Olindo Rampin on On the difficulty of telling the truth, “PAC”, May 17 2024

POLIS Teatro Festival 24 – part 1 – Mats Staub and ErosAntEros
Olindo Rampin, “PAC”, May 17th 2024
https://www.paneacquaculture.net/2024/05/17/polis-teatro-festival-24-parte-1-mats-staub-e-eros-anteros/

“[…] The interpretive signature set by Agata Tomšič is expressed in an inexorable diction, with a stern, pressing tone, mottled with a controlled rage, rhythmic as a metronome, but which at times catches fire in high notes of an infectiously bold vocalism. These are original warbling flashes, culminating in a bird trill, with an explosive streak in them. They merge happily with Davide Sacco’s electronic sounds and Michele Lapini’s photographs that flow across the backdrop: images of protests and demonstrations, of police charges, often seething, in tune with the music, in a process of graphic, materic and chromatic disintegration, which sharply comments on the expressive peaks of the valuable vocal-interpretive research.
At times the performer steps away from the microphone and in a dimly lit area of the stage changes her vocal register to a whispered, private tone, in intimate communion with the audience. The thin, nervous figure, the bloodless, highly mobile face, now stern now restless or sweet, the sharp profile, the clear eyes made iridescent by the theatrical light, Agata Tomšič seems to descend “through the branches” from acting genealogies of the early twentieth-century and Central European avant-garde, theatrical families of energetic restlessness and stubborn tenacity.”