Ariel Doron

*Spoilers ahead*

"Visiting Hours are Over" is a social experiment / performance art piece which uses puppetry to confronts the audience with their role as passive viewers of atrocities.  It explores the thin line between show and reality, and the associations, imagination and actions,

that inanimate objects can bring up in the audience. 

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Viewers find themselves taking part in a mass execution of puppets - with one puppet being killed after the other right among them, as there is no seperation from audience and performers and all happens in one space.

They can be passive viewers and do nothing about it, but they get a few small hints that they could intervene if they want, and each presentation of the piece, like in Performance art, develop very differently with people trying to stop the puppeteers, save specific puppets or interrupt the show completely. People start organising and planning how to block the puppeteers in groups, pull out the masks from puppeteers faces, re-animate dead puppets and manipulate them, often becoming violent towards the puppeteers just to save the puppets. Some people choose to join them, and kill puppets with them together. Every presentation is completely different and unpredictable, and even when the puppeteers are doing the same actions and scenes each show, what is really being animated is the audience itself here, and the show offers us a look at human and group behaviour, using the magic of puppetry.

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Review by Tobias Pruewer (Contains Spoilers):

https://www.fidena.de/publish/viewfull.cfm?objectid=217145df_b706_ff45_2521a30708b7a691