Hotel Memorial | Alen Čelić
Author & performer: Alen Čelić
Musician: Piero Malkoč
About the show:
Hotel Memorial is a revitalization of the work which premièred seven years ago at Dubrovnik’s Karantena. It is a study that combines mime and physical theatre, and speaks of an imaginary hotel populated by ghosts of celebrities where unusual guests stay. Čelić himself, without any props or text delivers a work full of rich imagination, dynamic movements, unusual characters and extraordinary energy. Even the temperature of the Split Multimedia cultural centre, that has more in common with a refrigerator than with a theatre, is not able to tarnish the raw energy of the work and performer.
Four segments of the story form the character of a man with a rich imagination who enters different hotel rooms and is faced with unusual situations: Ginger Rogers’s perfume prompt the visitor’s sexual fantasy, a bullfighter in a tight costume in a duel with a bull, an ironing board, a breakfast which he must cook by convincing a chicken to lay an egg… These situations serve as motives for developing this rich mime etudes, and a significant contribution to the creation is the music created by Alen Čelić himself.
- Jasen Boko, 2007
About the choreographer:
Alen Čelić is an actor, mime, drama educator (Assistant Professor of the stage movement at the Art Academies in Split and Osijek), assistant for the stage movement in HNK Osijek, HNK Split, Dubrovnik KMD, and musician - songwriter for the band ‘New Gondoliers’. He graduated in mime at the Folkwang Hochschule Essen in Germany, at the department of Physical Theatre, in year 2000, with the performance Hotel Memorial. (The Folkwang dance department is best known because of Pina Bausch). Hotel Memorial premiered in Croatia in 2000, at the opening of Karantena in Dubrovnik. He is a member of UPUH, the Croatian dancers association.
