Faki Day 1: Porn, Drugs, Risk...

Well, if the expectation was for risk-taking and things which can't really be done in performance, Day 1 delivered.

Occupying Day 1 and leading the program was the residents of Faki, who presented the culmination of the previous month’s work. Knowing the way the audience works in the festival, it doesn’t take long for a bomb to drop – and  perhaps the first was dropped for the evening by Sura Hertzberg with her autobiographical ritual about heroin addiction, an energy quickly followed up on by the fantastically trivial Nordified and the theatre experiment Talk to Me and I’ll Slap You.

First a disclaimer: it’s hard to adequately view five shows in one evening, let alone write on them. Today’s casualty was Collective B’s (AT) Spectaculat’or – a quirky physicality of togetherness and separation, which fulfilled the ‘someone has to break a window’ requirement of Faki. Adding further difficulty: the harsh halls of Medika seem to bring out a kind of violent strength in the ontology of the works, making the jump from one to the other even more difficult, as though moving between totally different worlds. As in the following days, almost everything is prefaced by an apology: I did my best.

Soft Associations

Soft Associations declares itself as an exploration into the ‘softness’ of the body, and it’s pretty much as it says on the label. The audience enters into a space of soft, warm, light and gentle smoke, the dulcet, albeit masculine tones of Sinatra belting out I’ve Got You Under my Skin, the two performers (Liv Fauver and Kata Cots) gently splayed naked on the floor. What follows is a meditation on ‘softness’ and the (particularly female) body, Nina Simone cutting against the opening Sinatra as a musical presence, sometimes ironically silenced, herself reduced to a projected image. The performers adopt an awkward, anguished movement that is almost struggling against its own display, achieving a kind of liberty against Simone’s Chauffeur, only for it to be suddenly ripped away by repetitive and reluctant exposure and concealment, reminiscent of conventions of (male) erotic pleasure.

It seems pretty clear that the target of Soft Associations is the male patriarchal gaze, and its tendency to capture and torture the female body (see Laura Mulvey’s seminal Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, for example). Such discourse may be as old as 70s feminism but it has certainly not been ‘mission accomplished’ in the quest to emancipate from the massively embedded power structure – and Soft Associations does itself a huge favour by selecting a specific perspective within that lengthy discourse. 

The meditation on ‘softness’, with all its connotations of pornography, maternity, and a kind of transgressive blurriness, are set against the crystalline, limited definitions of beauty within Soft Associations, and is to this extent both critical and emancipatory. The paralysis was exemplified for me when I was offered the disposable camera being passed around – told I could photograph whatever I wanted. Suddenly I understood my freedom – and simultaneously, my fear. How to take a photograph without becoming a voyeur, reducing the performers to just an image? Cycling through the options of refusal, I was left hopelessly point-and-clicking at the air in a vague attempt to create an aesthetic not focused on the performers, trapped by my own consciousness, admitting fully the honesty of the artist’s observations.

Love & Heroine

Exhibitionism has negative connotations in the western world, associated with ‘showing off’ or performance of the self for self-gain. In terms of theatre tradition it’s kind of an abomination of performance – a twisting of theatre’s accepted servitude to something higher: to 'the form', to the audience, or to a society.  Traditionally, actors avoid emotional over-indulgence, speak of protecting themselves emotionally, of making sure they can execute the emotional requirements of a role and still wake up the next morning and look themselves in the mirror. Performance art (and increasingly, theatre) plays by different rules. If exhibitionism is not the central idea it must be close, as it creates a key paradox from which the form thrives – that through the form, I expose parts of myself which I fundamentally cannot expose. I am the metaphor. My life is the canvas.

It’s notable, therefore, that performance artist Sura Hertzberg begins Love & Heroine by literally making an exhibit of herself – complete with small plaque with a mildly-parodic description of the artist’s materials (blood, sweat and tears among others). She lightly, and in an annoyingly trivialising way, explains to the audience that the piece is about heroin addiction and her autobiography, but that she’ll begin by dancing naked for us to the tune of Joy Division's Love will tear us apart. But an overly-indulgent love story this is not. What follows is part cathartic ritual and part investigation: candles, flowers and aluminum foil act as the mat, and Hertzberg fluctuates between touching on the emotionally and physically brutal nature of the material and some distancing mechanisms – such as a game show where the audience should guess the name of a famous addict, or a mock-advertisement where she plays out the paradoxical societal message of drugs – ‘you want heroin’ and ‘we don’t condone the use of drugs’ are interchangeable in the message. Reality is well and truly blurred in the depictions of self-harm, culminating in her snorting a line of white powder in the pieces finale.

It’s pretty fair to say that, despite the distancing mechanisms and the faux-carefree American triviality Hertzberg employs, I was ‘worried’ about the artist here. But that aside, because in a way it must be set aside, my key concern is a simple one about communication – a dry subject for an artist but nevertheless – what was being read by the audience? What was this as an act of communion? Was the catharsis experienced by the actor translatable? This is exemplified by Hertzberg’s decision to finish the piece staring into the mirror, speaking about her own self-preservation: “You’ll be ok, I just don’t wanna see you get hurt any more than you already have. I care about you”, at which point she may be speaking to herself, a real or imagined lover in a romantic collapse of subjectivity, or indeed, the audience, undertaking a similar experience (although this may also work the other way) through the ritual of performance. In the last case, is Hertzberg reminding herself of the necessity of evading the subject – that her pain is not the audience’s pain, that some evasion of the subject is precisely necessary because of its taboo and traumatic nature.

