THE DILETTANTE (who dreamt of an Angel)

A one-act audiovisual mono-performance immersing in the surreal world of Jean Cocteau’s artistic work. 

Jean Cocteau is a hardly fully comprehensible personality, whose dilettantism in different artistic fields flows out like fragments of a particularly rich poetic world – incomplete, imperfect, hasty, brave, resembling nothing else. 

He is a playwright, a poet, a painter, a drawer, a novelist, a graphic designer, a music manager, a boxing manager, an opium addict, an enemy of André Breton, but a good friend of Igor Stravinsky, Marcel Proust, Nobel Prize winner André Gide, Pablo Picasso or Erik Satie. 

The suicide of his father, the influence of Catholicism and Surrealism, the parallels between boxing and ballet, opium addiction, journey around the world, friendships with the most extraordinary artists of the time and art work, poetry, drama, prose, cinema, theatre, music – all these are the main themes of Cocteau’s life, which are the focus of an audiovisual intermedia narrative developed in a laboratory-like creative process.

The work freely improvises on motives from Jean Cocteau’s graphic and paintings, poems, novels “Opium”, “The White Paper”, theatre play “The Human Voice” and his films “Blood of the Poet”, “Orpheus’ Testament” and his biography. 

“The material for the performance becomes Cocteau himself, understanding him not just as an interdisciplinary artist, but also as an anthropomorphized montage of different media and disciplines. In this performance, all stage components are part of Cocteau’s personality. By dividing these disciplines (cinema, surreal objects, music, literature, fashion, etc.) and giving them to each member of the creative team, we aimed to break this montage back down into separate media and to montage them again into new contemporary intermedial pieces. With an incredibly talented team, we worked to find indirect connections, parallels, poetic paradoxes that would establish a symbolic relationship between themes, sounds, images and symbols that have nothing to do with each other outside this surreal world. We were working on a small scale so that we could freely and equally combine media art, music, animation, acting, cinema, mechanized scenography object, texts, puppet and object theatre, soundspace and other contemporary theatre instruments.” – Žilvinas Vingelis, director and dramaturg of the performance.