An Inventory
| Spectacle | A necessary event. Divorced from the spectacle, the play is reduced to its most rudimentary form – the “illustrated” text. |
| Play | Often a refuge for mediocrity. Ideally, an event defined not by repetition but by the need to find significant modes of expression. A new language for emotion, for example. The inexhaustible possibilities of movement. The sheer beauty of physicality on the stage. That space at the intersection of sound and light. (The shadows are as important as the light). The opposite of predictability, contentment, boredom. |
| Theatricality | An act of subtlety and restraint. (No, in theatre gestures don’t have to be ten times bigger. This applies to political agendas as well when they aim to overshadow the spectacle). |
| Text | Only one of the possible discourses on the stage – definitely not the most important one. The text alone (theatre on paper) should be a point of origin, not the end of the affair. |
| Performance | The world, today. Its condition. A certain tension between the body of an essay and its footnotes. The unwritten stage directions inside the fictional text. The poem's dialogic possibilities. The strictly astonishing power of silence. Intelligence and self-doubt. “About this ambiguity, I am ambiguous.” |
Performance Index
August 2011
Dayana Stetco
Dayana Stetco’s plays have been produced in her native country, Romania,
the U.S. and the UK. In 2001 she founded the interdisciplinary physical
theatre ensemble, The Milena Group. Her book, Seducing Velasquez and Other Plays, was released by Ahadada Books in 2009. Her fiction has appeared in various
journals including The Means, Emergency Almanac, mark(s), Interdisciplinary
Humanities, Metrotimes, Gender(f), and Dispatch. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where she teaches Creative Writing, Literature and Film.