Staring down at my almost-incomprehensible notes, muddied by the rain that inconveniently intervened the day before, you can see the chaos of festival-time. The blurs of the smudged grey lead blend with watermarks to create a beautiful diorama of activity.
This is an accurate representation of Day 2, which presented a chaotic array of colours and shapes, occasionally punctuated by discernable segments of text. The following is only a representation of a few of them - even of those I saw, it would be too many to write about.
LIVING ROOM
"Sometimes I think culture is just moving things around".
This comment is attributed to a worker from STANICA Cultural Centre - a festival hub for Kiosk - while moving a table around as he set up for a performance one day. It seems an apt metaphor in some ways. The object, the structure, play a central role in defining the theatricality of a situation, including its sources of power.
STANICA is also the location of Living Room, a work of object theatre from artist Lukáš Karásek that, as the title suggests, is primarily occupied with animating furniture. Indeed, there is a lot of 'tinkering' involved in this work, that follows the journey of a closet and set of drawers through time, space, and the limitless universe of animation in performance. Our cupboard-hero, sitting on the head of the solo performer and with handles forming a comically-blank expression, encounters various frustrations and travails as they attempt to undertake various tasks inside the logic of the staged world - a sort of magical, playful, literally living, room.
Technically, it is fantastic to witness, and Lukáš Karásek's relentless control is among the best I've seen for this type of theatre. There is always something magical in witnessing this type of art - as Karásek creates and dispels various illusions, the audience can fill itself with a childlike wonder. Beginning in the closet, Karásek spends a good deal of stage time simply trying to escape, finally pushing himself against the set of drawers, which then becomes a type of anthropomorphic face. This transformation from the invisible closet to humanoid draws begins the playful journey, comic for a type of reverse-frustrationism, where objects become animated precisely through their frustration with the behaviour of other objects. The different stages of the journey (dramaturgy: Viktor Černický) are marked by the pulling of a light-switch, which the performer sometimes amusingly cannot reach, depending on the constellation in which he finds himself in at the time.
Photo: David Konečný
The journey culminates in a fascinating epilogue, in which marbles are accidentally scattered on the stage in an act of infinite chaos. The final phase elevates Living Room out of a simple play, and into a discussion about human imagination and its limits. It's a traditional theme, but lovingly told, and a useful reminder of the stage conventions that feed so much of human self-conception through the stage.
PRO(S)THETIC DIALOGUES
If I generally don't like artworks that address AI, it's because it works with an annoying version of 'the unknown'. I've seen otherwise normal artists, when faced with the theme of AI, suddenly become drunk on power and weaponise it as a limitless source of ideological force. Yet AI has limits, sometimes extreme ones - something that Big Tech often refuses to acknowledge, and which are not popular to discuss. Such is the human investment on technological solutions today, that warnings, critiques, and even obvious points are simply refused, in favour of a view of AI that is "inspirational" "boundless", and therefore "hopeful" in a bleak context. We need the technology to work - to imagine otherwise is fast becoming unthinkable.
Pro(s)thetic Dialogues works with a different version of the unknown, one that is much more nonsensical and exposes failed solutions and limitations. The film work is essentially a mix of propagandic shots of 'nature', with a real-sounding theoretical discussions from a deep-fake version of British cybernetics intellectual Stafford Beer, whose face appears to recite absurd, tautological statements about the essence of humanity, drawn from various philosophers. The propagandic stream occasionally glitches out, and we see the programmer fixing the code in order to generate better discourse ("Wizard-of-Ozzing", here with a lifted curtain). Nonsensical, spiritual-sounding, and para-philosophical statements such as "the air we breathe has been replaced with less air" or references to "dialectical dialectic" point at both the current anxiety surrounding human influence on the environment, and our hopeless attempts to conceive and articulate it.
Screenshot of Pro(s)thetic Dialogues.
The playful approach pays dividends - of all works I've seen on the subject, Pro(s)thetic Dialogues most successfully turns away from magical thinking and targets the human being itself with ethical responsibility for the crisis of its own making. It also operates as a successful parody of intellectualising on the subject, pointing out both the incessant need for feel-good narratives, and the nihilistic tendency for presenting anxiety-building, platitudinal statements in a time that urgently requires productive thinking. Some of the sentences from the prosthetic-Beer directly talk about this: "We play with dolls to be immortal" "to play to win, to make history", "the final decision has been made", lampooning the End of History thesis. Others are cynical in a different way, possibly accidentally truthful, and in the context deeply ironic: such as "we are currently turning into machines". The finale, in which Beer's face morphs into various animals like the end of the music video to Michael Jackson's Black or White, and finally dissolves into a picturesque, slow-moving image of mountains and forests, offers little resolution, and rather deepens the ambiguity of ecological collapse and the inevitable failure of technological solutions.
