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.
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.
