Projects

"The Corridor" A theatre play by Matjaz Zupancic

"You have to be what you are... and you have to be so that the people like you.
Now you'll ask me: but how can we be what we are and have people like us?
Now that, that - is art."
- The Corridor

To be what you are, has a high price and everyone pays it differently. The very idea of being voluntarily subjected to reality TV, the eye of the camera constantly watching over you, seems uneasy to comprehend. Yet here we are, sixty years after Orwell's "1984" was published, living in almost prophetic times, meeting exactly the same methods simply in the name of security and entertainment. That is why The Corridor presents itself as a necessary expression, offering a glimpse into the ultimate nature of reality TV. The play takes place in an ordinary hallway within the studio lot from where reality TV show is being broadcast.. The Corridor is a place where there are no cameras or microphones and where our seven participants can seek privacy and truly be themselves. "The Corridor, my dears, will be your biggest problem." cautions Max, the owner and manager of the show. He personifies a gladiatorial logic of contemporary show business, not because he would believe in it, but because of monetary gain and perhaps even a trace of sadism. He's a manipulator and a show man, a kind of media reincarnation of Orwell's Big Brother - a modern-day Mephisto, who is looking after the show's ratings and sets ambiguous rules made to be broken. The play reveals the studio's manipulations of interpersonal relationships that tempt our characters to either leave, or submit to a slow, pathetic suicide of their own identity.

 Will the boundary between artificiality and reality become so thin that the artificial will become the center of moral value? Will it ever be possible to discover something authentic in the world of Benjamin's mechanical production? Does fetishization of "reality", "real existence", "facts" and "originality" that we have been facing, reveal anything else but a metaphysical emptiness?

In Thematic terms, Zupancic expresses the right to individuality, difference and privacy, and an honest social agreement. Influenced by Pinter's work, stressing the power of what is left unspoken. He is concerned with the fear of being different and the accompanying force used against the individual who steps outside of the mass. Along with the fact that contemporary civilization is funded on force, this reflects the kind of totalitarian power that is wielded by the current social and political system, which - with it's technical interference and control of an individual's life - resembles the ever-watchful camera in a television studio. It confronts us as viewers to re-examine our relationship toward reality TV, by putting us in the shoes of a voyeur looking through a peep-hole into the most private aspects of an individual - bordering on psychological abuse and moral ambiguity. In The Corridor we can see that, paradoxically, to establish total control over a human being is now a matter of choice and free will.

"During the decades in the wake of second world war, the lives of americans became increasingly controlled by ever larger corporations in which the neutral professionalism of the manager spelled out a pattern of behavior that was utterly at odds with Kant's "starry sky above us and moral imperative inside us". The managerial culture subtly invokes the idea of freedom as it's ultimate value, yet, at the same time, it disfigures it into a grotesque monster. In the name of profit and functionality, it demands that all the participants in this game share it's dog-eat-dog philosophy."
- A. Debeljak, slovenian cultural critic, 1990