marxismNL

Hosted by Marija Cetinić and Lorenzo García-Andrade, this season's second Avond will focus on two texts: one by Artun Alaska Arasli, and one by Jan Kunkel.

Artun Alaska Arasli's Untitled is equal parts a poem, a theatrical monologue, and a performance about the relationship between the stage and the house. Through the push-and-pull of a navel-gazing “I” and an accusatory “you,” it chronicles the conditions of its own making. 

Jan Kunkel's Tuber and the Lumpen is a little one-act play that proceeds from a deceptively simple premise: reenactment is just reenactment. One person is asked to follow and mimetically render an absorbing train of thought, like a musician interpreting a score. But this reading, staging an ensemble of antagonistic voices, is always prone to breakdown. It's a kind of epic joke, whose punchline is that there isn't one. The play’s minimal scenic framework consists only of a pair of gentleman’s shoes and a potato sack, both objects that bear material history and symbolic weight. Hinging on Brechtian Epic Theater (and its trivia), the piece draws from political economy and psychoanalysis to ask - again - what the potato might endure in the materialist imagination.