RYO JU | approaches #1 – #3

A few words from AKS on her upcoming project, Ryo Ju | approaches #1 – #3.

For years, the narrative The Hunting Gun by Yasushi Inoue has followed me.

For me there is more than one point of view, more than one possibility for directorial approach, various points of departure to allow for meaning that pique my interest in a cinematic, danced, photographic and pictorial staging of this work.

It is not that I cannot decide – but rather that I do not want to decide too early.

Over the course of this year, I conceived several concepts, drafts and various scenarios to play through. All of them are bound to dance, to film, to the original literary text, to the interaction and simultaneous presentation of these various arts. Sometimes the artistic personnel remains the same, sometimes the performers change or take over new roles and functions. One staging influences and is influenced by the others in some form. All image material stands in drawings – a series of tableaus, a dance image from greater dance images, a literary, a film concept.

The new, strongly dialogue-oriented formatin – formell in Stift Millstatt was created to support this kind of year-long concept.

I involve the public. I am interested in the resonance of a draft, of the apparently raw and unfinished – of questions that arise and that curious, voyeuristic interest with which the work process will be communally viewed.

Likewise, since for me sketches are often more appealing than the finished oil painting, I want to see to what extent the next presentations in in – formell are simply stops along the path to the premiere at the end of the year, versus where early drafts already hold more substance than the final product.

SynopsisIn The Hunting Gun three women each write a last letter to the same man, whom they, for different reasons, will never see again.

Each letter evokes and hurts deeply, tearing not only the man but also the writers themselves.

Slowly, like a puzzle, the picture of an entire situation emerges, which the man and the women alike show from different perspectives in their upright approaches to one another, to communal family life, love and breaking apart. We see the women and the destroyed man in his fall. We sense insight gained, believe that we recognized something – and yet the certainty disappears, the one truth becomes blurred by a fog, like the figure of the man walking along the river bed.

translated by hrgb