The League of Time

Photo: Ranka Latinovic

Zagreb-based performance collective BADco worked with Intercult on the SEAS Adriatic/Baltic collaboration.  Their productions Deleted Messages (which was commissioned by SEAS Adriatic/Baltic) and Memories are Made of… toured to several SEAS venues in advance of the main project as a kind of vanguard.  They became a coorganiser in the EU grant and began to think about superheros and the relation ship between America and Europe.

In 2008 they began to devise their Black/North SEAS production while still visiting the SEAS events on tour. From the beginning they imagined that the production would be presented in a large hall, not a theatre. The result was The League of Time. A short presentation of the work was given at SEAS Istanbul and the work was premiered in Rijeka in 2009 and joined the North Tour later that year.

Concept: Pravdan Devlahovic, Ivana Ivkovic, Ana Kreitmeyer, Tomislav Medak, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Nikolina Pristaš, Zrinka Užbinec

Set design: Tor Lindstrand
Costume design: Silvio Vujicic
Sound: Helge Hinteregger
Light design: Alan Vukelic
Co-producers: Drugo More, Croatian National Theatre, Prostor+
Support: Zagreb City Council and Ministry of Culture (Croatia)
Duration: 60 minutes

A theatrical journey back in time

In this  production BADco. commenced a complex operation in time. The story is set in 2125,  but it examines our own century – at a moment when two grand social narratives of the last century (capitalism and communism) have become inoperative – at a moment of capitalism’s turmoil and communism’s afterlife – BADco. question is  What happens to all future times whose time has run out? What happens to futures that never took place? What to the utopias that have become everyday? What is the time remaining?

Starting with a wide range of artistic sources (Kafka’s “America”, Mayakovsky’s “Flying Proletarians”, Soviet Factory of Eccentric Actor, constructivist paper architecture, superhero comics, East European ufology, American psychedelic art), BADco. embarks on a theatrical journey back in time.  Or rather into the future has imagined by Mayakovsky in 1925.  It is the heroic tale of an aerial attack on Capitalist America by the combined forces of Communist Europe.

Using startling theatrical effects and a set including hundreds of paper models of skyscrapers (and even a tiny King Kong) the battle is played out with flying saucers and death rays. With daring choreography and wry humour (the text references 2009 as the date for the collapse of Capitalism, not the collapse of Communism in 1989 for example) the League of Time – four superheros – oversee and describe the catastrophe as it unfolds.

‘…the piece interrogates a cosmonaut who has returned from space to relocate in America, and opens up to examine a whole raft of experiences: sleep, nightmares, Charlie Chaplin, King Kong, the imminent failure of the revolution and electric toothbrushes.  Absolutely precise but crazily surreal choreography – repeatedly interrupted by time-based orders or reminders from an authoritarian off-stage voice: “one minute”, “1 minute and 55 seconds to the end of present time”, “15 minutes out of 91″ and so on – underpin what seemed to me to be the central notion of the piece – “Your method is hallucination”.  The hallucinatory feeling was reinforced by ghostly lit bubbles rising to the ceiling, brilliant time-lapse film reproducing the outlines of the performers and an attack on the senses by the most painfully dazzling lights I have ever experienced…A disturbing and difficult piece of work, but absolutely brilliant.’ Nottingham Visual Arts

The League of Time by BADco.