Conceptual artist Ján Mančuška’s Backwards Play is a performance that works simultaneously with two directions of action.
A narrator in the audience tells the story in linear form, based on the author’s text. Five dancers on the stage act out the same story, but in the opposite sequence, i.e., backwards. All action on the stage is played out backwards, movements, gestures, the unreeling of action. Because of their mirror-like structure, both directions of the story – whose protagonist returns to the past in order to amend mistakes he has made – intersect at key points, and thus seemingly play out simultaneously.
