Tabula rasa, presented by an artist and director Egmontas Bžeskas together with a choreographer and dancer Karina Krysko, is a continuation of the performance which was delivered and very well received at the Off-beats festival last year. Music to this production is composed by Andrius Kauklys, a DJ and the leader of the Happyendless. His musical compositions are performed alive during the performance and serve as a résumé for its weird and funny visions. The stylistic direction of the production may be defined as a theatrical variety of a video.

This recent KARMAN production is filled with horror, weird visions and open eroticism. The authors advise that the audience should not take children to their performances. In addition, they are not recommended for people with a weak nervous system or extra-high moral standards either. KARMAN named themselves a reality theatre because the majority of the participants of their productions are real people, usually, not professional actors at all. They all do on the stage what they are good at in reality. The contact with the audience allows them to change the course of the production which adds unpredictable episodes to the action.

We are displaying life the way it is. We do not aim to hide anything or to cover it with veils of art. We are presenting sport, sex, wealth, perversions, madness and transvestites. We do not declare if it is right or wrong. As a reality theatre, we want to show it because it exists. Conclusions should be drawn by the audience. They should decide who the winner is: the good or the evil. This is real life transplanted onto the theatrical stage. Even the weirdest visions are the result of real human thinking mixed with clinical madness and sometimes based on real clinical records.

However, in this new KARMAN production there is also room for humour and for games with the audience. It makes the action unpredictable, the audience gets an impression that the course of events is out of control, and the feeling of safety is lost.

In some sense our audience may influence the course of our performances. We give our audience a chance to decide what they want and what they see. We are expecting as many different opinions as possible because in this way we can see that our production was really democratic, and that we did not put constraints on the imagination of our audience.

This tragically comic performance tells a story of an inhabitant of a “white quadrangle”. The closed space signifies the inner world of the protagonist which is split into two halves. One half of it is forced to submit to social norms, the other one plunges itself into odd visions and dreams. Gradually, the audience is also involved into the white quadrangle. The boundaries become blurred. The protagonist loses himself. What is real and what is illusionary here? Maybe it is just a bad dream or maybe it leads to the unknown…

Mr. X, the protagonist, engorges raw meat and evacuates because he understands that this is what the real human nature is. The boundaries of the white quadrangle stand for the brain of its weird inhabitant. All the visions that surround him are the result of the activity of separate parts of Mr. X’s brain.  They take forms of parasites, bacteria, erotic scenes et al. Mr. X cannot escape from the space of the white quadrangle. He is absolutely convinced that this is his private space and he is its only inhabitant. However, this is not exactly so since his brain is full of inner parasites that are constantly damaging the white quadrangle. They can get in and out of it easily and leave their clear imprints there. The only effort to clean and save the white quadrangle is made by Mr. X’s soul, a white spirit, a supernatural being that is embodied by a mindful lady who never gives up.

Tabula rasa was produced co-operatively in Lithuania and Berlin. Its premiere was presented at the Off-beats 2 festival in Berlin. A very cosmopolitan cast was involved in its production: Lithuanians, Germans, and Brazilians.