Well it's a few weeks since Kiosk Festival 2024 subsided, and I'm well and truly sitting back at my desk in Berlin. The sun is shining, but beginning it's long goodbye, the trees' leaves beginning their calm twirl down to the flat floor, ushering in the empty, dark, industrial-strength refrigerator that is Berlin's winter. As people begin to wrap up their summer activities, it's a good chance to stare out the window and take stock, thinking about how the summer unfolded, making plans to protect oneself as best one can from the crisp incisions that winter brings.
I'll take the long-awaited opportunity to update on the second day of Kiosk Festival 2024 now, and in a few days, write the (also-long awaited) follow up to my original "reflections" post in July, this time on the theme of the Far Right and Criticism. It should be noted that Kiosk Festival this year exists among a frenzy of Far-Right activity: recently, the "Culture Minister" of Slovakia's Far Right government fired both the head of the National Theatre and the National Gallery, without any kind of adequate explanation (something about an accident on stage being "improperly handled"). But these are only the tips of icebergs, as Slovakia both flirts with and actualises a phase of shifting to a more authoritarian government, echoing pulses resonating across Europe, as governments trigger their various populations' protectionist impulses using the instrument of fear.
The fear of 'the Other' is a political reaction that often drives the impulse for "invasion" - the theme of Kiosk 2024. Its justification is that strangeness is threatening, that boundaries must always be defended, that the dividing lines between self and other, us and them, are absolute and uncrossable. Yet we know, if we examine closely our experiences of being human, not only is this untrue, but that it denies the most pleasurable and meaningful parts of existing: those pleasant senses of trust, exchange, and togetherness that perhaps only culture and community can really bring. While it's true that over-extending ourselves can be self-destructive, Far Right proposals bring no answers to dilemmas, instead bringing solutions that are easy and brutal, boring and wrong.
In writing today, and so late, I've decided to pick and choose a little bit, for time allocation reasons. So it's apologies to many great shows: Unkulunkulu, a magical puppet theatre piece about a senile man travelling to the moon, as so often directed at children but - with a little coaxing of our wasted, tired imaginations - equally enjoyable to adults. And the closing show of the festival, Pinkbus, a rawcus queering of Sovak traditional signifiers. It's a novelty to see the Slovak national anthem performed with such genuine masculinity!
The two shows I'll focus on today are both from Slovak artists, one (Tomáš Janypka) based in Prague and the other (Roman Škadra) in Berlin. The shows have some similarities, so I'll put them in conversation with each other sometimes.
Lonesome Cowboy
The houselights dim, the hubbub dies down. The lights on stage go up. There stands the lonesome cowboy: dressed in white, leading against the pillar, his head bowed and covered by his oversized hat, as though masking some unspoken, deep sadness. Does he pine for some lost love? Does he search the desert for his own sense of self, lost among this vast, shifting sands? Or is he just a poser, performing some emotion that he never has the depth to truly feel?
Photo: Natália Zajačiková
It's an iconic pose to open Lonesome Cowboy, drawn from Sergio Leone's cartoony portraits of Clint Eastwood in films such as For a Few Dollars More (1965), albeit updated for today's online community of aesthetic-driven, trope-obsessed viewers. And that first pose, held by performer/deviser Tomáš Janypka pretty much sums up the whole of Lonesome Cowboy, performed in Žilina following its premiere in Prague. The shallowness of the image is deconstructed and played with throughout the performance, undertaking a kind of 'call-and-response' with composer Tomáš Vtípil, (mostly on violin).
Janypka moves through a variety of familiar formations, unwinding and re-winding a lassoo, transforming a simple see-saw into horse, then lover, then cow. The contemplative procession between these tropes has a wooden feel that seems to mock the solitude of the character, desconstructing his 'strong man' poses and evolving into something increasingly stylised and more recognisable as dance.
Finally, the deconstruction devolves into madness, Janypka uttering against the music "I'll be your key to every problem that you see" and "just me. Empty me". There's a focused disappointment present, as though the protagonist themselves is disappointed with their own shortcomings. And then, like one of his whistles, the lonesome cowboy fades off into the sunset.
Photo: Natália Zajačiková
It's a bit of a one-trick pony, but Lonesome Cowboy is not without merit as a deconstruction of contemporary masculinity, using the figure of the cowboy to ridicule and mock a point of genesis for many western male identities.
Girevik
Girevik is a strange kind of fitness experiment where a performer (Roman Škadra) surrounded by a field of kettlebells plays and experiments with them across approximately 60 minutes of running time. This may not sound interesting, but it's also kind of rare to see this combination applied in a circus set. And there are some details in Girevik that show at least a clear line of precision: the relentless clocking of the audience, the strange, distant relationship with them, occasionally transgressed as the performer clocks us one more time, or gances at us in an inquisitive, yet blank, way. It is as though we are there and at the same time not there.
Photo: Natália Zajačiková
That's a little unsettling, as is the complete silence that accompanies it, but it's not uncomfortable. Škadra begins the routine with a particular rythm, moving the kettlebells around in a fashion that feels like an étude. Together with the black, roman style pteryges, and set against the white, geometric space of the New Synagogue, it gives the piece a mathematical feel from the outset: an idea of testing objects and their relation to the performer. Placing the kettlebells on the stage in rows, Škadra then takes the rows apart, beginning a journey into futility that continues throughout the performance. A table enters, has kettlebells assembled on it, has the kettlebells removed from it, and then exits. And so on.
It's like a kid's game, but with more muscles. And while Škadra proposes this as a "historically hyper-masculine aura around the kettlebell", it's hard to see any kind of critique in Girevik, which also takes its name from the men's activity of kettlebell lifting (the women's is called guirevitchka, and these are your two options). Overall, the performance sits in a weird between-space, not exactly a deep contemplation, but not a joke or prank either. It's more a series of loops - and I guess this is what truly makes it circus, as otherwise there is such a precision to the movement that someone might mistake it for choreography (and indeed, Helle Bach is credited with a choreographic collaboration). As the soundtrack (Tomáš Vtípil) kicks in, the piece plateus its way to its understated conclusion.
It's a weird combination of stuff. But it's not bad. A little like Lonesome Cowboy, the focus on aesthetics leaves something lacking in terms of a critique of masculinity - both pieces probably need more grounding in why they are choosing such an approch, if a deconstructive critique of masculinity is indeed the aim of the game. Sitting inside the surfaces inevitably leads to a reproduction of the same thing and kind of avoids serious investigation, even leaning into a celebration rather than a proposal for something further. I contrast both to a performance like Waddah Sinnah's Born Into Ruins, one that especially gives attention to the difficult subject of violence and agression that so shapes and defines masculinity. Both of these performance don't really go into difficult contradictions, sitting on the surface and preferring a play of signifiers and some light deconstruction. But the new type of pervasive, friendly masculinity does not feel like enough to me: it's a mask, covering an uglier truth about the world, and one which I fear both pieces, in a way, refuse to acknowledge.
LONESOME COWBOY
Concept by Helle Bach and Tomáš Janypka
Choreography, performer: Tomáš Janypka
Music: Tomáš Vtípil
Lighting design by Martin Hamouz
Dramaturgy: Sara Arnstein
Choreographic collaboration: Helle Bach
Set design: Siggi Óli Pàlmason
GIREVIK
Benjamin Richter, Aleksandras Lempertas
Kettlebell trainer: Frank Kraft
Supervision: Benjamin Richter, Darragh McLoughlin, Claudio Stellato
Scene design: Tomasz Bajszarovicz
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