Rain Dance 2.0

Voodoo-kabbala-jukebox! Horror-shame-despair! This machine kills fascists!

Rituals containing incantations and similar psychic activities: voodoo, black magic, cargo cults, waving around a dead chicken and reading rune marks on circuit boards. An absurdist, dark satire combining the clichés of happy industrial life with scepticism that is slowly growing across western culture, as the demons of the old world stray into a new era where they don’t know the rules, just like the citizens.

An existential horror show about longing for a deliverance that never comes.

A revue program that attempts to tame the errant old-world demons who are as unsure of the new age as its inhabitants. On stage, a group of self-proclaimed healers and correctors of the world resort to increasingly bizarre acts. Against the growing emptiness, they invoke superficial rituals copied from National Geographic books or learned from B-movies. Meanwhile, the world hurtles ahead, leaving no trace of the mysterious. Still, there’s always time for a nice moment with a song.

From the dictionary of programming lingo: “Rain dance”

1. Any activity intended to solve a hardware problem with the expectation of zero effect.

2. Any sequence of mysterious actions performed toward a computer in order to achieve a certain goal. Usually limited to rituals involving incantations and similar psychic activities. Voodoo programming, black arts, cargo cult programming, dead chicken waving, reading runic characters from printed circuit boards.

Handa Gote research & development is a post-dramatic theatre group with a focus on experimental music and visual, sound and performance art. The group has been researching a specific theatrical language using non-linear and often non-narrative dramaturgy and the integration of science and technology in art.

awards/press

“In recent productions, ten years of scenic ‘research and development’ by Handa Gote have crystallised into a form that is original, funny, mysterious and solid. Handa Gote’s greatest asset, however, is the way the meaning of the show gradually unfolds: from the initial bizarreness to a clear, even burning, sense of things.”
Pavel Klusák: The World Has Knelt. Where Is the Reboot?, Lidové noviny