New version First time appearance 12.08.2007 AKTO_2 Festival, Bitola, MK

One hour before midnight - RECORD.PDF

Author Juliana Saiska.
Composer: Emilian Gatzov – Elbi.
Visuals: Ivan Nikolov – opnn.
Set design and costumes consultants: Elena Panayotova, Ivaylo Mitev.
Make-up: Donka Boeva.
With: Maria Atanasova, Boris Georgiev, Juliana Saiska, Velislav Pavlov, Jasmina Tcholakova, Diana Nikolaeva, Ivan Nikolov - opnn, Emilian Gatzov - Elbi
Part of the first version of One Hour before Midnight: Nevena Zlatanova – Jaya, Lora Hadjidimieva, Mariana Krastanina, Ekaterina Dimitrova
Supported by : National Theatre Center, National Center for Music and Dance, the Swiss Cultural Programme in Bulgaria, Violeta Kojuharova, Anna Vladislavova - Etud Foundation, with thanks to Ivo Palmov, First investment bank.
Place : The Red House Centre for Culture and Debate 
For reservations: tel + 359 2 988 81 88
Beginning of the performance : 23.00 h
Duration: 60 min.
First time appearance  First version : 22.06.2006
Not recommended for children under 12. 

 What has ever concerned me as an artist is to excite, to search for the most explicit image of the emotional life, to plunge the people in their sensations. 
What provoked this performance is the nostalgia for the man’s and the woman’s beauty, both as separate, independent, unique and different in their sensibility individuals. It opens before me a path to recall the spectator’s fantasies and dreams. I wish to examine the erotic as a most beautiful expression of desire for intimacy, and my attempt is its possible display on the stage through working out and reminding the archetype signs for sexual attraction. What concern me are the extremities as a forbidden zone; it is also the intercourse, the reasons for the impossibility to experience a real passion or the difficulty to express ourselves in an ordinary way. I believe that in the situation of extreme inner self-reveling, all suppressed desires come to light, we surpass our barriers and we gain genuineness in our feelings.
This project concerns the relationships in most extreme and most purifying mode.

…It feels like love but it smells like fear.

Juliana Saiska

Our presence on the stage is generally found and inspired from the physical theatre and its means of expression.
	The aim of “One Hour before Midnight” is to reach beyond the concreteness of life, beyond the borders of our consciousness, because there is the place, which overflows us with emotion and excitement. “It feels like love but it smells like fear…”
	To get knowledge of the unconscious, you have to forestall yourself, to reach beyond your own and to meet that other reality. The point where no history exists is the point where only the images and fantasies matter – the important thing is not their relationships, but their birth.
	As he gets in touch with this reality, the spectator will maybe imagine, recall and create his own history from the offered imagery on the stage.

About the performance and its form

“The characters and situations given Are all children of the actors’ fantasies All possible similarity or connection to reality Is part of your own history.”

 This performance studies the question of the nebulous line between the clear functions of the sexes; the nostalgia for the beauty of the man and the woman as separate, independent, unique individuals, with differing sensitiveness; the excess as a forbidden intercourse zone and the impossibility to experience a real passion, or the difficulty to express ourselves plainly. Therefore, we search to explore how we get to border frames of mind in our relationships. tionships. 
Mainly, the theatre performance evolves four actors: these are two pairs of men and women.
The duplication of the female and the male part is an important sign for the fact that the society could be referred to as a group, where one always follows, “doubles”, elaborates and gives an interpretation to the other.
This performance is told in pictures. The development of the idea does not suppose the use of text. The means of expression are based on the actors’ emotions, which they transform in gestures and manners. 
The situation and the atmosphere take shape in the relationships, which build up dramaturgy and choreography of the physical expression. The spectator is free to find and create his own history from the intercourse situation on the stage. 
The performance may be divided in three main acts.
The light and the music create an expressive background, which coupled with the play of the actors construct the general effect.

