Girl from the Fog Machine Factory

Jury Statement

Thom Luz in a fog machine factory – this seems as logical as it is simultaneously whimsical and melancholy. The staff of the eponymous factory is of the kind that will welcome one of its rare visitors with a madrigal in four parts: They’re not exactly worldly. And nothing could make these people happier than an opportunity to show their visitor every single item from the company’s range, from the cigarette-pack-sized hand fog machine to the polyphonic fog-pipe organ. In this show, Thom Luz reaches the culmination of what he has always been trying to grasp: the casualness of beauty, the attempt to hold on to the shining light. “Le passage d’un nuage”, as the song by Francis Poulenc describes it, a French composer between late Romanticism and the modern age of machines, between palm court music and the melodies of delusions, who features prominently in this production. The evening itself is laid out like a musical fog image, with an exposition, an execution and variations, that become increasingly blurred towards the end, until they slowly dissolve.