TENSE AND ENTRANCING
As a designer, Čavlek deploys lights, shadows and darkness. He casts disciplined illumination and passes across Isaković’s full nudity and handsomeness. Their process is a two-way staring. We, the audience, provide the third eyes. There are breath and motion and cool-blazed drama, too, in Čavlek’s lighting design as it possesses and tempts us; it formally slices and prog
resses across Isaković’s tension.
Think of the duo this way, if you will. Čavlek is the Koma to Isaković’s Eiko. Except that Čavlek remains backstage. Except that we can only one person executes visual effects. DENUDED’s real spirit recuperates the downplaying-contracting-expanding-arching-unshrouding of Croatian freedom of expression and male representation
Čavlek lighting design displays “breath” and motion; there came to be a distinct personality. The houselights went down. Chiaroscuro patches of warm yellow and cool white slice divide Isaković’s twisting form. His body arches and swells, it stretches and bends his spine, and it unhinges and forms muscle bridges. A protruding muscle in his navel clearly extends straight down to his cock. Dreamlike, DENUDED seems to yoga, inflate and deflate with controlled breath.
Nakedness, cramped motion and framed darkness do — on the surface — close in on Isaković, and the choreographer takes off his clothes, scans the room and makes contact with audience members. In my own experience, I found the shifts of color and lights to be impressive. About three-quarters into the show, as I remarked above, I was genuinely surprised and overtaken by the sudden introduction and swelling of a Philippine megastar Sharon Cuneta’s sung in my Filipino language took me aback. Positivity, aching feelings and the song lyric’s great longing overcame and lifted me. Unexpectedly, it sprung to my mind my personal struggles for healing and the necessity for optimism and recovery.
I’m sure other audience members during that September 28 performance hold different associations and reactions. They had their own subjective relation to the world.
Please. Do not let this week pass by without seeing DENUDED. Experiencing Bruno Isaković’s and Aleksander Čavlek’s approach is like a concentrated pause before plunging anew. Their movements are the ink that agiley counts. Intimate, physically lyrical and laden with a liquid awareness of body image, DENUDED is a tour de force. Why? Because it illustrates and illuminates. Because it unsettles and inspires from outside and from within.
