"Interactive theater forms gain their popularity in Slovakia and the attention of the critical community thanks to the combination of traditional theater procedures and new media, active involvement of the audience's mind and body, playfulness, discovery and expansion of culture outside official institutions.

 

 Debris Company prepared a site specific project Poses/Essencies/Traps, full of imagination, interaction and audience curiosity, especially for the Pro-téza international author's theater festival. Already in the festival bulletin, the creators left room for individual interpretation. "We laid down on our stomachs on the ground, feet apart, rested our palms on the ground, stretched our arms, straightened our torso, turned our heads back - towards the heavens. We scream…” The audience was given no instructions on how to behave, what to expect. Such an initiative was a sociological attempt to verify how a given community functions in some remote closed system. Visitors were only given a map of the vandalized and abandoned building of the former YMCA apartments, which the creators turned into a living gallery. Thus, they inextricably linked the artwork with the place and the strong concept.

 

 The author of the design, L. Pálmai, used the principles of sculpture and architecture and transformed the apartments into a huge conceptual art. Thirty-five visitors were confronted with works that they could touch, discover, explore, and sometimes were staged as surprising or disturbing. The seemingly empty and abandoned space offered a wide variety of smaller and larger objects, inscriptions, holes, children's shoes, animal skulls, flashlights illuminating the corridors and locked doors with peepholes. Detailed observation was key. The feeling that the viewer could always search and find something new that (maybe) has value and discovering new secrets, rooms and scenes kept them on their toes.

 

 In different rooms throughout the second floor, the performers had their positions, where everyone regularly played out the same scene, situation. Each artifact was an open multidimensional field of possibilities. The creators thus triggered a stream of associations in the viewer, which did not create a metrically identical space in his imagination, but emotional bonds, thanks to which the given space became real and valuable for the viewer. The YMCA was a space filled with images that, like an abstract painting, offered feelings rather than a closed narrative. In a world where different rules apply, the audience was engaged, sometimes involved in the action of the actors with whom they (sometimes unexpectedly and suddenly) shared the same space and were co-responsible for the resulting experience.

 

 The audience's time was different from that of the actors. The spectator came, got carried away for a moment and left. The traditional gradation of the plot did not take place. The spectator, who is normally a prisoner of his seat and has to go through all the theatrical scenes on the stage, here had the freedom to leave naturally or move to another place.

 

 The performers used electronic music, full of unexpected excitement and random tones, to keep the pace going. However, the creators also worked to a large extent with silence, which was only drowned out by the audience's footsteps echoing in the corridor or on the staircase.

 

 Not everyone can like such a specific site. The viewer may become tired of trying to decipher all the images in vain and may become apathetic and isolated. For those who were enchanted by Poses/Essencies/Traps, perhaps this project will not be a one-time forgettable act, but will be perceived as "a special kind of reciprocity" with the ambition to influence Slovak theater perception, use of space and initiate its rescue." Jakub Molnár

​https://mloki.sk/stvrta-pro-teza-vo-veku-univerzalnej-zmenitelnosti-hladame-jedinecnost/