DILETTANTE (dreaming of an Angel)

Jean Cocteau – an enigmatic and elusive figure, whose artistic dabbling across various disciplines unfolded as fragments of an intensely rich poetic world—unfinished, unpolished, urgent, unlike anything or anyone else.

He was a playwright, poet, painter, illustrator, novelist, graphic designer, music manager, boxing manager, an opium addict, estranged from André Breton but a close friend of Igor Stravinsky, Marcel Proust, Nobel laureate André Gide, Pablo Picasso, and Erik Satie.

His life was shaped by his father’s suicide, the influences of Catholicism and Surrealism, the parallels between boxing and ballet, his opium addiction, his travels around the world, his hobby of playing the piano, and his friendships with some of the most extraordinary artists of his time. His work spanned poetry, drama, prose, film, theater, circus, music, and beyond—forming the foundation of an intermedial, audiovisual narrative in this production.

The performance freely improvises with motifs drawn from Cocteau’s graphic and visual artworks, poetry, the novel Opium, the play The Human Voice, and the films The Blood of a Poet and Testament of Orpheus, as well as his biography.

"The material of the performance is Cocteau himself, seen as an interdisciplinary artist—or even more so, as a montage of different media and disciplines. By dividing these disciplines (cinema, surrealist objects, music, literature, fashion, etc.) among the creative team members, we sought to deconstruct this montage back into separate media and then reassemble it into intermedial sequences—some fragmented and difficult to recognize, others more easily identifiable. Together, we searched for indirect connections, parallels, and poetic paradoxes that would create symbolic kinships between themes, images, and symbols that otherwise have nothing in common beyond the boundaries of this work. We developed this using media art, animation, dramatic acting, mechanized scenography, puppetry and object theater, soundscapes, and other contemporary theater techniques." — says director and dramaturg Žilvinas Vingelis.

This performance is part of the Chamber PLUS program.