Table Animals

Table Animals, 2014-2022
Performance, 4-episode video, interactive game for 2 players
A collaboration with Tim Etchells

Table Animals unfolds through a continuous process of call and response between Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat as they face each other across a table in the performance space or gallery. The audience are mobile and unseated, able to get close to the performance, they can arrive, depart and return at any time.

Taking turns to arrange and rearrange a set of wooden and plastic toy animals in the bordered expanse of the table top, the two artists engage in a shifting game that moves between making patterns, narratives, formal arrangements and pictures from their chosen materials. A playful and competitive trading back and forth of elements within a pre-arranged performative frame, Table Animals is also a kind of silent tabletop theatre in which the surface of the table becomes a slowly changing stage.

First presented as part of Horvat and Etchells’ durational project Over the Table at Aichi Trieniale 2010, Nagoya, Japan

Images from the performance at Teatro Maria Matos, Lisbon in 2014. Photo: Sophie Nurse

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Table Animals also exists as an interactive game for 2 players and a 4-part video performance, commissioned by PACT Zollverein in 2022 and first presented at PACT in June 2022 in the frame of at Claiming Common Spaces IV: Cool Down festival of talks, performances and concerts.

Additional presentations of the video performance and interactive game installation at Theatre of Research (in German: FUNDUS THEATER / Forschungstheater) in Hamburg in September 2022.