By: Stela Mišković

The performance “Picture Perfect” by director Achim Wieland engages the audience from the very beginning. We are instructed to prepare ourselves for the performance, to turn up thirty minutes early and to install WhatsApp on our phones beforehand. We are awaiting the unknown with great suspense. However, it soon turns out that WhatsApp is actually meant to be a theater space, whilst we, the audience, are put in a group chat as mere observers. Establishing such a comparison evokes the famous quote by W. Shakespeare – “All the world’s a stage”. Yes, all the world’s a stage, as is the phone screen.

In front of us, invited through the application, three actors appear (Marios Ioannou, Elena Kallinikou and Marina Makris). They are tentatively exploring the terrain as if they’ve just set foot on the ground for the very first time. Suddenly, the whole concept remarkably resembles a “live” broadcast of a reality show.

The first photograph that is brought to life is “Listening to the birds” by John Dumont. Taken in the 19^th Century, the photograph is portraying eight children who are listening to the birds chirping. After this idyllic photo, whose carelessness is juxtaposed to the quick pace of our time, there will be a series of photographs that show in which direction humanity has gone from the time when the nuclear bombs were dropped to present day. The three performers will bring to life certain achievements of the human race as well as almost the entire devastation that man has caused. They will also attempt to revive emotions and states by going through either the assumed, or the shown or else the googled atmosphere in the photographs. Before our eyes, in a Brechtian manner and deflecting from pathetic, they will revive the atrocities of war, sufferings of children, the beauty of the Afghan girl, while simultaneously showing us the landing on the Moon and the glamour of Hollywood. After every weeping child, the idylls of Hollywood will follow with a view to remind us of a consumerist, corporative and capitalist society which is immune to the world’s wounds, except when those wounds are used as an advert for humaneness.

 After showing the photograph “The vulture and the little girl” (by photographer Kevin Carter) depicting a starving boy from Sudan (at first it was thought that it was a girl and so the initial title remained) with a vulture standing behind him, waiting for the boy to die, a pizza boy arrives. While interpreting the photo, the actress is trying to put herself in the boy’s position and then she goes on to conclude that the feeling is unknown to her. She does not know what it feels like to be hungry. The actors take a break and have a bite and we are left to feel painfully aware how we take things for granted and how unaware we are of our good fortune.

After a while, having seen a number of “revived” photographs, it’s curtain down on WhatsApp. In other words, in line with the dramaturgy (Marios Ioannou), we are sent a picture of darkness.

When talking about the theater and modern theater tools, we realize that theater stages world-wide are growingly influenced by visual arts and new media. They thus create a multimedia stage action and hence events are described with various, most frequently combined media. The theater is keeping pace with and seeking an authentic expression of the spirit of our time, the age of technocracy; it searches for an expression through combining different techniques which then become theatrical. Performances staged in this manner, brutally modern as they are, normally tackle contemporary topics and are abounding in meaning. This is not the case with this performance as in that sense it remains inconclusive. However, despite remaining on the level of experiment, such performances are necessary as they represent exploratory theater that continually pushes and expands the borders of conventional theater.