12 Visits as Consolation

Abstract

Mariam Aleksidze’s contemporary, multi-media ballet 12 Visits was staged in 2021 in the former Ortachala prison, Tbilisi. Thanks to the x-ray effect, the performance renders the inside world of the prison, its prisoner and his family, which the staging choreographer skilfully achieves through artistic expressive means. The performance doesn’t focus on one story or a plot. Instead, it creates an emotional space made of the synthesis of choreographic dramaturgy, fluidity, music, allusions, location and video projection, where spectators themselves become part of the prison reality. Twelve women of different ages (mother, grandma, daughter, wife) visiting their loved ones, expressing their emotions – the joy of meeting, thoughts, pain, suffering and anguish – without words. Those shown through their body movements remind us of the Soviet past, those arrested, exiled and executed in the 1930s, as well as the Post-Soviet period and the more recent past of independent Georgia. Together with the location having its own gloomy history, the ideas expressed through highly artistic means of contemporary choreography bear even deeper – philosophical, religious, cinematographic and literary – layers, which will be discussed it that order in the following passages.

1. The Consolation of Philosophy
2. Biblical Allusions
3. Cinematographic Allusions
4. Samaia – Medea, Phaedra, Carmen