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).
