{The Alunsina Network}

Devised, Designed and Directed by meLê yamomo
Choreography: Helen Pokrovskaia
Text & lyrics: Maya van den Heuvel - Arad
Dramaturgy: Lonneke van Heugten
Soundscape: Markus Hoogervorst
Production Management: Johanna TimonenTechnical Direction: Wouter Helmond
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U87N6wWetg


Premiered at the Cross Channels Intercultural Performance Festival [December 2008 - Theater Nieuwe Doelenstraat, Amsterdam, Netherlands]

The concept of the piece jumps off from the Panay myth saying that the genesis of the world coincides with the god Tungkung Langit's search for the missing wife Alunsina - that the world was created in search of love. In the production, {The Alunsina Network} is a virtual space - an online site in search for connection, for someone to talk to, for a date, for love. A Russian friend. A Dutch dinner date. A Polish sexdate. A Thai lover.

{The Alunsina Network} is a theatre piece devised from actual experiences in online dating websites by the artists involved in the production. In these websites, the kind of engagement is actually akin to Martin Heidegger's concept of the "World Picture" (Die Zeit des Weldbildes). The experience of social interaction in these dating websites is a conquest of the world as picture. Participants put up themselves as a picture and image for the rest of the world to see. The "World Picture" that these websites provide is a collage of images of prospective partners ready to be conquered - a technology that translates the Heideggerian notion of the conquest of the world as picture in the virtual sense.

The production is musically structured in the counterpoint and harmony of Bach's Die Kunst der Fuge.

Alunsina's Aria

Based on Kontrapunktus 1 - Der Kunst der Fuge by Johann Sebastian Bach
Text: Maya van den Heuvel – Arad

TungKongLangit, will I be found?

Were traces not erased,

Were voices not to turn to stones

Beneath the feet, the roads dissolve

Into dust, I will be found at last.

If shadows were not to fright

Had light not

to die out

If days were not to turn to nights

If

Mists hadn't covered hearts

I will be found.

TungKongLangit, will I be found?

I’m standing here.

Suns are setting, moons are rising high,

The knees

They fail,

They rub

The gra-vel roads,

The flowers bloom,

And fade,

They die,

And bloom

a-gain

inside,

my somber heart

I’m waiting here for you,

I know you’d

find me.