A Picture Perfect performance

Strangely detached from themselves and others, three performers are putting on a different kind of show at Rialto Theatre next week. In a piece called Picture Perfect, the SRSLYyours Ensemble re-enacts iconic images from a large photographic archive as a way to understand their presence and connection to the world. The performance on March 16 and 17 will also be in English.

With this piece, the award-winning SRSLYyours ensemble challenges the theatrical experience, connecting three protagonists, one virtual butler and the audience in a single group-chat that’s been adapted for the stage. While the audience is following the performance partly live, partly along an image/text-based script on their digital devices, fragments of a broken history unfold: the sound of a bird, the Kardashians, Hiroshima, a drowned boy…

Audience members will be added into a group WhatsApp chat which will exist only for the duration of the performance, from where they will read and view aspects of the piece. The application must be downloaded on each audience member’s phone prior to the show. Further instructions will be given before the event so audiences are requested to arrive at the theatre 30 minutes before the start of the performance.

Navigating through this digital wasteland, and gradually engaging their voice, body, breath and tears, the performers discover a potential loophole to rise from the ‘techno-scientific’ obsession of simulated imagery toward rediscovering a real human experience.

The team behind Picture Perfect is an international group of performers, dramaturges, researchers and visual artists based in Cyprus, Germany, Sweden, Greece and Switzerland, aiming to challenge the norms of theatre.

“We understand theatre as an incentive for social change,” they say, “perhaps a political one. We embrace cross-genre and participatory formats and believe the stage to be the perfect place for people to meet and exchange ideas in the most essential way of avoiding conventional narratives and ready-made truths. Dramaturgy, research, direction, writing and visual means are equal components that inform each other in fluid processes and within non-hierarchal structures. We like many cooks in the kitchen and have good reason to be perfectionists and dreamers. Seriously.”

Picture Perfect

Performance by the SRSLYyours Ensemble. March 16-17. Rialto Theatre, Limassol. 7pm. Please arrive 30 mins before performance. €12-15. In English. Tickets through www.rialto.com.cy and the Rialto App. Tel:7777-7745