Production, author, producer, director & sound engineer: Cosette Heuberger
Actors: Celestes De Vlam and Zoë Ceulebroeck
Synopsis:
Two strangers find themselves trapped in an elevator on the 23rd floor.
The man is hurried, rational, and uncomfortable; the woman is calm, observant, and responds poetically to the static situation.
What begins as “just being stuck” unfolds into a disorienting journey through a building that endlessly repeats itself on the 23rd floor.
The stairs lead to two identical rooms, and those rooms lead back to the same stairwell.
The floor on which they are trapped is not only physical but also mental.
Their dialogue balances between lightness and existential tension.
At first, they do not understand each other, and the silences and tones say more than the words. As time seems to stand still, urgency loses its essence, and they slowly begin to understand one another.
The audio work is in thematic dialogue with Franz Kafka’s Der Bau (1923), in which a self-built space turns into a mental prison. As with Kafka, the urge for security and control becomes a source of unrest. The elevator and the floor function as a contemporary cave: a labyrinth in which movement offers no escape and repetition prevails.
When the characters become exhausted and stop forcing themselves, space opens for something else: shared silence, a simple gesture, a moment of doing nothing. In that standstill, the meaning of time shifts.
