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Kunuk - an Eskimo message.

Article Excerpt
"At the bottom of the ocean lives the Mother of Sea Creatures, a mythical variant of the Great Goddess of Beasts, the source and womb of all life, on whose goodwill the very existence of the tribe depends. This means that the shaman must regularly go down under the water surface to renew connection with the mother of beasts." Mircea Eliade

If you weren't at Tomas Ondrusek's farm in Trstenice near Litomysl on Thursday 5th of September 2002 shortly after midday then you missed a great deal. And what you missed was the prepremiere of the production KUNUK, that magical descent to the bottom of the ocean to purify the self from all the wrongs of the world.

Kunuk is the graduation project of a student of stage design at DAMU [Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts], Kristyna Taubelova, who invited the composer Ondrej Adamek and percussionist Tomas Ondrusek to work with her.

In the project Kristyna Taubelova (1977) capitalised not only on her experience of attending middle industrial art school in Zizkov and then specialising in woodcarving and furniture restoration at the same school, but also on her studies in Doc. Zeithammel's sculpture studio. The structure she has made of wood and stretched sheepskins is an interesting artwork in itself. Thanks to its variability and position on a turntable it becomes a changing stage and also a "musical instrument" into which a performer -- drummer breathes life. Because the whole production is based on an ancient Eskimo myth, the performer, who moves round the structure and its changing shapes and makes it ring using not only his sticks but also his own body, is also an actor, the character who takes us through the story. The atmosphere of the production is much enhanced by the...

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