What would Skomorokh do?!

Application summary

Mean Time Between Failures is a life-long collaboration and a co-dependent artistic adventure exploring limits of performance making. In the past we have created a messy and multi-layered performance language. In our commitment to this work we now open up a risky and urgent experiment titled What would Skomorokh do?! This might lead to looking ridiculous or obnoxious in the eyes of those artists, institutions and academics who we work with. But we are willing to take the chance. The invisible protagonist of this experiment, Skomorokh, is an East Slavic cultural figure originating from the 11th century Kiev’s Rus’. Skomorokhs were entertaining clown-like comedians, sometimes denounced as devil's servants. They performed publicly, made humorous performances about authority figures and addressed disputable subjects that no one else could take. Skomorokhs were playing with proximity - getting closer to and further from their communities and its issues in order to perform matters that stayed hidden from the collective consciousness. We want to embody Skomorokh as a novel performance methodology and interweave laughter, controversy, irritation, vagueness, humor, festivity and complexity together in order to stay in an open dialogue with the world and its troubles. …because it seems that nothing else has worked in these horrific times. We will combine performance art, dance, clowning, Skomorokh folklore, performance studies, affect theory of humor, queer theory and critical heritage studies. We divide our work into two parts: 1) the Year of Institutions during which we focus on maneuvering and creating problems in and with different performing art institutions 2) the Year of Bodies & Methodology during which we document, experiment and create a novel Skomorokh methodology informed by our experiences during the first year collaborations. The methodology will be shared publicly through performance works and an accessible multimedia publication.