QUI SUMUS PERFORMANCE

Polina Koshele

This is a music/ dance video of my personal performance, which I directed at Jurmala Art fair 2018. I have directed and edited the video myself as well. This performance is about emotions and situations we experience in life. The most important thing I thought about when creating this performance was how to show what I am feeling as a teenager in this changing world. When relationships between countries are insecure, and many are on the verge of political and economical crisis, we as young adults don’t know what in the history was right and wrong and how we should respond to it. Yet the emotions we experience in our personal lives; hope, love, hate, envy, stay unchanged through centuries. People always felt and feel these emotions similarly. We are all born as an empty canvas and through the course of our life we feel these emotions, which build our personality and paint an image of ourselves. For my performance I decided to use young people who are experienced in dancing and dress them in white costumes. In costumes, their age, gender, nationality is not revealed and they not only represent all of humanity, but also a primed canvas. The thoughts and feeling I wanted to portray live forever. I used a music piece Sweet Dreams by Eurhythmics, as it is a story of young people imagining and finding their true self. Part of my idea was to enhance the impression from this song, and for that I used different remixes and covers (for example, when I wanted to show love I used a jazz remix, and for hate I used a cover by Merlin Manson). The thought was to show the situations me and my friends live through on a regular basis. This is a story of a relationship between young people, the love and disappointment of a boy and two girls, creating a stereotypical love triangle. How they met, felt hope for a relationship, fell in love, but after that all experienced negative feelings. Social media, technology and phones which follow us on daily basis have led them to feel envy which grew into doubt and jealousy, eventually leading the girls to a fight, as each of them wants to achieve acceptance of the boy. Meanwhile, he is careless about it, he doesn’t involve in the conflict and eventually all of them feel disappointment and hate. This is probably the most important issue for teenagers, but we all have to go through disappointment to understand what love and hope really meant to us.