Kiosk Festival Slovakia Preview: the "After" and the "New"

 

It's hard to make new stuff.

First - audiences just fundamentally don't like it. If you are a strategic artist (or increasingly, "content-creator" or similar) then you can take something old and dress it as new, bypassing the discomfort of the unfamiliar. But making something truly new involves opening dramaturgical pathways of the human brain which did not previously exist. Like a journey to an unfamiliar place, it begins with a feeling of trepidation and a sort of premature exhaustion. It is fundamentally an uncomfortable psychological experience for both author and audience. It requires patience, bravery, and skill from both - and even then, sometimes it just doesn't happen, the combination is not quite right - there was either not enough control, or too much, for example.

Writing criticism, and wanting also to produce something new through this (a 'new discourse', or a new reality through discourse), inevitably leads you to new circumstances of writing. You observe after a while that most structures of cultural production discourage (even actively suppress) 'new' stage work. This seems the case especially with programs that are openly labelled as supporting new work - where the possibility of radicalism ironcally motivates an enthusiastic conservatism in new writing. Such structures invite the reproduction of the status quo, because, as cultural theorists from Adorno to Benjamin to Frantz Fanon to Brecht exclaim, this is where the power lies. Change is fundamentally difficult: the audience prefers the smoothness of the stream to the interruption of the hesitation. This remains true of audiences especially today, a period with myriad lures towards conventional viewing, and where each new Netflix release is rigorously evaluated for its narrative streamlining and emotional manipulation.

Yesterday's Potatoes made new: a photo from the train of a revived baked potato from last night's dinner party (with special thanks to Tetiana Krekhno)

Žilina ("Je-li-na"), Slovakia's 3rd-largest city, is not completely new to me: I visited in May, on the invitation of a friend. As I walked around, I immediately recognised telltale signs of depression that were a constant of my upbringing in a small town in Australia, and can be found in most places in Europe outside the bigger cities. Unemployment, xenophobia, and general lack of investment combine into a sometimes deadly cocktail of stuff, bringing a weird "hushed" cultural consensus, which can only be broken through intricate knowledge of local codes and norms (or the creation of a carnivalesque situation in which they can be completely turned on their head).

Of course, these are the naive observations of an outsider. And if I am looking forward to anything in this year's Kiosk Festival in Žilina in the next days, it's to interrupt my own perspective - not only of performance art, but of its host city. Kiosk is now in it's 15th Festival, having begun in 2008, is independent in structure, and claims to be a meeting-place for artists as well as actively involved in the presentation of works. A mix of dance and theatre, with some installation as well, it promises to be an interesting week of camping, hanging out, and seeing performance.

A quick glance at the largely free-of-charge program this year, put together by Producers/Dramaturgs  Michaela Pašteková and Martin Krištof, reveals an occupation with 'post' themes and non-human agency, that also points at something close to a festival theme of 'Festival after theatre and dance' ('Festival po divadle a tanci'). But while questions like "How do we look at the future of theatre without a human?" "Ako sa dívame na budúcnosť divadla bez človeka?" , my translation) may have been asked within the safe walls of institutions for at least the last decade, asking those questions in public is quite a different matter. What can they say to a culture that commodifies self-obsession, technology creates endless reflections of an increasingly vacuous soul, and where the creation of art is weaponised into a grab for territory? Is there anyone who will still listen? (Is that important?)

As I wade through the program of largely unfamiliar artists in a region I've never deeply visited before, expect mishaps and mayhem as I attempt the act of translation into what will inevitably be my (hopefully reasonably outward-looking) critical frame. Aside of INSTITUT INSTITUT's Dead in the Pool, which I happen to have written about in May, the line up in an unfamiliar smorgasbord of names, themes, and titles. Hopefully the found-object waterproof (?) tent that constitutes my own installation will hold up for the duration of the festival.

Stay tuned for the usual daily updates from now until the festival closure on Sunday.

Festival Program available here (Slovakian).

 

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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.