Bombina Bombast and That Modem Generation has presented six work-in-progress performances under the label V.P.P.A. The concept was site-specific and performed at clubs, outdoor festivals, black boxes and white boxes as well as in the forest and once at an abandoned school.
#2: Botnik Studios, Clandestino Festival, Hamburgsund 28-07-2013
#3: Kalv Center for the Interchange in Arts, Kalv, 21-08-2013
#4: Inter Arts Center och Bryggeriteatern, Malmö, 07–08-09-2013
#5: BIT Teatergarasjen's Prøverommet at the public library in Bergen, Norway 10-03-2014
#6: In The Blend: performing arts festival curated by Teatr Weimar, Malmö, 25-04-2014
The idea was born somewhere between two contrasting phenomena. One: how information disseminated from the ”Arabic Spring” and keeps circulating, informning the world about the riots and demonstrations from a non-official perspective. Thanks to smartphones, Youtube and Twitter the world could take part ofthe event form a swarm of perspectives. Two: the often expressed fear of technology killing face-to-face communication. We wanted to put this conflict in the midst of our artistic research concerning integrating digital applications and virtual spaces with the theatre event. With filmed videoguides in surf tablets the visitors get their unique journey through the space they are in, the fiction and the world. In real life there is door in front of you but in the tablet the door opens and someone stands there, tells you a story. The choices you get to make in the performance affects your narrative - or do they?
During 2013 we made four public work-in-progress performances to collect research material for the V.P.P.A. production. During 2014 we made two more. With these trials we have been able to try out different ways of showing the relationship between us and our technology, between public space, theatre space and virtual reality. The finished performance was named What's Left and premiered at Inkonst May 2014.
Please visit our Vimeo page for videoguide examples.
”The distribution of art and ”sharing” of experiences and impressions has never been as extended as today. We see ourselves as artists with both feet in the performing arts but placed between a gigantic expanding exhibition archive on the internet and an audience and critic corps that are getting used to creating their own experience of art – or creating their own art for that matter. We live in a world of ”puppet masters”; game masters. We suggest a path that leads beyond this control that risks making gamified and participatory performances something just as one-dimensional as a traditional separation between stage and auditorium. The participation we strive towards is not just and aesthetic identification for the initiated gamers but a model where the spaces for action we create re- engages with the political in unexpected ways. We believe that art does not have to have explicit political topics to create political effect. A poetics of spaces of appearance.” /That Modem Generation