concept & performance: Anja Mueller & Dennis Deter
Mentor: Robert Steijn, Sher Doruff
Melkweg Theatre Amsterdam, June 2008
"blood in the gutter" is a theoretical term taken from the comic art. It means that the "blood" of the presented story, the action, does not take place in the visible, not within the pictures. It is hidden in the parts in between the frames, called the gutter, where the readers have to connect causalities and are therefore actually creating all the action themselves. Time, space and story are in that sense not fixed, but intentions fulfilled by an audience.
We question, how much is needed to tell a story or to let a story be created and imagined by a recipient. By reducing to simple narrative elements and techniques we expanded the "gutter", to let something magical happen.
But at the same time, it appears to us, that this magic is also a dark and sinister one. The freedom of mind and the power of fantasy brings the question of the virtuality of our actual freedom to life. In that sense, the piece can be called a cynical romance or a naive tragedy.
In the process, "blood in the gutter" has been our search for freedom in determined structures, the escape to a non-here and a not-us.
We re-worked this piece in 2010. It is known now as Interpassive Paradise
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