PARTITA SHELTER is a performance about instability and vulnerability. It transforms the performance space from a place of presumed safety into a place of uncertainty. The audience’s privileged position-protected within the theatre and able to survey events from a position of apparent detachment-becomes part of the performance itself. As this order is unsettled, we become more aware of the conditions that make our position as spectators possible in the first place. Syrian actor Raafat Daboul speaks texts in which people experiencing homelessness describe their everyday realities: what it means to be exposed and unprotected, to encounter solidarity-or its absence-and to observe, with precision, a society that passes them by. In counterpoint, Baroque violinist Augustin Lusson performs solo works for violin by Johann Sebastian Bach. The music and spoken texts rub against one another. Bach’s music becomes newly audible through these accounts, while the music lends them attention and dignity without resolving the tensions between them. The audience’s position, too, is unsettled. The gaze of the homeless narrators turns toward their privileged surroundings, making the spectators themselves the subjects of observation. At the same time, the theatre’s spatial order is destabilised: perspectives shift, and the boundaries between stage, auditorium and outside world grow porous.

 

PARTITA SHELTER becomes a laboratory for being together and enduring difference. The performance asks what happens when the safety of the theatre and the certainty of being uninvolved begin to crumble—and makes the shared experience of uncertainty a condition for seeing differently.

 

Concept: Sebastian Blasius

Baroque violin: Augustin Lusson

Performance: Raafat Daboul

Text: Developed from conversations with people experiencing homelessness

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