Press Release

29 november 2006

The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder # 1
hip hop judensau america
Tamy Ben-Tor

A performance project by Marianna Vecellio

Augusto is more than a clown:  he is a star.
The public loves it when he is standing on the stairs, looks at the sky and smiles, then sits in contemplation.  The inscrutable setting and the progressive transformation in a paradoxical surreal tragedy adds to Henry Miller’s narrative. The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder, an elusive beckettiano flavour that, on one hand, makes it simple, like the words that it conveys: smile, foot, ladder: on the other hand, irresolvable, like the theme that it confronts: the identity of a man and his space put in action, the reality.
It is a narrative in a narrative: “A tale - says Miller - but what is fantasy if not it’s own reality?”. It is a narrative of a man that is looking for himself in man: the clown, antihero for excellence, and his redemption to an active victim;  masking and revealing; the stage, intended as a private place and of imagined space, recited.  It is a tale that delves into time and into the performance space, like a metaphor of being: a personification and incorporating ourselves that are witness to the reception of life.
Erwin Goofmann believes that the importance of the performance is to stabilize a social identity with daily actions, while the boundary of the narrative seems to be so fleeting – a wish that Allan Kaprow gives to art – to fade away.  Above all, it is a narrative that ends in a death that is urging to flow with reality and time. The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder invites three young artists, Tamy Ben-Tor, Planning to Rock and Ragnar Kjartansson, who have always given performance their own form of privileged art.
Tamy Ben-Tor (1975, Israel)  constructs complex enactments wherein the costume, language, music and text become unified with imaginary contemporary hypnotic and perturbing. Tamy Ben-Tor divides, multiplies, transforms herself; uses and abuses; observes from the outside, turned into a puppet or in a banner for the content.  She uses the action and scene as a space of same reality, to transfer to you neurosis, stupidity and the absurd, to mix in a hysterical blend, satire, stereotypes and cultural memories.

To follow 2007:
Planning to Rock - Germany/Great Britain # 2
Ragnar Kjartansson - Iceland # 3