Sensus Communis
Physicall / object theatre and sound puppetry
2024
Continuo Theatre
Anna Luňáková
Jakub Štourač
Sensus Communis is a performative project on the border between sound poetry, sound puppetry and object theatre. Are there things we can only learn by hearing? How does our perspective become inverted if we choose hearing instead of visuality as our initial sense of knowledge?
Sensus communis, a term also known as "common sense," looks at how our sensory perception inscribes itself into our overall understanding of the world around us. And is it even the same world we are all living in? The theatrical adventure of listening is based on the idea that there are uncharted territories, absent worlds and multitudes of absent people or events to be brought back to the sensus communis by listening. The anonymous figures of the two "operators" as executors of an unknown, bureaucratic but also uncontrollable imaginative power.
Sound, as a natural part of our lives, takes on mythical dimensions in the performance as an object that cannot be perceived with a single glance; noise as a natural part of inhabited areas, but also of the cries of nature or cosmic space. Sound as a material from which and with which the most seemingly ordinary thing can be brought to life; because, after all, even the ordinary waste that we so easily dispose of can be its fantastic source. The specific memory of resonance embodied in tape recordings, which record unrepeatable moments just like photographs, can bring back those who have been deprived of words. Is it possible, with sufficient concentration, to perceive everything that has ever happened, is happening and will happen?
Closing Time
Physical and visual theatre performance
2024
Continuo Theatre
performance information
Editorial of the 1st issue:
What's a !TLAČ?
!TLAČ is a printmaking gesture, a student project, a freshly established intellectual ecosystem and at the same time just an ordinary graphic sheet. The premise of the magazine is not to conquer the quasi-modernist reflection and essentialism of the medium of printmaking. The magazine is founded on the ambition to fill the (by us perceived) ostentatious gap in the field of broader theoretical reflection of printmaking. And through the popularisation of essays and original literary and non-literary forms already existing or directly produced for !TLAČ, wants to promote and defend printmaking as an underestimated subject of (not only) theoretical interest in a subversive, accessible, complex, banal or even provocative way. To search for forms of contemporary printmaking, to ask questions relevant to the field and its development, in an attempt to update and grasp the thinking about printmaking as a medium coming to terms with its position in the 21st century. !TLAČ is the responsibility of the students* of the Graphics 2 studio (AVU Prague) and their friends and colleagues across disciplines.
For now, until then, forever
Sound design featuring Vít Vavřena (Trumpet, synths)
Site-specific, physical and visual theatre project
2024
Continuo Theatre
Foundations of the Work of the Sun (Základy Práce Slunce)
Experimental short film from analogue photos.
14 min
2023
Anna Luňáková
Jakub Štourač
The Foundations of the Work of the Sun (2023) is a short film-poem consisting of interconnecting “micro-essays” that collectively constitute a “fictional documentary” about the work of the sun. Inspired by (among other things) G.W. Leibniz’s theory of a pre-established harmony and his contributions to the science of optics, the film reflects on how the camera “translates” sunlight into intelligible images and how a photograph might be understood as the visual document of an embodied perspective. Based on a poetic sound composition, each story in the film touches on themes of labor, exhaustion, and utopianism. One chapter alludes to Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit (1968), while another follows the story of a worker whose life is recorded in photograms, snapshots, and prints. Taken together, these “micro-essays” address the question: How to think collectively through the individual?
Rooster scares the death away
Narrative series of photograms and prints on photo paper.
Postcard sizes,
squares A6-A5
2021
Wasteland
Physical and sound theatre
2019
Jakub Štourač
Elia Moretti
Audiovisual theatre performance combining the language of movement, visual theatre and live music is a collaborative project by Jakub Štourač and Elia Moretti.
Loosely inspired by T. S. Eliot's poem of the same name, the project places original mythological images in a contemporary context, exploring their transformation and new interpretative possibilities. The basic situation is inspired by the figure of Tiresias - a blind oracle who lived his life as both a man and a woman. An individual existing between the present and the future, between femininity and masculinity, in a situation of loss of the body, loss of the distant for those close to him, in the sterile environment of an analytical laboratory, a hermetically sealed place of disconnected relationships, where one can only dissect one's own sample of humanity and absent soul. An individual with a desire for transformation, for breaking the cycle of his own wasteland. Where vital forces are lacking, spiritual revival, ritual death and rebirth is the only escape from the barren land.