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For a while it seemed as if everything imaginable was happening at Universal Space NoD in Prague, that is, before the government inexplicably decided to shut it down. But before they could padlock the door, from 27–30 March the Swedish/Czech production of A Mantelpiece — A Story for the Eye by the Blackstone groups artfully cluttered the backroom of the building with their floor-to-ceiling live image extravaganza. Spectators were required to look, crane their necks and pick apart the many-layered, sometimes bizarre “19th century gone contemporary” array of goings-on. And many things did indeed happen, from a mysterious figure gracefully dance-painting, throughout the performance, the history of humankind on the heated floors with a mop and water to the severed headed of John the Baptist encased in an American football helmet hovering luminescent on a screen above the floor.
David Walliker, writer and developer of the performance, later said, “The new piece dealt with the obsession that drives the media market by the eternal transfer of desire through images, which eventually just leads to a more frantic turning of the same wheel.”
And the wheels they did spin, traveling from the eternal search for Jerusalem and the ideal this embodies as it is played out in Lacan’s psychoanalytic mirror and into the obsession of John the Baptist, Herod and Salome. The project combined video projection, dance, performance, choral voices and experimental sound, with appearances by Jiří Surůvka, Petr Nikl and David Fencl.
J. A. Buehler

01.02.2001