Marcus Krapp’s Last Tape is a travelling and experimental festival that brings together visual art, music, science, dance, literature into an all-encompassing experience. The play/workshop/gathering will be performed in Sweden, Finland and Lithuania . In each venue, local performers will be invited to present a passage of the play.
Marcus Krapp’s Last Tape takes its name and its narrative form from Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape. But in order to highlight that each participant looses some of his/her identity in the process of negotiating with other genres and disciplines all performers will have the first name Marcus or Markus: neuroscientist Predrag Petrovic will become Marcus Petrovic; dancer Carima Neusser becomes Markus Neusser and musician Jukka Rintamäki becomes Markus Rintamäki.
The evening will start with a presentation of the project and will be followed by the opening of the play. An old man sits bent over a tape recorder. The performance will merge into a musical improvisation. The sound collage will blend into a lecture on aging and psychosis from a clinical perspective and merges into a filmed sequence of Beckett’s play where suddenly a dancer appears. The screening goes black and the dancer appears in the space dressed identically and the evening will progress in this manner until an old man reappears in front of the tape recorder: “Be again on Croghan on a Sunday morning, in the haze, with the bitch, stop and listen to the bells. (Pause.) And so on. (Pause.) Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn’t enough for you. (Pause.) Lie down across her.”
Marcus Krapp’s Last Tape brings together creators from Sweden, Finland, Norway and Lithuania. It is organised by Curatorial Mutiny, BLVVD, Vision Forum in dialogue with the venues in the respective countries.
Marcus Krapp’s Last Tape will be documented by a book along that contains electronic documentation of sound and moving images. The project will offer new and challenging formats for dialogues between genres, disciplines, languages and cultures. Marcus Krapp’s Last Tape will offer new ways of understanding and developing Nordic cultures, languages and how they can thrive by co-existing and dialoguing.