower pots – for better or for worse, it was selected under “design”. But then Koji’s background is as a designer, at Konstfack in Stockholm – he is a self-taught programmer and robot engineer.

Neu/Now is there for sure

Yes we’re there and not to be missed. These are some pics Adina made in the streets of Vilnius this a.m. If clicking on the image doesn’t work, here’s the full link:

http://picasaweb.google.com/adinaluncan/NEUNOWFestivalVilnius02#

Judging from them, the whole place must be full of orange stars – enough, at least, to give everyone the impression that something is going on.