Petra Fornayová: SEVENTH DAY

Time-tested creator Petra Fornayová has taken on the “massacre-like” material of Burlas’s Record of the Seventh Dayand the messages it conveys. This work stands out for its urgency, pressure, and bleakness, as Martin Burlas composed it in response to the political tensions of the 1990s in Slovakia. Inspired by this piece, Petra has created a shorter, subtle yet highly expressive movement-musical-visual composition that generalizes past local crises and updates them for the present. This level of engagement is currently of utmost importance. The combination of the performance with Robert Švarc’s lecture is a unique, exceptional, and surprisingly brilliant and original genre fusion.

Jozef Vlk

The Seventh Day Record was composed by Martin Burlas as a response to the unfavorable political situation in the 1990s. Plato’s texts addressed the government crisis in Syracuse in the 4th century BC. Today, we are once again experiencing a crisis, and not only a political one. We each cope with crisis situations differently: some fight with beauty, while others prepare for revolution. The Seventh Day symbolizes exhalation, abandonment, and the end of a cycle. It is a treshold – a day that heralds a new week, yet despite its sense of peace, it carries the tension of an impending beginning.

Performance includes a lecture Revolt and the Body
Author and lecturer: Robo Švarc

“It is important that we act together and gather in public as bodies – as the embodied beings that we are.” With these words, Judith Butler highlighted the agency of the body during Occupy Wall Street in 2011. In recent times, social antagonisms have increasingly moved into the virtual spaces of social networks, making communication ever more predictable, in line with the tendency of entropy, which moves toward “heat death”—the leveling of all differences under the guise of passionate arguments, discussions, polemics, and polarization.

And what about the body? Is the body still capable of becoming, through its extension, a medium of communicative difference—one that could rise above the leveling surface of “the final equalization of all differences,” which, according to Helmuth Plessner, marks the end of democracy? Scars, color, movement, resistance, activity, passivity, natality, abortion, orientation, scent, fragrance, sound, touch, consciousness, unconsciousness, intimacy, solidarity, distance, assembly. We will shed light on some of these.

The lecture will be in English.