Faki Day 3: Incorrectness and Disability

It's day 4.

Occasionally at Medika, entire days pass without you really noticing. I claim this is because of its phantasmagoric essence, as an illusory new reality where the old rules of time and space would not apply. This means that days can simply disappear into some strange vortex, never to be heard from again.

In this case, I'm reliably told that the day existed. But if you asked me, it consisted of several glances at the clock, and a few mystified comments that "it's already (insert time here)!!!".

As a result, we have developed a small backlog with these dialogues, and I sit here in Medika's infamous HackLab, glass of red wine and lit tea candle the only notable companions as we enter the night.

Day 3 was problematic for us, as we reconsidered - or, I reconsidered - the performance (UMRE)ŽENE, which was repeated from the night before. On top of this back-step, we are invited to consider the work from a Hungarian disabled group Cloudwalkers, whose Bonding forced us to face certain truths - one of them being that neither Monika Jašinskaitė nor I are particularly knowledgeable about how to discuss theatre with disabilities. As a result, the second conversation will be somewhat addled as we attempt to engage a work that was close to community theatre, and more about process than performance outcome. We will be joined by Polish actor Damian Droszcz, a guest of the festival who has some experience working with people with disabilities.

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Pettifer: Ok, let’s begin. I will type slowly, as we speak, because then I don’t need to type it later.

Jašinskaitė: Like in European parliament we talk in pauses while they translate.

Pettifer: Exactly. What did you do this morning?

Jašinskaitė: Yesterday evening I took a nice walk through Zagreb. I found some nice buildings of early modernism, and some small details that were very peculiar, like the faces built into the walls, and some bas relief of an old man with big hair. It was -

Pettifer: Scary? At night?

Jašinskaitė: (Laughs) Very scary. I think this neighbourhood was much more scary.

Pettifer: Medika is scarier.

Jašinskaitė: Where have you been last night?

Pettifer: I went to a heavy metal concert here, and it was really good. It was free, I drank the rest of your wine and hung out. Then I went to a bar, then I went on the roof.

Jašinskaitė: We don’t have so much to talk about today, just one new show, Bonding, from Cloudwalkers in Hungary, and a second viewing of (UMRE)ŽENE from yesterday.

(UMRE)ŽENE (Part 2)

Pettifer: Watching the show again with your comments in my mind, I think some things I said yesterday were wrong. I think the show was for women, about women. It was talking to women. I don’t know if you agree?

Jašinskaitė: (laughs) That’s interesting to me. I am a woman. So it might be true.

Pettifer: I mean some of the things you were noticing I was just not noticing. And when you explained them to me, I was like ‘oh, it’s clearly – it’s a metaphor of oppression'. But I didn’t immediately read this.

Jašinskaitė: But I think that in this piece there’s a mixture of artistic languages of the performing arts – there are some actions that use the language of Live Art,  and visual language. Another level was physical – what the bodies do with each other. And one more was this, let's say 'contemporary dance' language. So I think because all of these are mixed, so it’s a little bit hard for the spectator to read this piece. In the beginning I was a little misled by different languages, and I thought that something was not important, even though it’s part of the message.

Pettifer: I don’t have a response to that. But for me, I think this is, for sure, now, feminist work, and maybe even more so than if it did what I was expressing yesterday – smashing patriarchy. Instead it bypasses this completely, totally ignoring it. This is one approach, why not? It does things on its own terms, in its own situation. And I think that’s fine – potentially even more radical.

Jašinskaitė: Yesterday, we finished at the point where I was talking about the message I feel the choreographer gives. And I was wondering if I didn’t make a mistake in interpreting the work. And I want to talk with you – because you are speaking about her being feminist, so I wanted to talk with you about the role of men in this performance.

Pettifer: On stage?

Jašinskaitė: Yes. 

Pettifer: I mean, for me, they are nothing (laughs). I don’t have something to add to that, actually. But I do not mean it in a bad way.

Jašinskaitė: Because I was thinking about one man in the performance, who is the last to enter the space, and is acting more like a stage technician, or an assistant for the performer. Later on he has his role, in the image choreographer proposes us, he becomes a ‘fake master’. And I was thinking about this situation a little bit through ballet. In ballet, which is a completely patriarchal kind of art, the woman performs and the man is ‘helping’ her to perform. So, for me, this piece is also working in a similar way, however I find it, as a strength of the work – it’s not a given thing, Ilijašević is not unaware about it. She includes it into her work. And for me, that makes a critique of the relationships between men and women, on stage and outside. Like yesterday you mention that you missed some historical links  –  ballet may be a possible link. Maybe Ilijašević wasn’t totally aware about the parallel with ballet, but I think it was a conscious choice to use the men as assistants. Because I think in this performance, men do not have power to show a woman in some kind of way that he wants to see her, but the woman is showing herself.

