Rain dance

An absurd dark grotesque jointing the clichés of entertainment industry and the growing scepticism of the Western culture where neither the rambling demons of the ancient, neither the contemporary people know what to do with themselves.

Authors, artists, info:

...from the IT jargon dictionary...

"rain dance"

1. Any type of activity aimed at sorting a hardware problem while expecting the effort

to have no tangible effect.

2. Any sequence of mysterious actions exerted towards a computer in order to reach

a certain aim. It usually consists of rituals, incantations, and similar psychical

activities. Voodoo programming, black arts, cargo cult programming, waving with a

dead chicken, and reading runes on printed circuit boards.

Self-appointed healers and menders resort to more and more bizarre acts. They confront the more and more intense emptiness with superficial rituals copied from National Geographic brochures and B movies. The machine goes on and on leaving no more traces of mystery. However, one always finds a moment to spend in the company of a nice song.

Voodoo, kabala, jukebox, horror, shame, despair.!

An existential horror on of freedom that never comes.

No computer or other machine based on an integrated circle software was used during the work on the performance, neither is it used in the performance itself.

Press:

„Rain Dance shows, among other, how a commercial product often becomes "public property" and a cultural artefact onto which the consumer begins to project his intimacy: moods, memories, desires... and thus the product (in this case the song) becomes the biggest idiocy ever. A suggestion of a word, melody, rhythm is enough... and we are carried on a wave which describes a different curve for each surfer."

Petr Ferenc: „In a Rain of Grilled Songs". A2 cultural weekly 21/2009

„It is true that this piece is to a certain extent a test of how much the audience can bear. Albeit all of the action on the stage is more or less ridiculously absurd (we laugh at ourselves), yet it is calculatedly purposeless and hollow."

Jana Bohutínská:  „Craftily Stolen Time - to what the Small Inventory Festival testified this year.- A didgeridoo made out of tubing. A2 cultural weekly 6/2010

„Rain dance works with oscillation between speech and demonstration. A deliberately non-theatrical manifestation is in direct contrast to the content of individual parts of the production, announced in advance.  Even if this is itself often ironic, it declares great themes, which the performers purportedly want to touch on. Rain dance is an ironic play, which makes fun of the pompous, large gestures of theatre which pretends to be profound."

Jan Jiřík: Small Inventory in Pigeon-Holes. SAD XXI/3 2010

„Theatre of song (Dörner´s guitar sports the inscription „This machine kill fascists"), event, lost identity (Smolík puts on a mask, attaches a paper with a drawing of a face, which he sets on fire. After burning, the mask remains like a sticker. Turning the mask from front to back, transforms Smolík into an executioner) and destroyed publicity brand names. Like a cat caught by naughty boys, Procházka runs round in circles with tin cans tied to his trousers, with the brands Adidas, Nike and Puma on his torso."

Tomáš Kubart: Big Inventory  - Dance in Acid Rain. Rozrazilonline.cz 27/4/2010

„The ten-year old theatrical „research and development" of Tomáš Procházka and co. crystalised in the last productions into an original, amusing, mysterious and solid form. The greatest device of Handa Gote, however, is how it gradually reveals the sense of the performance: from the first bizarreness to a clear, even poignant meaning of things."

Pavel Klusák: The World Knelt Down. Where´s the Restart?; LN 20th November 2010