Monday, June 28 & Tuesday, June 29 at 10 pm
Zagreb Youth Theatre 'Polanec', Teslina7
LUCKY PIERRE CHICAGO, USA
How to Manage Fear

Founded in 1996 Lucky Pierre is a Chicago based artistic company creating conceptual shows and performances where they quilt myths and themes found in American society. The group have produced numerous video pieces, installations, radio and sound records. In their, usually long and slow process of creating, artists from other spheres are invited as guest performers.

Till now they have produced more than ten shows among which Happiness, I Married Wyatt Earp and Movie Stars Live Here attracted the most attention. In 2000 the group made a series of three twelve hours, Evangeline, inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem accompanied by vivid music and the movies “Woodstock” and “Easy Rider” projected on 30 foot screens and in which participated over 150 performers.

How to Manage Fear is the most mature and most complex piece created to date by Lucky Pierre, inspired from American pop culture. How to re-create a car race on stage? How to posit a paradise in a warehouse? How to explain that the temporal measurement introduced in that paradise will inevitably destroy it? How to manage fear?

Using a trademark deadpan candour, five performers spend the first third of the piece alternately scouring memories for highway adventures and like doltish frat boys, enthusiastically chanting litanies of obscenities. Gradually these two strains converge; performers assemble yelling and howling curses, they pick apart chase scenes from the movie “Bullitt”. It becomes obvious that their memories all come from the movie itself and that the classic car race symbolizes the destruction of the image of the original Christian paradise. Musical support is the work of composer Jeffery Kowalkowsky who strengthens the piece with a row of compositions using Hayden’s oratory “The Creation”, removing its sumptuousness by paraphrasing Milton’s text “Paradise Lost”. Although this isn’t quite enough, so the group violates the musical support even further to strengthen the impressiveness of the car chase.

How To Manage Fear is a confusing and completely inexplicable piece by Lucky Pierre, in which an 11 minute car chase from the film “Bullitt” is transformed into a seventy minute research of paradise and extreme moments. The group’s approach is benignly irresponsible, intuitive and it seems illogical; gestures, talks, dance parts and video clips flow simultaneously without any obvious rhyme or reason. But in Pierre’s ingenious orchestration of fragments many spectators can find a world of imaginative possibilities.

http://www.luckypierre.org/