No apologies needed / Gisèle Vienne "I Aologize"

It´s the sweetest story Gisèle Vienne and Co are telling in “I Apologize” of a man who likes to torture and rape young girls. There´s as much intimate memory sharing as there is fake blood on the stage.

Wooden boxes not personalized enough to be called coffins are piled in the white room. They give out their content as the main character retreats to the world of his most powerful memories. Memories condemned by the outer world. Puppets of young girls in blood-stained school uniforms are torn out and thrown on the ground, seemingly indifferently. With no apologies. The aesthetic beauty of the world created on stage grows as the horror of the situation uncovers itself. Your common sense tells you to be bothered by the narrated brutality but somehow physical perception overshadows it. Your ears are crying to the violent rhythm of the loud music, the brightness of the stage lighting has made the pupils in your eyes to almost vanish and all the pores of your skin are drowning in sweat. And still you see everything as calmly as through the magnetic field of an MRI.

Did that doll just move? It couldn´t, none of the actors are there to move it. And yet the lifeless puppets are alive, slowly sliding off the positions they were put by humans on stage. There´s two more now. A woman, pale as plastic dancing despite of her angular joints. And a red-eyed man with a body as a canvas, walking the limber walk, taking its time to blend in with the pure and methodical atmosphere on stage which holds you tightly in its reach.

There were no memories to be shared in the first place as the intimacy of their importance is beyond recognition of an controlled mind. This is no confession and no apology would be heard even if the audience screamed as one of those raped girls probably did, once upon a time.

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