German premier

»Rough Ride … « is like a shussing through big-city traffic and symbolises the cyclist who is burning up his or her own energy reserves, filling the space between speeding car bodies with this energy, surrounded by enemy cars and threatening trams. The musicians and performers on the stage throne in a desolate sculpture composed of scrap bicycles and cars, monitors and motors. Rotating and vibrating steel with painful sounds and acid fumes.

The performer Damir Bartol Indoš builds himself up into a trance. His game is a ritual and secret ceremony. Highly concentrated, he dances, sings and disclaims. Croatian, English and German. »Who will be my murderer, what will be his name: Renault-Megane, Fiat-Bravo, Mercedes-Benz … ?« Then he sings of Heraclitus again: »Water only lives from the death of the air / the earth lives from the death of the water. / This is how Heraclitus spoke of troubled waters.« Cries of exasperation and exhaustion merge with synthesiser sequences and the sound of tortured metal. »Rough Ride or Of the spirit« may be understood as an acoustic-kinetic installation, revealing the defencelessness of people, life as a speeding trip.

Indoš’ performance style does not follow any canon of performance and you can’t categorise it as dance or theatre. On the one hand, he’s like an innocent child who is completely lost in his game. Then he is profoundly woven into the creation of extremely complex subtle actions. On the one hand, the body, that is working itself out and driven to exhaustion and on the other hand a filigree game of the hands and fingers, charged with secretive symbolism.

Damir Bartol Indoš is looked upon as a cult figure of the Croatian off-theatre scene. He was born in Zagreb in 1957, studied philosophy at the University of Zagreb and has been working since 1988 as a free-lance artist with various national and international artists (for instance, Charlie Morrow, Elliott Sharp, Yolanda van Dijk, Emil Krištov). Since 1991 he has been co-operating with musicians and video artists in the kugla group.

His early performances are frequently picked up in the independent Croatian theatre scene and used them for the point of departure for new dance and theatre work such as texts written by bodies.