Each screening of CLIMAX is presented through individual episodes, is a site-specific installation and is performed in realtime. CLIMAX wants to innovate and investigate on the physical and psychological processes on how we perceive, listen, and perceive cinema.
Each episode is laid-out in a graphic visual score (which is modular in nature); and parts, sections are carefully notated but allowing the performers to improvise freely on its open structures. Structured improvisation allows the performer to realize the situational potential of realtime storytelling, in effect treating cinema as how a musician would treat music-making.
Sound is created and projected based on the acoustics of the space, and may even include sound makers installed strategically within the audience and the space to produce organic surround sound. Similarly, the visual projections could come in different forms, from the traditional large central screen to multiple projections that could be positioned site-specifically. In some occasions, the audience has the freedom to move around viewing the performance and experiencing the cinema as a video object similar to moving image installations you can find in an art exhibition. Some performances might utilize audience-participation where their interaction might even trigger certain scenes, sounds, or movements, making the usual passive viewer into an active creator and participant of cinematic experience. Each performance-screening is unique every time, enabling it as a never-ending cinematic process/object.
Episode titles
phobia
stigma
camouflage
panopticon
identity
vacuum
psalm
Selected fragments of Climax will be presented at symbolic times on symbolic places, leading to a collaborative narrative portrait of contemporary life. The story is narrated, and is about the pseudo-individual haunted by fears which are a consequence of the analysis of the world he lives in. He perceives his sensibility as an error and fears he will be stigmatized for it and consequently eliminated from the society. By analyzing social patterns, he unfolds various strategies of camouflage which individuals use and, on the other hand, how they are controlled on socio- political and intimate levels. Finally, he questions collective and personal identity and their mutations. Individual’s power decreases by complete alienation and becomes a psalm to the old world.
