Matija Ferlin: Sad Sam Revisited (2004)

Ferlin’s first solo performance unfolds as a series of anti-actions that push his body and mind to their limits. Using minimal yet intense gestures, such as lip-syncing nostalgic songs and rubbing a microphone on his chest until his skin reddens, Ferlin’s presence fluctuates between stark visibility and partial concealment. His choreographic choices, including repetitive walking patterns and gestural restraint, resist conventional dance categorization, exploring an intense focus on bodily presence and emotional immediacy. The staging creates a raw, introspective atmosphere that underscores themes of intimacy, isolation, and vulnerability through sustained moments of bodily auto-fixation.

This is the fortune of manhood.

Images and image.

Burning the calm fever of love.

I press the button.

He feels.

Fainting upon the obstacle of touching.

Nothing I care remains.

He took the silence.

I took the devotion of a staring fantasy.

I’ve made a comedy of becoming a man next to an animal.

Ferlin’s first solo piece Sad Sam Revisited goes back to the final year of his studies in Amsterdam. Sad Sam Revisited encapsulates the procedures of contemporary theatre and dance with unexpected maturity and boldly sets out to face the demanding performative non-acts of duration, of persisting in forming a state, albeit never wavering to interrupt the narrative. The palette of Ferlin’s performing corpus in Sad Sam Revisited already incorporates recognisable sequences of the physical procedures he commonly uses, as well as the skilful shifting between humour and dryness, which performatively plays with the poetic fragments by Katalina Mella in the field of contemporary dance (and theatre). 

Source: https://emanat.si/en/production/matija-ferlin--sad-sam-revisited/