Sunday, January 1, 2023

What happened in 2022?

Sitting at my little wooden desk by the window in the weird 14-degree Berlin weather, sick with the flu and rejecting any possibility of celebration, I have finally had the chance to "take stock".

2022 began for me with a long bus ride to Portugal, a type of 'holiday' to visit friends and colleagues, which was punctuated by different forms of trauma over events of the last years. By the time I got back - February 16th - I had a week in Berlin to look around at what was happening, before things would change completely again.

The period after that week is something of a blur. 3 weeks on the cold streets with people from Ukraine, desperately trying to find some sense of orientation together, were followed by a year in which my work completely changed, and the entry of many new influences who would become good friends and colleagues. The first emergency "Cultural Workers Cafe" events initiated by Inga Zimprich, Viktoria Lyakh and Sönke Hallman at Flutgraben were created to support incoming cultural workers to meet each other and engage in mutual support. These were followed by the development of Cultural Workers Studio, a shared space which became both my home base at Flutgraben by Berlin's River Spree, and a kind of utopian cultural project you can only find in Berlin. Through supporting the studio as it's only member not from Ukraine, I co-moderated a film festival, supported a livestream concert, modeled on the catwalk, and learned how to cook various Ukrainian specialties, as well as convivially supporting my colleagues in finding some sense of stability in the new (often very bureaucratic) environment.

All of this activity has forced me to somewhat put aside (or fail at) my plans for the year, including work and other opportunities. There was, however, no other decision to make. The journey of Cultural Workers Studio from an idea into a concrete, funded entity, with 8 Ukrainian-led projects on the way in 2023, was a type of dream outcome. There were many moments through the year where I wondered casually what was "in it" for me, as the work seemed to take such a large toll on me, and was (of course) also unpaid. But talking with friends and colleagues, I understood that, through building a trusting community with my new friends, I had achieved a type of orientation that others were lacking. There are benefits to solidarity that are hard to precisely pinpoint. I can only say that, throughout the year, I did not feel lost - and was in many ways found, thanks to the specific generosity of the people I was working with. When I think of the year, I celebrate them.

Yet even writing about this now has its difficulties. In 2022, all I wanted to talk about was Ukrainian self-determination - and yet, being not Ukrainian, it was the one subject I did not have a license to talk about. All my life seemed to revolve around my studio colleagues, and yet you will find almost no photos of them on my social media feed (despite them occasionally making me into an Instagram superstar). Shelving plans, putting aside your own goals and desires when the need arises, centering others, can be difficult, but in 2022 it had unexpected rewards for me that were beyond what I thought was possible. For all my experience, I was led in 2022 by a group of extremely brave young women that I am proud to call among my best friends and colleagues.

Despite the distraction of murderous invasion, I was privileged to support the collaborative leadership of Faki Festival 25 in Croatia, which took the theme of Enough! to express a shared impulse of  sustained work beyond capacity. Faki 25 was a line in the sand: where many theatre artists, having experienced a 90% loss of revenue on top of increasingly difficult conditions of neoliberalism, came together in an explosive performance week across Zagreb. It was my last festival at the helm of Faki, and I am particularly grateful to this year's leadership team of Elsa Mourlam, Sonia Borkowicz, and Alja Ferjan for their mutual support, on top of the always-undefeatable Mateja Pribanić. Doing a 'handover year' is a luxury for a situation with such low resources, where periods of artistic leadership inevitably end with everyone storming out of a room dramatically or cutting off ties completely - therefore, I was happy to re-join the leadership team and impart structures and knowledge from 8 years at the festival, before peacefully retreating into the distance. I look forward to what Faki 26 will bring!

In 2022 I almost completely stopped developing theory, which became increasingly difficult among the emergency environment. Visits to Nowa Drama Festival in Bratislava for "New Crisis of Theatre Between Ideological Extremism and the 'Cancel Culture'", to University of Malta for the conference Mediating Performance, and later in the year to Brno for the conference "Touching Limits/Crossing Borders of Theatre" were my only chances really to further develop strands of research that sometimes span many years now. Even these seemed dominated by the latest invasion, and I became at times convinced that my own work was almost useless and incoherent against the tide of civilian massacre, atrocity, and cynical, double-sided rhetoric. It is easy to see your own attempts at resistance as quite meek against this misanthropy and hate, yet, when  I look at the moments of celebration and togetherness that were created this year, it is hard for me to feel anything but hope, and gratitude to colleagues who somehow managed to show me the way, miraculously, despite their own circumstances which I knew to be often desperate.

So despite things going completely funky for me, I leave 2022 without a sense of regret, and actually with a strong foundation to build on. I never had many excuses to spend a lot of time in Berlin - despite it being the city in which I am based, there has never been much keeping me here, and a lot of its faux-affinity I find superficial and ironically exclusive. Now, with strong community support, even a job (!) writing criticism at tanzschreiber.de, there is part of me that has to acknowledge that the largely fruitless attempts of the last years to advocate critical thinking in performance, call attention to continuing oppression inside former Eastern Bloc contexts, and work in solidarity with women-led projects somehow culminated in 2022, albeit prompted by an insane and tragic military intervention that will inevitably have catastrophic consequences for a long time. 

The irony of finding such beauty in the madness is not lost on me as I enter 2023, and the work I do will continue to be greatly influenced by these horrific circumstances, even as I attempt to push back against them together with others. The invasion of 2022 must clearly and unambiguously be called out as a most cynical, opportunistic and atrocious articulation of power, even if this poses some risk to those who do it. The words must be put on paper - it is not enough to sit back and spectate, to "see both sides" or to offer opinion based on the latest reading in leftist circles. I learned more from my displaced colleagues this year than I could read in any opinion piece, likewise, I was haunted sometimes by the silence in a room after I articulated what I understood to be a bare minimum statement of solidarity. The future will require courage, and interventions that are not only self-preserving.

Meanwhile, for the performing arts, questions remain about its recovery following the pandemic, during which 90% of revenues disappeared, and long-standing stage traditions were severed.  The results have been particularly devastating for the independent sector, or Freie Szene, in which I mainly work, and where I always find the most powerful imaginations of what the stage is an can do. Criticism, meanwhile, remains in a difficult position due to the contemporary tendency to blindly connect it with negativity among a drive for hyper-affirmation and self-promotion, fed itself by an environment that amplifies the ethical suffering of the individual, and which advocates cutting oneself off from the needs of others and sitting inside bubbles of privilege and safe answers, or choosing from a supermarket of identity affiliations.

Writing for tanzschreiber.de as the English-writing correspondent, I am again struck by the amount of artists who seem to be in contact with a critic for the first time in their (sometimes already quite lengthy) careers. Part of me thinks that it should not be a surprise when someone takes the time to thoroughly research your performance practices and attempt to deeply understand the principles at play in a collaboration - if criticism does not do this, then what is it there for, exactly? Am I supposed to just write first-person accounts of what I 'think' and 'feel', based on my mood that day? Am I supposed to write promotional texts, so that people come to the show? Are these the only possible expectations, now? If yes, that's a pretty low bar to cross. Inserting performance into wider social, economic and political contexts with independence - yes, always subjectively, because there is no other way - remains the key goal of this writing platform, as I seek to hit 2023 with a new energy and vigour, born of what feels, maybe for the first time after 9 years, like actual, tangible support surrounding.

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