Caprice, voiced performance

The solo performance by Irena Tomažin entitled "Caprice" uses voice as its medium. The voice unwittingly discloses the history of the body. It tells us stories engraved in it that it cannot get rid off or change, stories that it must and will tell, relive over and over again. An obsessive persistence with the question of which of the voices is the right one may find a temporary answer in a kind of a fragile suspense, instantaneous exhalation. This is followed by a new slide into the game of re-examining the identities. A constant circulation of self-reflection. A vicious circle offering a single alternative: silence.

The performance deals with the issue of the capriciousness of human nature. It asks itself about the different faces that we wear – from the most intimate and hidden to the masques we put on when leaving the house. The search for the answer to the question of which face is the right one is perhaps just a trap we get caught in because of our fear, because of our desire for safety… including safety against ourselves. In order to find any answer, we must perhaps simply surrender ourselves to our caprice and follow it …

A caprice is a sudden emergence of uncontrolled and unstable will that cannot be explained by the circumstances and situations in which it appears. Its significance and truth evade the conventional rationalisation and show themselves outside the field of an individual's character. Can the emergence of a caprice disclose a personal confession, while the character conceals the most intimate constant of the human nature – loneliness? On the other hand, a person's character could also be seen as an obsession by a certain and continuous caprice.

What significance is conveyed today by a personal confession in the ocean of particularities; which truth does it tell? Can it tell, do, change something? We have become deaf and blind by all that has been said and done, by the flow of continuous changes – and despite so many changes there is no difference. And while a person is overwhelmed with the options of various fictive and virtual characters, and is able to make him- or herself anybody, the truth in these options is that the person remains a nobody… Nevertheless, it is necessary to be "somebody". This "somebody" is perhaps just a battlefield involving different stories, voices, faces, interpretations … In order to hear him – or herself, a person must first become silent. Supposedly, the silence is a certain absence. Absence of voice, words, movement. How to touch this absence and drive it into motion, expression, existence…? Can silence have its voice and space? Are those the voice and space of another, for another? Or a new slide into the game of one's own caprices …

Loneliness is the time when a question may be raised. Silence is the space where an answer may be heard.

By Irena Tomažin
Author of the concept and performer: Irena Tomažin
Dramaturgy: Vida Cerkvenik Bren
Music: Mitja Reichenberg
Set design: Marko Brdar
Lighting design: Tomaž Štrucl
Costume design: Davorka Požgan
Producer: Maska Productions
Executive producer: Špela Trošt, Maska Productions
co-producers: Plesni Teater Ljubljana and EN-KNAP
Subsidised by Ministry of Culture and the City Municipality of Ljubljanay
Premiere: 21 January 2005, Dance Theatre Ljubljana