Premiere: 2 November 2011, elledanse, Bratislava
Credits
Written, Directed, Set and Costume Design: Sláva Daubnerová
Idea and Performance: Sláva Daubnerová, Pavel Graus
Music: Pavel Graus
Translation: Peter Lomnický
Choreography: Matej Matejka
Video: Lukáš Kodoň
Light and Technical Design: Slavomír Šmálik
Production: P.A.T. Platform for Contemporary Theatre
About the work
Some Disordered Interior Geometries grew naturally out of Daubnerová’s engagement with Heiner Müller, which began with Hamletmachine. Deeply influenced by Müller’s writing, she continued her exploration of his work through the texts, poetry and personal history surrounding his relationship with Inge Müller, an accomplished poet and writer who was also Heiner Müller’s wife.
A central source is Die Todesanzeige (A Death Notice), Heiner Müller’s prose text about the suicide of his wife, Inge Müller. The performance draws on his poems, short prose texts, interviews and autobiography, and Inge Müller’s poetry. It explores the complex relationship between the two artists, the circumstances of Inge’s death and the traces of this loss in Müller’s later writing, while opening the question of what it meant for Inge Müller to live and create alongside a playwright of his stature.
Artistic approach
The work takes the form of a visual concert, composed of fragments, situations and moments tracing the disintegration of a relationship. Spoken testimonies, music and songs are interwoven with intimate home-video footage, creating a fragmented reconstruction of a shared life and its gradual dissolution. Theatre critic Marek Godovič described the performance as a unique and remarkable work, highlighting its distinctive form and emotionally charged treatment of the relationship’s disintegration.
The personal dimension of the project is essential to its conception: Daubnerová created and performed the work with Pavel Graus, her partner in life at the time, while the two performers were exploring the life and relationship of another artistic couple, Heiner and Inge Müller. This parallel gives the performance an intimate and self-reflexive dimension without turning the two relationships into a direct equivalence.
The work also brings Inge Müller into focus as an independent artist. Her literary contribution and the complicated history of her authorship within her collaboration with Heiner Müller become part of the performance’s broader questioning of artistic identity, authorship and recognition.
Selected international festival
Mitteleuropäisches Theaterkarussell, Vienna, 2011
Artistic development
Some Disordered Interior Geometries is a direct continuation of Daubnerová’s engagement with Heiner Müller that began with Hamletmachine. Where Hamletmachine confronted Müller’s text through the female body and questions of male and female identity, this work moves further into the world behind his writing — into biography, intimate relationships, authorship and loss. It marks a shift from interpreting Müller’s text to investigating the lives and artistic identities that surround it, while further developing Daubnerová’s documentary, visual and autobiographical language.
