Our daily performance, a piece created by Guiseppo Chico and Barbara Matijevic, is a spin on the videos or tutorials we all watch and love. Combining humour and experiences we all go through in our daily lives creates a universally enjoyable kind of light comedy.
Over the course of the past 10 years Guiseppo Chico and Barbara Matijevic have been doing plays on the issues that leading a double life, one in reality and one virtual reality, provoke. This particular performance was executed by 5 actors.
The play focusses on tutorials that force physical behaviour. Things like working out, defending yourself against a preditor or making a rap song. Each individual tutorial transitions into the next one. Our daily performance is constructed as if you have a playlist on youtube that is full of these videos and that is what you are watching.
Personally, I really liked the play. It criticizes the way we spend hours in front of a screen watching tutorials that are supposed to teach us something, but in reality we are most likely never going to do any of them ourselves.
Instead of getting up and recreating those tutorials, we are in fact doing the exact opposite and we are sitting at home watching other people do the actual work. All while we are hurting our bodies and brains by the second since it’s not a secret sitting in your couch all day is bad for you. Our daily performance makes the irony of it all painfully clear.
Besides this, it also reflects on the pressure we feel to constantly achieve greater things. Especially online, the need we feel to ‘be better’ than others is a growing problem amongst young people. One of the acts talked about ‘Shadowfighting at home without a partner’. The actor shows you ridiculous exercises you could do on your own so you wouldn’t have to ‘waste time’ making an appointment with someone else. It went from things like climbing a table to excessively bouncing on an exercise ball. The point was to never stop moving forward. It emphasized on these things because, that too, is a growing problem we can’t deny. It’s okay to take a break sometimes and have a breather, something we seem to be forgetting more and more.
Femke Gilis
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