A statue is pulled down in the centre of the city.
The statue wonders what it will see from this new position.
The rope questions if it can handle these opposing forces.
The puller hopes this action will change the course of history.
The Third Room is a collaborative performance project by Liza Baliasnaja, Christine De Smedt, and Theo Livesey, centered around the notion of Low Intensity Violence.
The Third Room attempts to understand how invisible, structural, systemic violence serves as a condition of possibility for visible violence to take place, and how Low Intensity Violence itself operates and passes through most, if not all, of our lived experiences.
Who and what holds the power to name something as violent? Why, and at which point is something named as violent? Can altering the discourse around violence help us in bringing about social and political changes that are needed today?
The Third Room addresses violence as a perpetual force inherent to all of life, trying to analyze violence also beyond the dichotomies of passivity and activity, doing and receiving. By means of fiction and storytelling, The Third Room plays with ways of addressing violence without speaking about it.
The work proposes to bring people together around a notion of Low Intensity Violence by setting up a “conference-inspired format” which modulates between conversations, dance, interrogation, invitation and story.
By engaging with language in all its forms, through the body, the page, the spoken, this work seeks to be a space for coming together, to think alongside one another, with a view to imagining how the relation to the violence within and around us can evolve.
10.12.2022 – De Singel, Antwerpen (première)