Photo: Ivan Marenic

Pettifer: And has control.

Jašinskaitė: Yes. Even though she is continuing to reproduce the same culture.

Pettifer: Well, in a way, but it’s not the same. No?

Jašinskaitė: No.

Pettifer: Just to be clear, in a way stand by what I said yesterday, in the sense that it points out one possible future for the work. But now I think it’s based on a misreading, and there are other possibilities.

Jašinskaitė: But Ilijašević said she wants to create a longer work from this piece, it would be interesting to see how it can be developed, and what other qualities it gets. By the way, do you think it’s radical because it eliminates men?

Pettifer: Not only because of this, I just think this is one possible approach.

Jašinskaitė: I’m thinking about the rope, as a symbol of oppression, and the women staying to play, to act with this rope, even though men are already not there. So for me this performance is about that, it proposes me that this idea of oppression stays, even though the men are gone.

Pettifer: I think this is where it can be radical – where it takes ownership of struggle, and says ‘It’s our problem, no-one will free us in these struggles, we must do it ourselves’.

Jašinskaitė: I don’t know if that comes from the work.

Pettifer: Yeah, maybe it’s too much.

Jašinskaitė: This moment of freeing for the women who are in this work, I think the situation of freeing is already in the past. But maybe in a way it can still function.

Bonding 

For the second part of the conversation, we welcome Faki performer Damian Droszcz. Droszcz has experience working with actors with disabilities in Poland, and as Monika and I lack the vocabulary and expertise, we invited Droszcz also to speak in the conversation.

In the following conversation, problematic terms like ‘normal’ and ‘defect’ are used. The validity of these terms is up for debate. Occasionally second-language English is being used to describe local conceptions of disability, particularly in Poland and Lithuania.

Pettifer: So, Monika, you didn’t like the performance?

Droszcz: But it wasn’t performance. For me it wasn’t performance, it was a type of therapy. For people who are not open-minded, there is a good therapy to see that handicapped or disabled people are normal.

Jašinskaitė: That’s the reason we invited you here, because you said you worked with disabled people before. We can say that people are normal, but we have to admit they have certain disabilities. For example, people with down syndrome, sometimes they have different physical appearance, but also some of them can talk, they can move, they can do many things. But some cannot talk, it's harder to express themselves. So can you explain a little bit how work is done with these people ?

Droszcz: I work with handicapped people – blind, deaf, paralysed. For example, one person is paralysed from the neck. In the beginning she could not talk. Now, over the course of the rehearsal process, she is speaking. When I make a performance with the group, I don’t help them while they are on-stage.  They did that during the performance yesterday. That’s why for me yesterday it was therapy.

Pettifer: I liked it, in a strange way. I thought it was performance, also. My questions are a little bit paradoxical: why it was in this festival? Basically, because there was no radical idea, and it was super- conservative, not the way that they work, but the content – that men are always paired with women, the scenes that they chose – this public street situation, or that someone is sad, the tango. These situations seemed a very limited view of dramatic reality.  

Photo: Ivan Marenic

Jašinskaitė: I agree with you – I didn’t understand why the work was in this festival. This performance by Justyna Sobczyk, A Revolution That Was Not There, would be perfect for this festival. I was really disappointed. I talk about it only as a work of art – I understand it also as therapy, but it was presented as a work of art, so I must look at it this way. There are guys who were wearing white. There was a diversity of disability, and it seemed like they were controlled by the people who were ‘abled’, let’s say, and trying to fix their failures, to hide their failures, and organising them in a certain way. They were trying to pretend. That’s why this work was strange for me. Damian – you mentioned that you see inequality in this piece – I saw the inequality because that.

Droszcz: This is one thing I got from my mentor. When I began working with disabled people, I initially tried to hide their ‘defects’. Using scenography, etc. My mentor told me one thing. If you want to make a good performance with handicapped people, you have to believe that their ‘defects’ are their power. And try to use their ‘defects’ to make a performance. When I travel from festival to festival, I see that on stage they are not disabled. I think that Cloudwalkers Theatre have a mission – maybe not an artistic mission, but it’s a mission impossible, to see others that can go out, be on the stage.