But I’m quite sure Hertzberg, in a way at least, doesn’t care about the audience – which is either a problem or a liberating element. I will return to Oscar Wilde, who once said “good friends stab you in the front” - the artist who cares just delivers truth. There may be a particular type of truth in Love and Heroine, but the critical questions remain about the audience’s communal experience - how to deliver the extreme nature of the suffering while not totally removing our protection? And what exactly, was this truth, beyond the obvious? Is it about drugs specifically, co-dependency, or something much darker?

Nordified

Perhaps dance is always a ritual of simple pleasure. This is inevitably confused with superficiality – and I intend to make the same mistake here as I tentatively approach Nordified, a collaboration between Italians Alessandro Sollima and the aptly-named Vienna-based Maria Teresa Tanzarella. It’s delightful to watch two artists work together with a genuine freedom of concept, and Nordified revels in the simplicity of its project – trying to fuse together two individual works from the artists. The result is wonderfully unrestrained, moving through its loose juxtapositions – Sollima holds a melting ice-cream while Tanzarella works heavily in a small circle like a mule – the metaphor expressing nothing in particular, beyond a particular childish curiosity with the question of ‘how do we fit together?’. The program promises that the artists will be “talking about structures, patterns, repetitions, difficult things, tiring things, things that we don't like so much, free material, survival strategies, exhaustion, confusion, states of mind and our common southern Italian origins in a nordified version” it’s fair to say that the piece fulfills all of this sprawling, irreverent promise. This comes to the fore most trivially later, as Tanzarella bursts out in an all-white outfit to John Williams’ opening of Star Wars, a ridiculous parody involving lightsabers, over-masculine poses and comical, overly-earnest facial expressions which is so enjoyable precisely because it should never, ever be staged by any serious artist.

After the high stakes of Love and Heroine, Nordified expresses a kind of opposite – a burden-less joy, which may be conceptually shallow, lacking in some bigger target. But it’s the best kind of shallow – one almost comically concerned with surfaces and the pleasure therein, limiting itself to a simple project and within that, achieving a distinct reminder of the particular freedom that dance has perhaps always been there for.

Talk to Me and I Slap You

Interesting things happened to me during Talk to me and I Slap You, a high-stakes performance experiment by Chilean-born dancer Gabi Serani and Singaporean Chan Sze-Wei. Effectively, the nuts-and-bolts of the performance are as follows: audience sits in-the-round, Serani follows a looping pattern of re-arranging two chairs in the centre, continually inviting the audience to sit with her to discuss ‘relationships’, mostly ending in a slap, before a re-arrangement of the chairs signals a re-setting of the process. Such a description does nothing to describe what is actually happening in the work – which is so punctuated with expectant pauses, interventions from the audiences (sometimes unwelcome, I sensed) and a kind of tedium from both performer and spectator as to render the physical description of the work hopelessly reductive. It’s commonly stated that about 90% of communication is body language – a statistic often trotted out at public speaking forums. A more complex point is that it’s the unsaid that defines language – that when we open our mouths we create imperfection, and that verbal communication is always destined to be a kind of disappointing compromise.

It’s interesting therefore to note some of the more banal or near unnoticeable details of the dramaturgical frame of the experiment, upon which I feel the work really lives or dies. Serani’s constant examination of the chairs whilst re-setting them provides an empty space for possible arrangements, as well as a genuine curiosity about the physical objects themselves and a somewhat metaphysical speculation about what they, in fact, are, or indeed why any of us are there. The negotiations with Serani take on a colour of negotiation with authority – not only of the performer, but outside as well. The platitudinal utterings which make up the text of the work (‘I get scared sometimes’ or ‘sometimes I am scared of what I don’t know’) are frustratingly banal, but create a kind of tension in the audience which forces participation, as well as leading the enquiry. The question ‘how is this dance?’ (which is I suppose a question given the dance background of the artists) is only addressed by a paradoxical complaint that ‘dance is dead’, a claim closely followed by ‘dance is not dead’, which may either be a token attempt to address a guilty feeling from the artists that they have made something other than dance, or an indicator of the potential for the piece to actually be dance (I actually think it was), take your pick.

The interesting failures are all from the audience, who for whatever reason this night, I felt didn’t meet the work. Are we so concerned with not being bored that we must answer back to the performer’s silence, so unable to listen that we must intervene before we are met with our own lack of knowledge, so unable to understand violence that we must place all of our investment into this one actor to make this enquiry? Are we so unable to support an enquiry into ourselves? What are we afraid of?

Such disappointing observations may only serve to shape the ambitions of Talk to Me and I’ll Slap You, which, with a more cynical approach to today’s human being, may yet act as a perfect mirror to the hopeless shortcomings of our present social condition. As it stands, the naivety of the work provides an innocent failure against which the audience stands on trial, guilty of falsifying the more optimistic assumptions of the experiment. If only those were true.

Soft Associations
Devised and Performed by Liv Fauver (USA) and Kata Cots (MEX)

Love and Heroine
Devised and Performed by Sura Hertzberg (USA)

Nordified
Devised and Performed by Alessandro Sollima and Maria Teresa Tanzarella (IT)

Talk to Me and I Slap You
with Gabi Surani (CHL)
Devised by Gabi Surani and Chan Sze-Wei (SIN)