Damir Bartol Indoš and Tanja Vrvilo — House of Extreme Music Theatre: Performative Translation of Croatian Neo/Avant-garde

Abstract

DB Indoš and Tanja Vrvilo — House of Extreme Music Theater work with material from the Croatian historical avant-garde scene in all their performances of exhausting, physical theater, which they approached through the Zagreb circle of zenithists, “through Kamov and Čerina as predecessors of the Futurists (but not the Marinettists), and their influence on the literary-revolutionary circle of rebellious youth. Some of them included August Cesarec, Đuka Cvijić, Zora Ruklić and members of their ‘Republic of Stenjevac’, members of the Zagreb group Zenit, the lyrics of a visionary film through the books of Ivan Martinac, concrete poetry by Josip Stošić and the silent art that we ‘shachtophonize’ for our parallel performance canon” (Vrvilo 2020). Their systematic work on the performance and reactualization of the neo/avant-garde can be defined, by using Roman Jakobson’s definition, by intersemiotic translations (cf. Munday, Ramos Pinto, Blakesley 2022: 9) into musical theater which, in their example, is based on manipulating sound objects/installations/sculptures with the cut-up technique of original texts into schachtophone scores (moving away from music notation to graphic notation) for schachtophone music, all through the vision of the performance of exhausting (physical) theater with Indoš’s constant dedication to Artaud’s theater of cruelty, the alchemical theater of pre-logic and pre-rationality, a theater that, as a magical ritual, can lead to the healing of society.