KOMMER (Grief)
"How are you?"
"I’m fine, considering the circumstances. And how are you?"
"Yes"
KOMMER is grief in 50% theater and 50% film. In a tender portrayal of human fragility KOMMER shows the little angles of large human suffering. The first half of KOMMER is performed live, and portrays a group of six people as they respond to the news of the death of a loved one. The audience watches their acute grief as they try to give and receive comfort by saying words well-meant but,at the same time, misplaced and cliche.
In the second half of KOMMER, the audience views a video in which the camera follows the "real-life" of the actors after they have finished the performance we have just seen. After receiving the applause, in the dressing room, and on their way home, the audience observes the actors in their individual "private" lives, and witnesses their lonliness.
Using few words, precise physicality and humour, KOMMER captures the sadness and accompanying awkwardness inherent in these moments, and reflects with uncanny truth the human community in times of grief and stress.
Kassys is a theater-initiative of Liesbeth Gritter and Mette van der Sijs, founded in 1999 and based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Kassys makes shows in which theater and film are being combined. The codes of these media are (ab)used and placed in their original form along side each other. Balancing on a thin line of imagination, fiction and (acted) reality, Kassys displays the beauty of human success and failure. The mechanism of human behaviour is an endless inspiration. Self taught spontaneity, shamelessness and obedience are submitted to precise observation in all Kassys’ works. The differences and the similarities of "being yourself" and "pretending" are anatomized and painfully displayed. What’s left over is a disillusioned representation in which ordinary people try to cope in extraordinary and uncomfortable situations. Self mockery, humour, recognition, an eye for detail and voyeurism are concepts that apply to all the work of Kassys.
