The Hole Open It

“This performance courageously bridges poetic excavation and physical confrontation in a society where female expression is too often constrained. Rooted in Armenia’s conservative context, where working with the body—especially as a woman—can provoke social backlash and institutional silence, The Hole Open It dares to expose what is culturally repressed. Through water, movement, and layered sound, the artist stages a ritual of rebirth and reckoning, pushing the boundaries of theater into raw, embodied presence. Drawing on a foundation in classical training while subverting its conventions, she transforms the stage into a site of memory, resistance, and fragile power.”

Jury Statement

The Hole Open It is a performance and sound-based work that stages a visceral confrontation with memory, identity, and the primal intelligence of the body. Drawing from a poem in the artist’s own book Documentary Self Discovery, the piece navigates the tension between inner resistance and the longing for transformation, embodied as a restless force imagined within the bones. Set on a stage partially flooded with water—a visual metaphor for memory and the subconscious—two female performers engage in a ritual of emotional and physical release.

The immersive soundscape weaves together breath, water, heartbeat rhythms, and fragmented classical motifs, oscillating between suffocation and revelation. Rooted in traditions of Cruel Theatre the work reclaims the female body as a site of knowledge, vulnerability, and resistance.

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Credits

Arash Azadi – Composer / Sound Artist
Mary Bayatyan – Co-author / Co-performer

The presentation of the work is funded by State of the ART(ist), a collaboration between the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ars Electronica.