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Geoffrey B. Small introduces theatre/defile in Paris for the very first time
Can three ladies talking on a city bench at rush hour suddenly
come to symbolize a world spinning out of control?
And what does that have anything to do with fashion these days?
IN our ongoing commitment to human performance, artistic expression, and the environmental catastrophe we now all face due to the failure of a ruling class so out of touch with the reality of our humanity, that they are now racing to eliminate it, including a fashion and textile industry which has recently been exposed to have already contaminated virtually all of the world's public drinking and sea water with plastic microfibre particles from its massive use of polyester and synthetic materials… "Come and Go" will introduce the first live theatre performance ever done for a Paris fashion runway presentation, as well as the most advanced extreme handmade clothing technologies and concepts for women from our world-renowned via Spalato workrooms at Cavarzere Venezia, all enhanced with an amazing master performance based upon the play by Samuel Beckett directed by Brad C. Sisk starring Sara Lazzaro, Melissa Purnell, and Jenni Lea-Jones. We believe it will be a revolutionarily human, emotional and touching event during the fashion week, and we truly hope that some of you reading this can be there.
Geoffrey B. Small will introduce theatre/defile in Paris for the very first time with an amazing
master performance based upon the play by Samuel Beckett directed by Brad C. Sisk
starring Sara Lazzaro, Melissa Purnell, and Jenni Lea-Jones. We believe it will be a
revolutionarily human, emotional and touching event during the fashion week.
So why merge live theatre with a Paris defile?
THERE are many reasons far too many to list, but perhaps the best one may be because we are living in a world where the very existence of our species is now being put to question. The very hopelessness that Beckett came to define is now a real phenomenon among the vast majority of human beings. It is becoming a part of our existence. We humans can't seem to do anything about anything anymore. Fabled democracies are no longer democracies at all. Our vote. Our civil liberties. Our so-called human rights, are nothing but a memory, or worse, a lie and a delusion. Our lives, planet, and destinies are being manipulated and controlled by a ruling class that is committed to perpetual war, contamination of our environment, slavery and human misery, unprecedented deception, chaos and division, and the premise that they can escape and protect themselves from the calamity that their actions and leadership are driving us all into. Hell on earth is coming for us. But not them. They will continue to survive and prosper, the rest of us are expendable.
A nuclear war or confrontation is now on the table and in the open discussion of the mass media of the world. The world's most powerful economy and military power is now a mutually dependent single-bonded entity feeding on itself and everything else around it in its constant need to grow ever more larger with no end in sight. Mounting and ever-more shocking examples of nature's immense power to destroy all of us and reshape the entire planet as we know it are taking place everyday along with the mounting millions of human victims as result. From the plastic contamination of all of the world's water, to the melting of the world's permafrost releasing oceans of methane into the air, and glaciers and arctic ice deepening the warming of the oceans and raising them at the same time, to the apocalyptic droughts and massive forest fires turning carbon sinks into carbon sources, to those bigger and bigger storms- one after the other- hitting us everywhere and releasing mountains of chemical and radioactive contaminants as they begin to smash our feeble and hastily designed infrastructure- which is now based so foolishly on all these toxins, and the hundreds and hundreds of species now going into extinction as biospheres and systems get increasingly messed up from all these massive changes… the world is changing right before our very eyes.
We were warned about this. We are all concerned about this. But our leaders and those who control the strings of our civilization, and have known where things have been going to, have done nothing- except get in the way at every step of the process. What have they done? They have used their media from television to the internet to smart phones to confuse us, scare us, and divert our attention to a threat and an enemy that is always changing but is never them. They are investing unprecedented resources to be able to live without us, and if necessary to defend themselves against us, even eliminate us, once we really realize what has been going down all along. Throughout the entire western world now, local police are now armed to the teeth and national armies are being prepared for domestic deployments against their own countrymen, but the madness doesn't stop there. The end of mass employment is now on the very near horizon as Artificial Intelligence (A/I) is being rolled out into our societies at a breathtaking pace and the perpetrators of these technologies are knowingly aware of the appalling results to humanity that will result from it that will shake our civilization to its very core as a result. Between mass unemployment, mass dislocation from global warming disasters and the next perpetual war that comes to a neighborhood near you, the world will continue to spin into ever unbelievable chaos and misery… and those who are causing it and profiting from it, will need increasingly armed force to protect them from their own citizens who they have abandoned and abused so much.
Now is the time to look at Beckett and his work as the world spirals into more and more chaos
and increasingly bizarre and insane leaders spouting off at the mouth reinforce the idea that
the individual normal person is being increasingly left out on his own with nobody to depend upon,
So while we have discussed Joseph Bueys here on SZ
especially on this thread, now is the time to look at Beckett
SAMUEL Beckett was one of the great avant-gardists of the 20th century, like most of us in our game, he had to go to Paris to make it in his game as well. And while he was perhaps one of the most influential writers during his lifetime, like Orwell, it is today in 2017, where his bleak, minimalist, views of human existence, helplessness and inability to change destiny from destitution is now becoming the reality and the future for most of the human world. The inability to control the world, let alone survive in it anymore, its ominous future, and the growing focus on poverty, failure, exile and loss- as Beckett put it, on man as a 'non-knower' and as a 'non-can-er is becoming more and more prescient. The systematic extinction of democracy, freedom of the press, expression, movement, civil and economic liberties, any form of security and safety, and even privacy, grows unabated everywhere. The bombardment of images of police abuse, refugees, terrorist attacks, and increasingly bizarre and insane leaders spouting off at the mouth continues to reinforce the idea that the individual normal person is being increasingly left out on his own with nobody to depend upon, especially those who have been entrusted with the responsibilities of keeping the public safe, secure and better-off with them than without them. And when it comes to a global fashion and textile industry that has singlehandedly contaminated the entire world's drinking and sea water with plastic petrochemical micro-toxins, kept a 6th of the world's population working in slavery, stolen another 6th of the population's money and jobs by selling them garbage made of plastics at all price points to the rafters, and brainwashed generations of humans into merrily going along and paying their money for this road to hell… there is clearly a lot to answer for. As fashion mirrors the society in which it finds itself in, Beckett's non-knowers and non can-ers know no end. Indeed, today, they are everywhere.
"Come and Go" has been called Beckett's most perfect play. A masterpiece of his pioneering minimalist style, it is said that he agonized over each individual line until they perfectly hit a vision he had in his mind. A vision that portrays a story of time, human relations, and some calamitous event, or perhaps many.
Beckett knew how transient everything was becoming. And isn't that what fashion is? Everything truly is so "come and go" these days... especially in this digital and virtual age of fakery and vapidity. But like the new GBS limited edition collection showing with it, the play is an essentialist work based on real skill and truth. Only exactly what needs to be there is in it. No more no less. And therein lies its beauty and power. So little can indeed evoke so much.
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