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Interview with Adva Zakai

23.05.2016

Maker of Last Seen Standing Between Brackets

Can you introduce yourself?

Born in Israel, living in Europe. Performing, writing, socialising, dancing, studying, teaching and loving like all of us do, one way or another.

Do you notice a difference in audience between different countries and/or cities?

I notice rather myself being different in every context I visit, than the audiences who watch the performance.

What is your opinion on the social relevance of theatre?

Many ways to answer this question. Here is an attempt to articulate one: in theatre (and other art forms), reflection becomes embodied and materialised. As such, theatre is not only providing a context to think about life, but it carries a potential to generate realities of its own, as real as any other narratives that exist outside of it. The more realities I create, the more conscious I become of the possibilities of changing existing ones.

If you hadn’t become an artist, what would have been your profession?

I experience artistic practice as a way of being, not merely as a profession. Personal inclination, desires and background, led me to consider no other option than relating to my environment and to my own life experience through art. As becoming an artist was never a calculated choice but rather a mode of existence, this question remains impossible to answer.

What does the title of your piece, Last Seen Standing Between Brackets, refer to and what is the connection with your performance?

It refers to the moment where text and its reader, or text and its writer cannot tell anymore who/what is creating who/what. An experience I believe everybody is familiar with.

In your performance you work with several aspects, including virtuality, actuality, privacy and public aspects, organic and digital aspects. How did you combine all of these aspects in your performance?

The notion of space is metaphorical when it comes to the virtual, but yet many of us share the feeling of living in two environments, the digital and the physical. The interaction between those two spaces, whether the distinction  between them is real or not,  generates for me new questions about the relationship between body and presence, body and text, body and embodiment. In the performance I touch upon these questions, by combining text animation (digital) and live performance (physical), and try to bring them together with reflection about live performance nowadays.

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