It turns out that as well as being a functioning train station, cafe, and stage, STANICA Cultural Centre also converts into a handy club. So after quite a lot of rain and some great spinning from DJ Laura Plis, it was hard to pick myself out of my flooded tent, complete with improvised fly and sticks as pegs, and switch on to the offerings of Day 3. No regrets. However, I confess that the shows of Day 3 are seen through something of a haze, not all of it from the fog-machines on stage.
C R ASH
The first show of the day plunges us immediately back into darkness, offering glimpses and snapshots, elusive and half-lit traces. Smoke further obscures our view, and the top- and side- lit performers (Jazmína Piktorová and Tereza Kmotorková) propose a range of gestures and tableaus, perhaps hinting at fragments of a relationship (or several relationships) through time. The scattered soundtrack (Jakub Mudrák) further splinters the stage into a ever-dividing room of pieces and half-pieces, performers perhaps struggling against a fading memory. Eventually, the movement (co-ordination by Daniel Raček) is drawn out into a type of crime scene, or a dependent relationship trying to struggle through snow, and the soundtrack dissolves into the pure noise of a blizzard.
C R ASH is an interesting experiment in the stagecraft atmospherics from Bratislava-based director Martin Hodoň, created together with the performers Kmotoroková and Piktorova. The movement is very much through emotional terrain, perhaps one or a series of relationships, as the description states, running the gamut of "love, pretense, defiance, illusion, violence, abandonment, forgiveness" and incorporating "family, partnership, and friendship" (so: most relationships then). There is a desperation about the work, as though it is urgently trying to show us something, which sits together with its visual focus, and creates a stage that - whilst seeming relatively defined - is also exceptionally busy with emotionality. It's a story mainly told through lighting, with a star of the show undoubtedly Lukáš Kubičina's lighting design, which jumps and slides through elusive illusions and shadows, pools and floods.
Photo: Banskej Bystrice, Marcela Záchenská
Such relational stage work relies heavily on the emotional quality of its connections and distances, and a sense of precision and control over the tools of the stage. For me, C R ASH doesn't quite nail it's collision of form and content. It doesn't quite control the emotional runaway train. But it comes close at times. To be fair, it's probably a show better suited to a late-night time, and the capacity of STANICA's S1 studio probably limits the intensity that can be achieved in realising the performance. But with such an abstract point of focus, the show really lives or dies on complete commitment and 100% execution - without this, it falls flat. There is an interesting conversation about whether this type of theatre should even exist - whether such a goal of precision and aesthetic aspiration is worthwhile, or whether it removes some of the wondrous and all-too-human ambiguities of stage. Nevertheless, C R ASH is far from an untidy 35 minutes in the theatre.
THEATRE SCORE FOR HUMAN AND MACHINE
I love a good experiment on the stage. To see something you've never seen before, with unpredictable results, while it can be uncomfortable and at times annoying, ultimately creates the most rewarding experiences of the theatre. Without experimentation, nothing new can be achieved - our stage work sits in its unchallenged traditions, and can't develop past reproducing old and sometimes faded ideologies. The world moves on - the stage should too.
Just what exactly the experiment was in theatre score for human and machine was unclear to me. Nominally a work of performance or theatre, its primary occupation is with the infinite mysteries of human-machine interaction, as we spend 120 minutes of stage time watching non-actors attempt to interact with soft- and hardware, (also a little with each other and a little with the audience) organised into a sort of exhausting series of tests. There is a lot of tinkering involved, as the score moves through various models of interaction (machine-human, human-machine, human-human, and in the case of the automated piano in the corner, machine-machine), isolating the occasional glitch in voice-recognition and occasionally interrupting with the Pavlovian chime of a bell from director Peter Gonda.
Photo: Official Kiosk Instagram
It's more than a little banal to watch, although this is a category of theatre which I always find abrasive and others seem to quite enjoy. What frustrates me so much is that the stages performs all of the signs of experimentation, and yet its ambitions are, at least in terms of stage (and that is after all where we are) so small. What is the exercise to demonstrate? That so much of life is a performance of a human interacting or failing to interact with a machine? But I know this - I see it everywhere, it's a platitude. Watching 120 minutes of tinkering might be a nice metaphor for the performance of science, but it seems to do little to further stage conventions, to the point where it possibly does not belong on stage at all. When I think back to the first performance without actors I ever saw - Stifter's Dinge in Melbourne Festival 2010 - the focus of the experiment was absolutely a dramaturgical one. Director Heiner Goebbels was obviously occupied with the drama of the machine's movement, exploring its inherent theatricality, its tensions, its climaxes as well as its banalities, with the execution contingent on the relationship with audience. Comparatively, theatre score for human and machine leaves you guessing as to its theatrical intent. Its occupation with the process of experiment is such that the human elements are erased completely, and the stage performers (all of them apparently non-actors) rendered mere instruments, with a sugar-coating of sympathy from director and audience alike.
It's hard to feel anything about it, and so theatre score for human and machine seems much more for machine than for human. Perhaps when the audience itself becomes machines, this will make some sense. In the meantime - for this critic, watching and speculating on the failures of computer and human interaction for so long has its costs, as does watching a non-actor improvise a response to a politically-sensitive question. The audience of the New Synagogue, perhaps expectedly, sat in mild amusement for most of the performance, like watching your grandfather playing with an old clock. Surely, there is more drama to be found in human-machine interaction than this.
MULTISENSORY SPACE EVENING
The evening finishes with several events - a communal dinner from designer Dávid Koronczi, and a performance lecture from Bratislava-based scientist and artist András Cséfalvay. Later, it's onto the DJs again, for what will be the last night of festival partying, and inevitably, an even wetter tent.
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C R ASH
Director: Martin Hodoň
Creation and interpretation: Jazmína Piktorová, Tereza Kmotorková
Movement cooperation: Daniel Raček
Light design: Lukáš Kubicina
Music: Jakub Mudrák
Scene: matoha
Costume: Johanna Grigarová
Photo: Alena Kurajdová
Production: Alexandra Mireková and SKOK!, GAFFA
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THEATRE SCORE FOR HUMAN AND MACHINE
Concept and direction: Peter Gonda
Dramaturgy: Adam Dragun
Musical dramaturgy: Michal Cáb
Scenography: Matěj Sýkora
Code architecture: Samuel Michalik
Creation of the object: Natália Sýkorová
Production: Klára Mamojková, Tereza Dvořáková, Lucia Račková
Performers: Karolína Ježková, Anna Kárníková, Eliška Kupcová, Eva Oliva, Lenka Pražáková, Alna¨Procházková, Jolana Ritterová, Hana Sarvajová, Lucie Sčurková, Anastasia Sirůčková, Jakub Sláma, Monika Soušová, Hana Venclová
Credit: Lukáš Vodseďálek
Photo: Michal Hančovský, Radim Labuda, Karina Golisová
Partner: Alfred in the yard
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MULTISENSORY SPACE EVENING
Bruchovravy. Poetic Tasting - Dávid Koronczi
Useless Alone, Meaningful Together - András Cséfalvay
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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.
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