CARPE CARPE CARPE
Poetic Tableaux Performed by Seven Children
1988
A theatre performance by Hotel Pro Forma. The text is written by the poet and the semiotician Per Aage Brandt. The poems are performed by seven children at the age of eight.
In one side of the room is a laboratory, where the children make physics experiments. In the other side of the room is a sculptural landscape, where fragments of animals and materials have been put into glass on high plinths.
Per Aage Brandt´s highly concentrated poetry opposes the children´s sensuous and unsophisticated presence. The performance is about the beginning of life. The children´s voices and the way they move release meanings that otherwise would have remained concealed. The children speak a written language. It is distant and present, and flows as a poetic stream. The taped voice of the poet reads nine elegies about the phallic phenomena and the artificial inseminations. The childe talk about the invisible ad make physics experiments. Law of nature as narrative images. Tableaux about the inconceivable. For a moment a magician perform. Sciences and magic side by side.
In this performance the scenic expression is moulded into pure poetry, pure sculpture, real physics experiments, pure images and movements.