This year's Faki Festival was hit with not one but two of what the insurance companies calls significant 'Acts of God' - the COVID-19 pandemic, which made gathering in public impossible, and the 5.3 magnitude earthquake in Zagreb, which put parts of the former pharmaceutical factory Medika out of action.
It's surprising that there is a festival at all in 2020. And yet, as I've written previously, there is no more important time for culture than now. Not just any culture either: free non-institutional culture, dedicated to principles of free expression, free exchange, and development of alternatives to the unidirectional mainstream. 14 out of the 16 shows will be livestreamed through the ZONE OF CONTROL, Faki's independently-developed web performance platform, which allows for HD performance streams, live chat, and Zoom-style discussions, which will be led by yours truly together with the globally-feared critical mastermind Jana Perković.
Snapshot of the 'countdown' system, used in the front-of-house protocols for Faki 23.
This year the festival accommodates an unusually wide variety of shows in response to the theme of 'Control'. On day one, the ecoanarchist and animal-rights activist Robert Franciszty (HR) opens the festival with Anticorona happening or "If I can't dance, I don't want to be a part of your revolution", one of just two performances happening on-site at Medika (and not live-streamed). While a lot of opposition against COVID-19 restrictions has been massively privileged and without any solid argument beyond 'personal sovereignty', Franciszty's participatory work is described as a "Joint dance therapeutic relaxation in the dystopian state of the world", hinting at an act of collective resistance departing from a simple complaint about government intervention. Hugo Baranger (FR) follows this with his work Les mots de recours, a short sensorial experience designed around a type of digital noise-theatre, and the first work delivered over the festival's ZONE OF CONTROL livestream platform. Finally, Day 1 will see the first performance of Brazillian performer-composer Manuel Pessoa de Lima's Red Light Piano, a performance adapted for the online format, where the artist will create a sort of 'lounge piano', playing off the theme of a commodification of love, and drawing on his usual themes of failure and the colour red. In the daytime, there's also Yasen Vasilev's (BG) workshop, titled Nutricula, which runs over three days, which will see participants will have the chance to re-imagine parts of their bodies as objects, and the tension between local and global politics of the body.
Day 2 begins with La Turba (ES) premiering the work Attached to my Flag, a 'performance conference' which sees Andalucian dancer/peformer Carlota Berzal return to the festival for the first time since 2015's thrilling Everything I'm Not. Following this is an aerial acrobatics work Tortura Blanca from Spanish/German solo artist Iria, an exploration of 'white torture' - variants of torture that are invisible, and yet used to coerce and discipline people psychologically. It's a show likely to heavily connect with the festival theme of control, and the links between physical and psychological restraint are virtually limitless. The day finishes with Bonds, a wordless solo show from Teatr a Part (PL), an initiation journey of life entanglements.
Day 3 begins with Serbian Butoh performer Marco Netkan's Holy Martyr. addressing nihilism and the fear of no higher or more significant meaning. This is followed by Nebojša Vuković's (HR) S/tanding O/n S/take, a 2-minute work in which the artist attempts to 'heal' Zagreb from its recent crises, via a Buddhist approach, which involves becoming a statue at a busy Zagreb intersection. Finally, a live experiment UNRENDERED JUNCTION from mathematician/director Robert B. Lisek and Fundamental Research Lab (PL) will see participants co-opted into a performative examination of the "dynamic relation between randomness and order".
On Day 4 we take a deep breath - with just 2 performances scheduled. Croatia's Anja Ostojić's Dijete od pijeska (The Sand Child) is a wordless work of physical theatre, based on the 1985 novel by Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun. Like the novel, the play looks at identity in an Islamic context, through the eyes of a woman raised as a man. It's a work that has already received significant development, and gets an online rendition at Faki this year. Finally, Finnish/German choreographer Marje Hirvonen returns to Faki festival following 2019's fantastic collaboration with Anni Taskula, FEST. This time Hirvonen returns with another collaborator, Kevin Kilonzo, to bring an examination of anxiety as a medical and social condition, examined through the lens of fear. FEST was a highlight of the 2019 Faki festival, making this a much-anticipated work for Faki 23.
Day 5 ends with a repeat performance of Manuel Pessoa de Lima's Red Light Piano. Prior to this, Split's Dora Popić and Mišo Komenda (HR) will at minimum fulfil Faki's circus quota with their work Sound and Body, a work-in-progress exploration of control as expressed by the body. Surely one of tiny Italian enclave San Marino's only theatre companies, Brandipoteatr, will then offer us their physical theatre work Drop, a minimalist exercise investigating the 'spirit of the world we live in'. It's one of only a handful of works of more conventional theatre exploration this year, and surely worth a look.
The last day of the festival, Day 6, sees just one viewable performance online - Paolo Avataneo's (IT) surrealistic comedy called simply !. Not only a nightmare for spellchecking systems and program editors, ! promises to be a madcap adventure, not least because Avataneo claims that it is "spoken everywhere in the local language" (which, for this digital Faki, is what exactly? Binary code?). No doubt it will be a great way to round off a madcap week at Faki 23, the last day containing Želimir Schauer's work-in progress - to be shown physically at Medika in Zagreb, and once again Manuel Pessoa de Lima's Red Light Piano.
Each performance will be followed by an online Q+A, in which myself and Jana Perković will talk with the artists about their creations and how they have adapted to the pandemic situation. An exciting addition to this year's program, our Faki Kronika livecast promises to deliver interesting critical discourse around the festival - not least because I consider Perković one of the most remarkable critical minds around. It's something of an oddity that, after meeting in Australia over 10 years ago, I would go on to write about 7 years worth of Faki festivals in her home country - and so this year's Kronika promises to be a strange pandemic culmination in more ways than one.
Unlike previous years, I won't be attempting my usual fevered critical writing during the festival. So if you wanna get with me, better make it online: from 21.00 each night Zagreb time, as we watch and discuss the performances live for Faki Kronika, accessible via the livestream at the bottom of the schedule page. Until then, you can find all the information about the program online at https://attack.hr/faki23/, and I look forward to seeing you in the digital, hopefully virus-free, space.
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