Concept & Performance: Bar Altaras & Roni Katz

2017 / Slovakia

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Practices of Love installs a lab for developing embodied performative practices for reforming patterns and habits in love and romantic relationships and weaves them together into a sensual performative event. By practicing love and intimacy in a performative situation we condition an atmosphere in which we don’t usually spend time with strangers. We invite the audience into a space which upholds the values and ideals we wish to be more present in reality. The practices we generate teach us certain principles, for example finding pure togetherness while maintaining the self and reclaiming the permission to be vulnerable. In a creative space we can neutralize the drama of real life and work in the gap between the existent reality and the idyll we envision. In this gap and with these and other principles we practice the reinforcement of values such as mutual empowerment and care, supportive challenge, empathy, hospitality and generosity. The project conflicts softness and harshness as we make ourselves a home in a public space - the town's public transit underpass. The endeavour to produce comfort and safety in rough and unfamiliar environment is emblematic to our existence as women and immigrants and propels us to invent strategies for facing violent realities with fierce kindness. The project premises is that the revolution starts with relationships and it aims at restoring the way we relate to one another as humans and at building alternative, healthy networks of relationships.