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.
