"Some places are like people: some shine and some don't" – to quote a classic. "Les Moires" Hotel is the only shining spot for many kilometers around. Away from the popular tourist trails, it exists as if there were no time: it doesn't age, it doesn't get younger, it just is. It is said that time passes more quickly high up in the mountains, although people do not notice the difference. Although "Les Moires" itself does not experience time, the destinies of its inhabitants are accelerated compared to what happens closer to the ground. The fact that this acceleration is noticeable contradicts all the laws of classical physics. Minutes and seconds seem to be more compressed in time so that there are more of them in one day and one night than would be measured by a simple clock. In the suspicious acceleration of time, there is also an acceleration of a certain property of the physical world that could be called event quanta.
What is meant by the term "quantum"? The word "quantum" is Latin for "how much". In physics, a quantum describes the smallest portion that a physical quantity can hold or change in a single event. Simply put, a quantum is a portion that cannot be divided. A cake cannot be cut infinitely. There is the smallest possible slice that can be given to a guest.
Life is made up of quanta of events. Events happen one after the other, lined up in a story. The multiplicity of events, feelings, and relationships are fragmented in a narrative that divides into the past, the present, and an unknown future. We call it life, biography, destiny. Time governs each story and makes stories intelligible. First, there is a cause, then an effect, and an action causes a rebound. But when time begins to accelerate, it ceases to be time and becomes something we no longer understand by nature, a multiplicity of quantum events ceasing to average out into a reality that can be understood and comprehended.
This is what happened one summer evening in 1938 in the "Les Moires" hotel in the Swiss mountains, barely making ends meet. The physical properties of space and time are disrupted. The disruption is also experienced by the hotel guests themselves. Something begins to change in their memories, attitudes, emotions, and desires. Nobody understands what is happening.
Among the guests is the famous German physicist Werner Heisenberg, author of the uncertainty principle. Does the reality of large objects such as a desk, a hotel, and mountains start to behave like the reality of elementary particles? According to Heisenberg, particles can only be spoken of in approximate terms, describing their states of being rather than themselves. Only by changing the way that we think about what an object is to what the state of an object is, can hotel guests understand what is happening to them and around them. They have come to "Les Moires" to see the world from the perspective of the high mountains. To look for deeper meaning in the big picture. What if this meaning can be found not in the Swiss landscapes, but in a single quantum: an emotion, an event, a communication?
Co-produced by:
Onassis Stegi (Greece)
De Singel (Belgium)
International Theatre Festival “Divine Comedy” (Poland)
Národní divadlo Brno (Czech Republic)
Adam Mickiewicz Institute (Poland)
Financed by:
The dramaturgical research for the performance was supported by:
Partner:
