Faki Day 5: On Freedom in Improvisation and ‘Perfect Agreements’

MONIKA'S INTRO:

 

When seeing posters like 'Wash your dishes', 'Clean your shit', and 'Respect our home', you can never forget you are in Medika. 

Good morning again! Cups full of butts from the cigarettes, empty paper sachets, table surfaces covered by tobacco remnants, empty bottles around and some unknown people sleeping on the sofa in the living area - just another party that was last night. You are washing a cup for your morning drink.

The guy on the sofa wakes up and asks for tea. No sugar, just milk. Ok, you wash a cup for him too. The guy hands you back the packet of milk, and you put it back in the fridge. Did you just become a host? You put another spoon of hummus in your plate, and ooze out onto the roof for breakfast.

Yesterday was the last day of the festival, and we had just one show to discuss - the instant composition dance work Out of Balance from Freiburg-based collective Quizzical Körper. You would think that would make our lives easy - the reality is totally different, as can be seen from the conversation below.

Photo: Monika Jašinskaitė

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Jašinskaitė: I think a festival in Medika is much more dangerous than your usual theatre festival. Because when you are 'in', sometimes you don’t find a way out. It’s like a black hole. It swallows you. How do you feel today?

Pettifer: I’m tired.

Jašinskaitė: That’s all you have to say? It seems like you are saving your energy.

Pettifer: It was a nice night. Many performances, some more time on the roof with an old friend, which I always like, and then a lovely morning walk through the city. And you?

Jašinskaitė: I had a good rest.

Pettifer: You dreamed?

Jašinskaitė: I didn’t dream about anything. I slept like a baby.

Pettifer: So you don’t remember anything?

Jašinskaitė: No.

Pettifer: Just like Andrea Lagos during the yesterday’s improvised performance Out of Balance, then. She also said in the forum that she remembers nothing of the actual performance. That forum afterwards was interesting, no?

Jašinskaitė: Super interesting. Do you think now it was worth having the discussions after the shows?

Pettifer: For sure with a show like that. Because I think understanding about their form really helps with reading the piece.

OUT OF BALANCE

Jašinskaitė: They call it ‘instant composition’, right? It was interesting to hear more about it, because very often I don’t like improvisation in the performing arts. Very often it’s an area of speculation. When a performance is made without improvisation, it has quite clear composition, and elaborated means of expression. And sometimes, with spontaneity, it’s a good excuse not to elaborate on a means of expression. For me it’s often not interesting, because performers who use improvisation unconsciously repeat certain patterns, and then a question for me comes: do they express anything at all? Is there work at all?

Pettifer: I mean, I think that feeling comes from reading the agreement early. In this case, for the improvisation to work, you really need this agreement between the performers.

Jašinskaitė: What kind of agreement? What’s the agreement about?

Pettifer: I think it’s often unspoken. Certain things you can’t do – you can’t leave the stage, you can’t talk to the audience…

Jašinskaitė: You mean like, rules of the game, rules of the improvisation?

Pettifer: Right. And sometimes the audience can read these rules early, and nothing can really change with them. And then I think the performance can sit in one single space and not change, or move. I think it’s very difficult to produce a shift in this agreement.

 Photo: Ivan Marenic

Jašinskaitė: Maybe it’s not only one agreement but several, and very strong ones.

Pettifer: Where this connects with what you’re saying is: to compose, or juxtapose, you need these shifts, somehow. To go on a journey, you need to have these, let’s call them violences, violent shifts. A juxtaposition between two things which totally agree is not a juxtaposition, there must be some conflict, no?

Jašinskaitė: I’m not quite sure about that. There may be no conflict, but there may be an intrigue, maybe. And the intrigue is coming from the expectations. And there's the game of fulfilling these audience expectations – the performer playing with this. And I think that the improvisation, because anything can happen, you presume that you can expect anything, and there are no certain expectations, thus no intrigue. So I agree with you on the first point – sometimes you can have a conflict, sometimes you can have an intrigue, sometimes there might be other things. I think that yesterday we say quite a lot of conflicts actually, on stage. Dušan Murić, when he was speaking in the discussion earlier in the week, made a funny point: ‘You know, guys, I’m a lazy person’, something like that. And yesterday in the performance, it was the first performance here in FAKI that included this questioning of doing nothing or of being lazy in the discourse of equality. There was a spoken text in the performance that talked about the continuous work for freedom, where everyone is equal, or something like that. And when we talk about being equal,  about an equal distribution of money, it’s also the question about equal work and not doing it, having a rest, being lazy. And I think Out of Balance came on stage only because of instant composition. I think the performers also included the idea of having pleasure, enjoying things, not focusing on certain goals, but just ‘being’. In a way, this type of being is a luxury, but I think it has vital importance in human life. There is a kind of a story, that might be understood in post-soviet countries. When communists were taking over Russia, a Dekabrist (Decembrist) wife asked her maid what they are fighting for, and the maid said ‘they are fighting for having no rich people’ and she replied ‘it's so strange, when my husband was alive, he was fighting for having no poor people’. So I think the pleasures of life are very often ignored in anticapitalist discourse.

Pettifer: That quote sounds, sorry to be ironic, like the Ayn Rand quote I used in the introduction to these dialogues! She also said “The best way to help the poor is not to be one of them” – a slightly different statement, but still. Quizzical Körper performer Rebecca Narum in the forum described being in Instant Composition as being in a meditative state. This can be a state, I guess, where things like gender, class, and money disappear. I think that’s interesting and potentially radical – the main thing that worries me about the improvisation is just communicating this to the audience. You said earlier that there are no expectations – but this is certainly from the perspective of the audience. From the perspective of the performer, there are expectations, and huge limitations as to what you can do. And that’s for me the great irony – it looks from the outside maybe that you are totally free, and the reality from the inside is that there are all of these rules about what you can and can’t do. The great irony is that these rules can be even more limiting than a piece that is not improvised – you can have paradoxically even greater freedom, I think, in a structured piece by an auteur director as you can choose to break these rules, you can choose to resist. Within instant composition it seems this is not really possible.  

Jašinskaitė: But I think that was the question yesterday – about the agreements they had between each other. And one of them, Irene Carreño I think, broke the agreement, she said that ‘I decided not to go where I was supposed to go’.

Pettifer: In general, a piece like this, I think it’s interesting for criticism – you can’t use the same approach as for other pieces. The criteria is different. You need to, I think, look at the whole piece together as a kind of feeling, and, I come back to this agreement I guess – what is the nature of the agreement? What are its principles, its politics? Upon which platform is it resting? The agreement, in this case, is the performance for me. This is quite a special thing. Someone asked about the politics of the performance in the forum. What was the answer again? Lagos talked about how they are always rejected within the contemporary dance world – people don’t program them because it’s not clear what they will specifically do on stage. There’s a politics about that – Narum was also talking about choreographers trying to make a perfect image. This performance had – and perhaps instant composition has – many imperfections, but the agreement is perfect.

Jašinskaitė: Why do you say the agreement is perfect? Because I wouldn’t propose that something in this instant composition is perfect at all. Ok, there is an agreement that these people are making and when people say ‘it’s a perfect football game’, we can say that because we say so many football games that we know are one of the best, even though there is no such thing as a perfect game. So I think this is more like a practice, maybe the more you do it, the better you do it, but I don’t think it can be put on the scale of perfection somehow. And that’s why I like it, because in this kind of work, it’s kind of a humane way of art, where in a way it reminds me a little bit of storytelling. Many professional performers hide behind personages, or their work on stage, but in this case, I think the performer is really ‘true’.

Pettifer: Ok. But can I come back to this football game? You seem to accuse me here (in a friendly way of course) of saying that their performance was somehow perfect, that they played the perfect football game-

Jašinskaitė: No, you’re talking about the perfect agreement.

Pettifer: But I think, to elaborate, I was saying that the performance was exactly imperfect, but the agreement was perfect.

Jašinskaitė: Why do you say the agreement is perfect? Because they agree, and they won’t break it?

 Photo: Ivan Marenic

 

Pettifer: Exactly. And you can see this happen also in football, especially when a low-quality team plays a higher-quality team. The idiom here is ‘A champion team beats a team of champions’ – it describes a situation where you can have very high-quality team in a football match, but they still will not necessarily defeat a much lower-quality team that has a strong agreement. Because when you are working together and you are bonded and working in the same direction, then it is very difficult to defeat, actually. And even if you are defeated in the score, there are agreements so powerful that even this will be received – not talked about by a manager or public relations, but actually in meaning – as a kind of victory anyway. Not a consolation. A means of collective resistance and togetherness that is literally undefeatable. So, I don’t know if comparing instant composition to a low-quality football team is a good analogy (laughs), but when we talk about the perfection of the agreement, I like this idea because I think this can exist in many different situation of performance, or it’s a particular type of complicity.

Jašinskaitė: I agree, and not only for performance or theatre.

Pettifer: Yes, it’s a stage metaphor for something that exists in the real world. Which is something like solidarity. Something like this. In this sense, very political. Lagos was saying ‘we don’t know if the piece will be shit’. This agreement is all they have. They don’t have validation from the audience, they just have each other, and they have to believe in this. And then the metaphor is: ‘we have to believe in each other’.

Jašinskaitė:  It’s also interesting that they were speaking of disagreement, or Carreño dropping the agreement. So it is possible. And exactly this notion of dropping is mentioned – that they agree to do things, while they are training or in certain moments, but sometimes they drop it. They have certain things in mind, but they don’t focus on them.

Pettifer: I think I just mean that it doesn’t break. Even if one person drops it-

Jašinskaitė: You don’t go off stage and tell the audience ‘the performance is finished’.

Pettifer: Yes, for example. I think maybe the stronger the perfect agreement is – like an agreement can be perfect but not strong. If it’s extremely strong, then you can really push this ‘perfect' idea – imagine a performance where in the beginning, one of the three leaves the stage, even goes and has tea, something like this, nevertheless remaining in the performance. Does it make sense, what I am trying to say?

Jašinskaitė: Yea, I think I got it.

Pettifer: This would be an example of an extremely strong agreement – where you can violate everything, and the agreement will still remain perfect.

Jašinskaitė: And this person can come back, and continue the performance.

Pettifer: Or also not come back. And this is an example of the type of conflict that was maybe missing from the performance – I did not see some really strong shift, which would be indicative of an extremely strong and exciting performance agreement. But I think this also takes a lot of time working together, and is very difficult. And you were point out that these shifts where there, anyhow.

Jašinskaitė: Yes. I was thinking yesterday during the performance that almost anything that happens on-stage can feed an idea of inequality. And when ideas of inequality come to our heads, it doesn’t necessarily speak to inequality in the performance itself. But to my surprise, in work, there were many constellations speaking about inequality for me. Watching them – three females on stage that are more or less the same height and similar physicality – they still had a certain appearance that was different, and this reminded me of the stickers in my school in the late 90s, which were written in English and French, “All are different, all equal” (in French, “Tous différents, tous égaux”). This gives me an idea of variety in equality. To be different, you have to be free – and I think that freedom is a very important condition for equality. And I think that’s the case where the extreme left fails. Extreme right, too, but where the capitalists win, it’s because of this strong agreement around ‘freedom’. For me it makes sense why communism didn’t work as an experiment in history. Wow, this is so funny, we are talking about very big things now!

Pettifer: So let’s go back to the performance a little bit. One thing that I really appreciate is how Quizzical Körper addressed the theme – they made a work for this specific festival. They tried to meet the situation on its terms. It was interesting to hear them talk about working with a theme, which is not something they normally do. Lagos was saying, they can never send someone a video about their work, because they can only say ‘this is a previous work that we did, and it will be different each time’. But in this case, it means you can be flexible in what you do – you can incorporate not only a theme, but also the situation of performing in Medika, how the audience is, what you had for lunch and etc. It’s an approach to dramatic reality that actually creates a ‘drama of life’ through dance.

Jašinskaitė: I wonder, maybe this makes sense only when we have this traditional way of prepared shows. We notice this quality because we have this variety in the theatre. And I think, again, if we are speaking about equality, this way of creating a performance, instant composition really makes sense. And I’m happy to know that there is a place where people practice this form. I think it makes theatre richer.

Pettifer: I mean, I agree. But here I think it also combines itself with some philosophy of what the stage is for. If you come here with a show about inequality with a giant opera and a huge set, then this would make certain demands, let’s say. So I’m talking here about adaptability – even though it doesn’t sound like an amazing thing, but when you are building, as Narum was saying, a kind of training the body, a way of listening, a way almost of meditation, this doesn’t put demands on the structure or the outside world.

Jašinskaitė: I agree. That’s why I compare it to storytelling. There is a person, there is a body, and you can do it.

Pettifer: And I think, it can be radical. We have this counterpoint of a giant opera in a state theatre, that puts all of these demands on visibility, advertising, etc. It’s not only a philosophy of what happens on stage but of an entire system of producing work. To me this is an interesting counterpoint to that, something like agreement, solidarity in human relations, and again this focused or specific way of seeing. It’s not the only form of theatre or dance that works in this way, nevertheless the form feels like it proposes a type of equality, fundamentally.

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Pettifer (cont'd): It’s our last conversation. Do you have any last words? Imagine when you leave Medika it will be a type of death, and these are your last words. So, there is a type of ‘pressure without pressure’, if you like.

Jašinskaitė: (laughs) “It’s such a beautiful day”.

Pettifer: (laughs) You are just reading from the graffiti on the wall of the room. Is this your answer? I like this answer. It seems to demonstrate some appreciation.

Jašinskaitė: I think so! It was a hard week for me. But I was very happy to be here to see the works of theatre that I don’t think I could have seen in any other festival. And it was very good to speak with you. It was a nice journey. Thank you for that. You would like me to ask you something?

Pettifer: Yeah!

Jašinskaitė: Same question. What will be your last words?

Pettifer: “This complicity will one day break, but we need to trust that what’s left was worth it.”

Jašinskaitė: Do you think it’s complicity that is the most vital condition for equality?

Pettifer: Unfortunately I already said my last words! Thank you for the week, it was a pleasure.

Jašinskaitė: Thank you for inviting me here!


OUT OF BALANCE

By Quizzical Körper
with  Irene Carreño, Andrea Lagos, and Rebecca Narum