Performance
CYNETart_03transit, 10.10.2003, Festspielhaus Hellerau

Concept/performance: Georg Hobmeier, movement: dramaturgy: Claudia Heu, sound: Gregor Ladenhauf, video: Leonhard Lass

After Kampfzone, the performance group Senselabor focuses on drama again and uses interface technologies and video projections for the ancient art of story-telling and theatre. The plots hero is one of the oldest protagonists in occidental tales and myths: Odysseus. Senselabor compiles a scenario inspired by the classic epic of Homer as well as by a part of Dantes Divina Commedia in which Dante meets Odysseus soul in hell. Odysseus had been banished after being bold enough even in his old age to sail to the forbidden seas with his comrades upon which incident god shattered the evil-doers ship.
The moment of death is the storys focus. Odysseus lies dying on the cliffs, his spirit wanders a last time through his memories and moments of his life. For Odysseus and his actors/ performers the stage becomes a mental space, a carrier of memories; it is the access to the interface between the man and the memories through which he wanders in this eternal moment, facing the end of his worldly existence. Real-time-generated and -altered video fragments are, next to sounds, the carriers of the memories. The performer triggers and controls those elements with the position and direction of his body.
Die letzte Reise is yet another of Senselabors attempts to explore new techniques of story-telling and new performance methods without blinding the audience with technical innovation. The technical equipment is even assigned a role a multilayer audio-visual architecture forming Odysseus memories.
The body and its dramatic potential, its movements, its theatrical projections are extended by its linkage with medial content such as video or sound synthesis. This linkage of the real and physical world with the artificial and spiritual world is designed to disclose the audience a new layer of perception.