Eszter Koncz

MeetFactory / no language barrier / 60 min

River Room is a performative installation devised and performed by Eszter Koncz as her diploma project in the MA program of Directing of Devised and Object Theater at DAMU. It premiered in Studio Alta on 7 June 2022.
The piece is inspired by and devised with the materials that constitute the city ~ cobblestones, feathers, and sunbeams. It was developed through long walks by the river, observing the everyday unfolding of natural life in the Old Town. Sustainability is an inherent part of the piece: All the materials used for the installation were collected either on the streets, parks, and hills around the city or have to be found at the site where it is realized. The installation is highly site-specific because every time, it has to be carefully shaped in conversation with the room where it is installed. And On a larger scale, it was also shaped in conversation with Prague.
River Room questions the border between natural and human, a room and a city, a city, and a forest. The city is not an enclosed island, nature is not missing here, it has the form of the city. The performance is not an enclosed island either: Nature is not exactly missing here, it has the form of the performance. Thinking this way, dwelling and devising is almost the same process: When you pick up a stone in the garden and take it to the studio where you rehearse, you are building the city. The room where the performance takes place is in the city and it is the city. The bird landing on a branch outside the closed window is just as much part of the performance as anything else in the room.
River Room takes place in a multimedia environment where human and nonhuman presence has the same weight. Over the course of one hour, audience members are free to find their own perspectives and explore the slowly unfolding events in their own rhythm. In this environment, the room's weather, gravity, and an uneven spot on the floor can have as much agency in generating movement as the performer or the audience. The audience is invited to make their own associations as they watch a sequence of images that succeed each other following an aesthetic order. It is a fragile, light blue world built of glass objects, mirrors, and green water from the river. And an absence of animals: snail shells, feathers, and fishing objects. This environment is supported by various screens and projections bringing different layers of time to the present moment. Media such as live streaming, a video of a pigeon that visited the now empty window yesterday, and an eye in an empty mirror, are quietly flowing into one another and the division between virtual and real slowly disappears. A projected image is as much part of nature as the ducks that it displays. When birds look into houses what impossible worlds they see.

Trailer: HERE

Concept, Performance: Eszter Koncz
Dramaturgical support: Cristina Maldonado, Eglė Simėnaitė
Production: Lamija Čehajić
Special thanks to: Alena Novotna, Adala Gajdosova, Tomáš Procházka, Viktor Černický, Jovita Siu, Susana Botero Santos

Photo by: Michael Lozano a Jonathan Machander

More info: HERE

Tickets HERE

Supported by: **DAMU - Theater Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague