The Third Room 

I think it says a lot about you, that when the question is about responsibility, the next topic that’s brought up is guilt. I find that interesting.I thought you were talking about guilt? I was talking about duty.I heard you say guilt.I said guilt after you said guilt.You did say guilt!I said guilt, but I was not thinking about guilt.Ok. Distinction made. You said it without thinking about it. That’s quite impressive.

Life in the contemporary Western world is permeated with casual violence, so small that we hardly notice it. Microaggressions disguised in friendly language, scars of a violent history in public spaces, tug-of-war to gain the upper hand in a conversation… It is violence that we have experienced and sometimes cause ourselves. It’s subtle, but builds up and can cause long-term damage.

The Third Room is a performance in which Christine De Smedt, Liza Baliasnaja and Theo Livesey investigate what they call ‘violence with low intensity’. Together they encompass the lines of a conversation. How can you use language as a means of imagination and dominance? In the situations created, the performers swing back and forth between the positions of perpetrator, witness and victim. They pierce the fiction of freedom and peaceful coexistence that divides part of the Western social ideal.