THE HOUSE OF EXTREME MUSIC THEATRE

THE HOUSE OF EXTREME MUSIC THEATRE
DB Indoš and Tanja Vrvilo

THE HOUSE OF EXTREME MUSIC THEATRE is a Zagreb based collaborative performance group by the artistic duo Damir Bartol Indoš and Tanja Vrvilo, which has been creating performance works and installations based on the interaction of several media and theatrical forms. In the last 20 years, an auteur tandem Damir Bartol Indoš and Tanja Vrvilo develops complex thought structures using various artistic expressions: extreme-music theater, contemporary dance, interactive installation sculptures, exhibition-performances, develops ideas of essay theater with long-term archival research of materials. They invite artists from various artistic fields and positions – from alternative performers of different generations to academic theater artists and juxtapose their performance styles in collaborative work.

The group was founded by performance artist Damir Bartol Indoš in early 1990s, who built his artistic vision as a member of the neo-avantgarde theater group Kugla Glumište (1975–1982), one of the most important theatrical, multimedia and interdisciplinary groups in Croatia and the former Yugoslavia. Kugla Glumište created a new conception of theater as an urban ritual and social situation.

Long-term research and development of sound sculptures for performance has resulted in the construction of a series of performance boxes (in the footsteps of prepared instruments): audiovisual sculptures named Schachtophones.

Shachtophones are instruments of bruitism for the synthetic forms of performances and installations, whose sound boxes and graphic partitures-schachtophonies are made by the artist and performer Damir Bartol Indoš. They were created by the developing his sound-stage objects from “spiritually recycled post-industrial waste” since the late 1980s and used as a performing apparatuses and sound sculptures as part of the multimedia settings of the House of Extreme Musical Theater.

By developing the idea of ​​schachtophony, The House of Extreme Music Theatre supports dehierarchical processes in the organizational models of artistic collective production. The idea of ​​using unusual instruments (schachtophones), found through the process of spiritually recycled waste, or preparing existing classical instruments and isolating the function of their primary sound – originate from the desire to dehierarchize the academic system of understanding the practice music, economy and politics of such work.

Graphic partitures reanimate the written, sound and image materials of neglected local artists, bringing the schacht covers as close as possible to their underground origins. The extreme music theatre reveals the post-dramatic practice and the thematic focus of the work, the artistic sampling process as a method of appropriation, variation and editing of material borrowed from different times that infuses underground culture with current political relevance.

“DB Indoš and Tanja Vrvilo — House of Extreme Music Theater work with material from the Croatian historical avant-garde scene in all their performances of exhausting, physical theater, which they approached through the Zagreb circle of zenithists, through Kamov and Čerina as predecessors of the Futurists (but not the Marinettists), and their influence on the literary-revolutionary circle of rebellious youth. Their systematic work on the performance and reactualization of the neo/avant-garde can be defined, by using Roman Jakobson’s definition, by intersemiotic translations into musical theater which, in their example, is based on manipulating sound objects/installations/sculptures with the cut-up technique of original texts into schachtophone scores (moving away from music notation to graphic notation) for schachtophone music, all through the vision of the performance of exhausting (physical) theater with constant dedication to Artaud’s theater of cruelty, the alchemical theater of pre-logic and pre-rationality, a theater that, as a magical ritual, can lead to the healing of society.” (Suzana Marjanić)

“Performative methodology of the House of Extreme Music Theater led by Croatian, Zagreb-based performing artists Damir Bartol Indoš and Tanja Vrvilo is largely based on the creation, recycling and abundant use of sound objects, deconstruction of voice and text, and collaborations with alternative rock and noise musicians and multimedia artists … that show that flexible postdramatic, “extended” approaches, such as abandoning the narrative sequence and manipulation of sound objects, improvisation and interdisciplinarity, which at the same time touch upon the textual template and graphic scores, represent a good platform for questioning the prevailing concept of noise and, eventually, encouraging its reaffirmation.

Unexpectedness, inexplicability and general novelty that is manifested in the performance conceptions of Indoš and Vrvilo is in a constant wavering between ethical and aesthetic function. Indoš and Vrvilo denominate the topics they select through deep archival work as “deserved topics.” The work of the House of Extreme Music Theater therefore shows itself as a constant dialectic between ethics and aesthetics, normality and extraordinariness, theater and performance art, system and “carnival”—which in mutual interaction produce that life-giving energy that is manifested in noise and open to everything that could be. And in that sense, it is truly music and noise as theater, and not only music and noise in theater. In the end, it is perhaps even more than an aural experience precisely the root metaphor of our world.” (Anamarija Žugić Borić)