Pettifer: I started to think about in which ways I am ‘abled’. And also, it’s not right to say that I am disabled – nevertheless, there are some things where I am limited, on stage and otherwise. So I was thinking about this idea of ‘normal’, and how I fit in to this idea of normal, because I only kind of do. And I guess everyone has their own relationship with this idea of normal.

Jašinskaitė: I think my first performance that I watched with disabled people was a Jérôme Bel show Disabled Theatre. When watching it, it was really made for the people to accept disabled people as individuals. For me it was nice work, where slowly the spectator is invited to know the performers and accept them as artists, even though they have down syndrome. And I remember the hysterical laughter, which I think was a psychological anxiety, and it was again interesting in the audience how people where trying to ‘shhhh’ the others who were laughing. In Sobczyk’s performance, there's an introduction made by an actor without a disability. He speaks about laughing, how it is produced in our bodies. The audience laughs. And then the disabled actors come on stage to practice producing laughter in their bodies.  It gives a really relaxed atmosphere, and we are all just laughing. And it’s the way we all come to be on the same page.  I think for disabled people to be accepted, one needs to work with people who do not have disabled people in their direct environment.

Pettifer: I mean going back to the previous point, it seems like free expression is important.

Droszcz: But I sometimes think the actor is a slave. And sometimes we have to play what we don’t want to. And I think that each performance for actors should be a new way, a type of learning. You have the technician, the tools, for how to play.

Jašinskaitė. But how would you connect this to the performance we saw?

Droszcz: I see that they have a lot of problems getting into the performance, and they are always looking for validation. You also see in their eyes – that they come in and out of performance. That’s why I try to call it therapy, or a lesson, or something like this.

Jašinskaitė: Like they were not performing, but they were learning how to perform?

Droszcz: It was a type of open workshop.

Pettifer: Then they should call it and open workshop!

Jašinskaitė: Richard, you mentioned yesterday that you don’t want to care. The thing we are talking about is that every group needs to have a care or attention. Does it mean if you are a middle class white man, middle-aged, you don’t need this care?  I think it’s very often that we mix up individual care and institutional care. I think that institutional care is very important. But I feel like, I take it very much from the politics in Lithuania, we have a situation that very often we don't want to take care about things individually, we want to leave them for the institution to take care of.

Pettifer: I don’t disagree with you, but, I think there is also much of this work that can happen by social agreements – small acknowledgements or gestures that are outside of institutions, but are instead purely between humans and exclusively on the level of human relations.

Jašinskaitė: And I think this festival is helping to find these agreements. That’s why it’s good to participate here. But I want to go back to the work. You mentioned dancing – women only with men. It’s a little bit about passion and about physical seduction of each other. And so when we see this couple dancing, we have our attention drawn to their being attractive or not, in a heteronormative sense. This seems to speak more about differences of the performers than about being equal – it seems to highlight inadequacies in them. That’s why for me, this can be a good piece off therapy and a bad piece of art. Because what it shows is completely the opposite to what it says it shows.

Droszcz: I’m wondering about one thing: we need emotions on the stage, they have to like each other. They have to get to know. And if you want to do this very well, you need a passion. Maybe it can be love, maybe something small. I am wondering about something, this girl in the dance, but what does he feel?

Pettifer: But why do you ask this?

Droszcz: Because it’s very dangerous. We are talking about people who sometimes have problems with emotions.

Pettifer: Maybe, maybe not.

Jašinskaitė: I would go a little bit further – where I see inequality in this also – where I see this woman, dancing, she may do it more as a mother or sister, but he may treat her as a women.

Pettifer: For me this not different to any other situation on stage. We are always relying on this trust and complicity, and sometimes things can go wrong with this. It can turn into love, and people can become obsessed. It’s dangerous, always.

Jašinskaitė: What I am trying to say is that people who are disabled can be much more vulnerable.

Droszcz: When I make a performance with people with down syndrome, I notice they feel hurt more quickly than I am used to, if you tell them something is not good. They also receive your gestures as either positive or negative – nothing in between. Otherwise, we could discuss the grey areas. But in that situation, you need to be very careful with what words you use.

Pettifer: It’s also never only 2 people in this situation, you also have the system around. So when you react very sensitively to something, it can be because this is a behaviour that is learned over time, in the society. So how do you use theatre to overcome these things, so that it’s not only repeating the pressures or the oppressions of the society around? And I think this is what I didn’t see in the piece – I only saw repetitions of the social structures, I didn’t see resistance. I don’t necessarily expect or demand this. But I always like it in the theatre.