Although posing as a rather banal, slow-moving work, Pro(s)thetic Dialogues is an urgent call to action on multiple levels - one where the inability to answer questions is exposed, and the increasing dependence on Artificial Intelligence for solutions is revealed as a false god.
NIC-MOC
In an age of endless entertainment, where little of our attention is free, 'prank theatre' - a sort of niche sub-genre of theatre - holds a special place. Not only can it subvert the expectations of an audience, but it can call attention to their often unreasonable demands, and make fun of those. Oh, just because of the lights, the tickets, the protocols, and the stage - you thought that something would happen?
Brno pranksters d'epog are apparently experts in the genre and familiar to Žilina's audience - meaning that it was possible that I was the only one actually pranked at this night's performance of Nic-Moc. As the curtains slid awkwardly open, house lights still on, and the stage stood empty for a few minutes, bathed in a lazy 'general wash', a little murmur began to grow among the audience. But it was not quite a surprised murmur of an audience expecting flashing lights and algorithmically-verified Netflix narrative - more like an 'oh no...' of dread.
This 'oh no' only got worse when, following maybe 15 minutes of empty stage, spontaneous applause, appeals to the tech upstairs, and some audience leaving, two feet appear under the back curtain, before casually disappearing again. The feet returned, only for a second set of feet to casually appear, and then both disappeared, to the mild entertainment of a completely disenchanted audience.
Although seeming to present nothing, the reality is that too much happened over the 90-minute duration of Nic-Moc (apparently meaning 'noting much' in Slovak - possibly a joke about the video sharing platform TicTok?). Here's a series of the events:
- Curtain opens
- Audience growing restless
- Some spontaneous applause
- "Shhhh"-ing
- Small flash of the stage lights - possibly a small power problem
- First set of feet appear and disappear
- Second set of feet
- Clothing rack appears
- 2 pairs of shoes where the feet were
- A red rope is thrown on stage
- Someone moves across the stage with a broom
- The clothes rack is removed before being replaced with a larger one
- A phone camera sticks out from the side of stage and photographs the audience
- A chair comes on stage and it sprayed
- A guy in white goes on stage and disappears backstage
- A clothes rack is placed in the front and centre stage, a mirror is hung from it
- Then there is a definite stage intrusion
- A child goes on stage. For 10 minutes, they go around, playing dangerously with the red rope, attempting to push the clothes rack. Finally, the un-anxious mother collects her - but the child escapes, only returning on the 3rd try (and thereby perfectly obeying the narrative rule of 3). Audience applause
- A small amount of smoke is blown on stage, possibly from a pipe
- An audience member is roped and brought on to the stage, then backstage
- A guy from a delivery company goes on-stage with a food delivery. Audience applause
- One of the two 'stage-hands/actors) takes a selfie with the audience behind them
- Curtain begins to close, but not all the way
- A rock soundtrack softly begins to play, including a hook with the lyrics "The Neverending Story - what's that?"
- A guy vapes on stage
The situation reminded me of several similar critiques of middle-class expectation: Luis Buñuel's film El ángel exterminador (The Exterminating Angel), for example, where dinner party guests find that they suddenly can't leave a house. Or the William Golding novel Lord of the Flies, which sits more in the category of social experiment. Such texts make a mockery of bourgeois expectation, showing our primitive selves once the layers of facade are stripped away. Nic-Moc wasn't quite as dystopian as Lord of the Flies, but it's probably the closest I'll come to learning the culture of Žilina's local population
As people started to wander onto the stage, chat to the 'actors', move things around, and the general facades of the National Theatre collapsed before my very eyes, I wondered if such an experiment is particularly prescient during the pandemic, when methods of social discipline and control have discovered new heights. The emancipation I found in Nic-Moc is probably a good advertisement for the show, although I acknowledge that many didn't have the same experience, nor take the insult well. For me - I saw things on stage I never saw before. Maybe that's enough.
LIVING ROOM
Author, performer: Lukáš Karásek
Dramaturgy: Viktor Černický
Scenography, production of masks: Lukáš Urbanec
Lighting design: Zuzana Režná
Costumes : Hynek Petrželka
Production: tYhle, Studio ALTA
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PRO(S)THETIC DIALOGUES
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NIC-MOC
Note: Current publication is done with the understanding that colleagues and communities from Kharkiv, Mariupol, Kyiv, Lutsk, and Lviv among others in Ukraine are currently under attack in an attempt to erase Ukrainian culture and identity.
No artist should be forced to
rehearse how to pick up the gun.
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