The critics and commentaries 

The courage to go in forbidden things has always distinguished the true artist from mediocrity. And what more forbidden than to dare to peek into the unknown and frightful cauldron?
Freud once named it a cauldron of unconscious instincts and rages. A source of unpredictable evil locked in the unconscious, which has not to be touched. Set out from there, every impulse has to be held back, locked, diverted, and sublimed. 
Our unconscious – the unknown It, which horrified the doctor.
It, which scares the modern Homo sapiens in his sleep.
And when an unwise discoverer who dared to cross over the taboo of our Uncle Freud appears, we all hold our breath before the images which pop up of the dark. Horrified, confused, frightened or enraptured, we eagerly peer at the image of the forbidden. And astonished, we see there something that we’ve always searched for, something we’ve always missed.
What if just there lies hid the basis of our true nature? 
What if this is the place, which holds the answer of our questions?
What if there lies our contact with the soul?
What if the good Viennese uncle is wrong…
That is why the performance arouses respect and content. Without superstition and with no fear Juliana and her adherents embark on the dark depths of the unconscious and take out from there images and impulses which they elegantly transform in creative fact.
With no fear of lack of understanding and rejection, the team works with the complicated and frightening material, drawn from the depths of the human psychology, transforming it in a work of art. This involves courage and a pioneer spirit. That is why the team’s initiative is arousing respect to this extent, and the result fully justifies their courage.

Ivailo Palmov

 Harakiri

The full title of the theatre performance is “One hour before Midnight (…it feels like love, but it smells like fear)”. Combining these words, we can decode much of its meaning: resonant love, scary love, midnight love fear, an hour of love before the fear, fear of love, a love-sounding fear and so on. However, no matter how we put the words in order, the fear remains, and love is searched for as a deficit from beyond. The performance will not “rejoice” you with direct messages, nor will it lead you by the nose with some attractive plots. The plot you will be present at is a personal, unconscious movement, an action of the instinct - showed off and aesthetisized.
What will you think about if the stage before you – the whole box – is covered with red curtains? David Lynch is the first possibility and it is all but accidental. This time, however, Lynch will be interpreted in a Japanese manner. The space of “The Red Hall” in “The Red House” lavishly draped with a red, falling in folds, heavy curtain (not cheesecloth or some other small catch of compromise, thank God). So, this pronouncedly luxurious curtain-drapery transforms the space into a box for expensive jewellery. In such drapery, one can put in only something extremely precious. A diamond ring for example…Or golden ear-rings…Or pearl necklace…Or some longing…Or the most personal part of himself…Going out of the dreams, we find out that there already is someone in this jewellery box. Human bodies, dressed in a strictly elegant manner in evening gowns and suits. Two men and two women, composed as for a family portrait, make us a hint at the patriarchal spirit. However, a young, dressed up-to-date girl, whose style and manners we can put forward as “Bliss”, interrupts this breath of nostalgia. A stewardess before flight alike, she explains in a mixture of English and German, and with a microphone in hand, what phases the show will lead us through, naming them: “ATTRACTION, FEAR AND…”

The last one is unknown to everybody, even to the performers. The theme is positioned: The phases of one, as it seems heterosexual relationship. The treatment of the theme shows off as corporally over-exhibited metaphors of sensuality. Self-concentrated, but at the same time full of desire and even longing to penetrate in the space of the other one, the actors become living pictures of the passion, the fear and the lack of satisfaction. The contact is possible, it displays itself as propulsion, clash, shaking, embracing, pressing, licking, pulling, throwing to each other, one against the other, one for the other, and one without the other…Restless and unsatisfied, breathing, grunting, croaking and moaning, the bodies – divided in two sexes, ask for their integrity. The eternal problem of the sexual passion – the fusion of bodies - yet does not present the fusion of souls, never mind how hard we try to compensate and to cajole ourselves. Thus, the performance becomes a metaphor of the luckless contemporary attempts to overcome the loneliness and the alienation with more and more of sex. More of it, however – less of love, alas. The extreme of the four characters’ affect pursues the Japanese suspense and expressiveness and seems to lead them to the salvage hara-kiri. What if this hara-kiri is the last, not declared part of the show? Therefore, the jewellery box starts to look like a trap of the sensuality, where the whispers and the loneliness eventually grow dumb lips wide opened. Like fish out of water. Or, like sex dolls which we think about an hour before midnight.

If some lovely evening you find yourself in the center of Sofia city at 23.00 and you pass near “The Red House”, you can also check if they stage the performance of Juliana Saiska “One Hour before Midnight”. If this is the case and if you decide to go in, you will experience something interesting and unusual. Something, in which you may also find such meaning that my opinion had not proposed. Something that will not change your life, but will give you a chance to see it from a different point of view.

Mila Iskrenova