The performance runs from 12.00 noon until midnight. Visitors are welcome to enter and re-enter the venue as often as they wish, at any point during the event. 

Ticket purchases are available on our website before or during the performance. During the event, tickets can also be purchased at the box office outside the venue (cash payments only).

Before undertaking to perform this motif 840 times in succession, it is wise to prepare oneself in the greatest silence, with due regard for the indispensable periods of complete stillness.
- Erik Satie

Vexations, composed by Erik Satie around 1893, is regarded as one of the most radical works in the history of music. Satie appended to its single-page score, comprising only a handful of musical lines, an enigmatic instruction that transforms a brief musical phrase into an extraordinary hours-long performance through 840 uninterrupted repetitions. 

The instruction does not prescribe a mode of interpretation but rather the conditions of performance. The composition thus establishes itself as a temporal framework within which the performer becomes the agent of repetition. Whatever Satie's intentions – whether earnest, ironic, or provocative – the resulting performance radically reshapes our experience of time. In the context of increasingly accelerated present, fractured continuities, and perpetual stimulation, Vexations opens up a different regime of perception: one concerned not with the consumption or expenditure of time, but with enduring within it.  

With repetitions exceeding the threshold of continuous concentration, the clear distinction between execution and the performer's state of being gradually dissolves. What begins as a simple task returns as an embodied experience. States emerge that are not aberrations but consequences of duration: exhaustion, strain, boredom, frustration, disorientation, emptiness, demotivation, dissociation, numbness, pain, and hallucination. Yet it is precisely these conditions that open the possibility of a different mode of attention. Repetition is no longer mere monotony, but a fissure within the automatisms of perception.  

In many respects, Exercises in Discomfort approaches the conditions of contemporary existence, in which discomfort does not appear as a continuum – one that system continually masks through a hyper-production of stimuli, the imposition of short-term objectives, and an instant drive towards perpetual movement. What becomes of discomfort when we relinquish the pursuit of pleasure and comfort? 

Vexations – Exercises in Discomfort is not a work that can be performed in the conventional sense, but rather an experimental situation through the enduring presence of three pianists, five dancers, and the audience.  It is not a question of interpreting Satie's composition, but of its material effect. The performance is an invitation to inhabit time for twelve hours, rather than merely consume it. 

Translation: Nataša Jelić