Maria Metsalu examines the discomfort of the personal doom in which the self is completely reset and tackles it by insisting on staying in the void between the old and the new, a fluid state where everything is possible.

ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE

The Well by Metsalu tells the story of an isolated figure lowered into a well by her four psychoanalysts, where on her leather couch she is tasked with writing to give the world a new structure. She is a composer. She is a magician and an alchemist. Through the narrative of this tragic protagonist, the non-narrative performance deals with an individual apocalypse in a liminal space. The performance space becomes an erotic mindscape, an internal and secret place, a confinement of the misbehaving deviant body secluded from reality, hearing what should not be heard, seeing things that are not there.

Together The Well and Lacuna look for ways to make sense of the self in a complex world of signifiers. Pushing the physical and the bodily to various extremes, the shows each process memories and lived experience as an exploration of the ontological.

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ABOUT MARIA METSALU (EE)

Maria Metsalu (EE) is an artist who uses her own body to explore contemporary issues, often employing sexually loaded means of expression. She views performance as a radical space and performing deviance as a possibility through which new ways of looking and seeing could be created. Her work seeks to proliferate meanings rather than systematize them into a clarity. She is interested in an emancipated audience and in ways the position of the spectator can be  challenged, destabilised or abolished altogether. Besides her solo work she is one of the founding members of Young boy dancing group.

Her solo works have been shown in Art In General gallery (as part of Performa17), deSingel Theater, ICA Theater, Nanterre-Amandier Theater, Les Urbaines festival and Impulstanz festival amongst others.
(At her core, Metsalu is a vagabond artist and rejects the idea of a base. Currently she lives and works mainly in Europe.)

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MANAGING DISCOMFORT PERFORMACEFESTIVAL

In the spring of 2024, Toaster and Live Art Denmark present the performance festival MANAGING DISCOMFORT, which includes a number of Danish and international artists whose works have the common denominator that they all deal with discomfort, but process it with care and humor.

The festival stretches over seven weeks and each week two new performances are presented, which are staged as a double-bill at Husets Teater. This means that one ticket gives access to both performances, which are separated by a short break.