Fresh Minds asks questions regarding the corruption of innocence, the coming of age, and how our fresh minds can die. The room, full of toy cars and water pistols, reveals a girl in a floral dress behind a clothes line that’s fixed on the robust concrete pillars of an industrial space. Next to her a basket full of entrails, livers, lungs… And then Frank Sinatra’s “Somebody Loves Me” fades in.
After the damaging events of the first act, we enter into a world of cleansing of the body and the mind, where a female figure covered in bubble wrap and FRAGILE sticky tape enters a free-standing shower cubicle and while she tries to wash we can see the muddy water pouring into the transparent and clinically precise drainage container, filling it slowly with nightmare-ish hues of purples and browns. The catharsis comes through the performer’s lips while she speaks to us with a soft but broken voice a few lines from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Last Pearl” :
Do you see the shimmer of the rainbow, which unites earth to heaven? So has there been a bridge built between this world and the next. Through the night of the grave we gaze upwards beyond the stars to the end of all things. Then we glance at the pearl of Sorrow, in which are concealed the wings which shall carry us away to eternal happiness.
Fresh Minds was presented at Bios , Athens in 2005 as part of their Random Characters Festival. Stavroula collaborated with designer Rhodi Iliadou who, primarily responsible for the video-art and the built environments, made an invaluable contribution to the overall aesthetics and conceptual development.
Except “Somebody Loves Me” (Frank Sinatra) and “Something” (Coil), the show’s music consists of original scores all composed by musician/composer Niadoka especially for Fresh Minds.
Stavroula Kounadea 