End of Species published in The Vernacularist (NZ)

My other life, very much intertwined with my critical writing, is as a purveyor of Dramatic Monologues.

Recently I have been touring the work End of Species, a monologue about my attempt to travel overland without flying from Australia to Germany, and Charles Darwin's travel in the opposite direction aboard the HMS Beagle.

The monologue did a mini-tour in the UK, traveling to all corners of the mother country, and has now been published in except form in New Zealand publication called The Vernacularist, run by Arts Depot, Auckland, in a special edition themed 'The Environment'.

Available here (free)

End of Species, left out of the Contents page because its revelations are so explosive, is page 74-76

"The rain will not erase it" - Interview with Mladen Alexiev (BG)

Mladen Alexiev (1980) is a theatre maker from Bulgaria. He partecipated to the Terni Festival 2014 (www.ternifestival.it) with two different works called “Standing Body” and “A Poem”, giving the name “The rain will not erase it” to the entire Festival.

By Carla Capodimonti and Richard Pettifer
Available in Italian at http://fattiditeatro.it/the-rain-will-not-erase-it-intervista-mladen-alexiev/ 

Carla Capodimonti: I found your works about “walking” very interesting. In the history of art we can find a lot of examples and inspirations about walking: in 1921, Dada organized a series of guided tours to various trivial places in the city, in the 50’s, the Letterist International began the 'theory of drift' which turned into situations experiencing creative and playful behaviours and unitary urbanism. Constant reworked Situationist theory to develop the idea of a nomadic city (“New Babylon”) introducing the theme of nomadism into architecture. From mid-century, artists started to use walking in nature as art. In 1966 the magazine Artforum published the journey of Tony Smith on a highway under construction. In 1967, Richard Long produced “A Line Made by Walking”, a line drawn by trampling the grass of a lawn. Since 1995 the group Stalker conducted readings of the cities in different parts of Europe from the point of view of wandering, to investigate the urban areas and the contemporary transformations of a changing society.¹

Did you find some kinds of inspirations from the history of art for your work called “A poem”? What is your definition for “walking poem”?

Mladen Alexiev: Actually, the starting point for the intervention “The rain will not erase it” is that I did in Amsterdam in the Autumn of 2013 and its follow up – the photographic project “A poem”, developed in collaboration with the Italian photographer Eleonora Anzini and presented in the frame of the last edition of Terni Festival - originate from quite opposite interests of mine. For quite some time my fascination has been not with the act of walking but, instead, with the act of standing. At one point in my practice I wanted to strip down everything I know about theatre-making. I was thinking – what is the minimum physical expression an individual can do without any special preparations, what is the minimum (political) statement a single body can make? And I have chosen a simple entry point – a body enters a space, its appearance is already a statement – inevitably.

It is not about the walking but rather for taking a stand. Literally. To hold yourself back. To make your body visible through imposed discipline. To leave it somewhere. To deny the body the right to move, to make an attempt to put it into halt. I am touched by the state of emergency that this simple act suggests.

So I am not interested in the history of art in the first place. At one point in the process, links and references naturally occur. But I find it quite suffocating to have it as a starting point. In the end, the history of art is a graveyard in which we find ourselves aspiring or ascribed to certain lineages, attempts and illusions. Our loves make it alive.

"A POEM” (Design and Text: Mladen Alexiev – Visual concept, photo & graphic design: Eleonora Anzini)

Report: 3rd International Baku Theatre Conference

The International Baku Theatre Conference is a biannual conference held in Azerbaijan's capital, where speakers confer to share knowledge, information and networks.

The conference brings together some strange bedfellows - delegates from the USA and UK mix with regional friendlies Georgia and Iran, a surprisingly large Indian representation, and of course the omnipresent Russia - with more than a quarter of total delegates, and far more than the host nation. Conversation focused (or at many times strayed from) the central theme, which this year was 'Theatre art in a system of multiculturalism and universal values' - a theme somewhat diluted by the conspicuous absence of one neighbour to the near south.

The outcome was a strange cocktail of public relations, government interest, networking and a disappointingly small proportion of critical enquiry. The air inside the Music Theatre Baku stayed taut with officialdom and affirmation, with volunteers from the local tourism school acknowledging the two-pronged focus of the conference (Azerbaijan's culture and tourism department are one and the same).

At best, the formalities of government combine oddly with art, and coupled with this, the conference battled against a theme that many in the West would now find passé - multiculturalism was a horse flogged to death in the 90's, as waves of immigration combines spectacularly with capital interest in many places, and has given way to either resentful tolerence, a nationalist xenophobia or full-blown fascism - depending on your point of view.

Baku Theatre Conference, Azerbaijan

On the 5th and 6th of November, I will be participating in Azerbaijan's biannual theatre conference in Baku. The theme of the conference is 'Theatre art in the system of multi-culturalism and universal values' - a theme which seems steered towards discussion of the things which connect us across cultures.

It's certainly an interesting opportunity at the moment for your naive Australian correspondant. The conference is attended by theatre-makers from Europe, the US and the UK, but many from Russia and the local area. I am the only Australian, and just one of two from Germany. Given Australia's recent hysterical response to global events, and its particular targeting of the religion of Islam, the conference is a genuine opportunity for me to gain some insight into how this plays out in a theatre forum - and hopefully to communicate some of that knowledge.

I will be presenting my paper, called 'Artist as Battering Ram and Collective Scepticism', based on my experiences making theatre traveling from Australia to Germany.

Stay tuned...

The Notebook

Hmph. It seems Tim Etchells has already thoroughly critiqued Forced Entertainment's The Notebook here.

This is becoming a theme for me in FEs work - this defense against criticism, and by extension a kind of forced production of new pathways in critical thought. It's about as thorough a program note as you'll get, and, yep, covers virtually everything I was about to try and write. I suppose if you block off all other avenues, then all that remains is the creation of a new response. I'm yet to exactly make my mind up about whether this is really good or not... something about a correct theatrical intention being impenetrable to the words 'I liked it' or 'I didn't like it', and so instead demanding something else be said.

The Notebook is adapted, pretty strictly it would seem, from Ágota Kristóf's 1986 novel, translated into English with the same title. The story follows a pair of twin boys who one day are shipped off to live with their grandmother, and subsequently learn their survival during WW2 by teaching themselves. The ambiguous process of this learning and decision-making is presented without judgement in both novel and play, and the boys become desensitised to the horrors and pleasures of life. This desensitisation occurs the extent that they are able to respond to situations in ways at once empathetic and inhuman, training themselves into unwavering ethical machines.

The two actors on the stage (Richard Lowdon and Robin Archer) read the play from books, and it's split into stories which we later find out were written by the boys themselves as part of their 'Mind exercises' aimed at improving their chances of survival. The situations they witness include beastiality, killing their mother, whipping a visiting officer for sexual pleasure, blackmailing a priest, and so on. In each scenario, the decision of the boys is almost entirely, and very interestingly, justified by the context, to an extent that is hilarious, absurdly consequential, yet totally rational. Oh, you fucked a dog? Guess that didn't hurt anyone, and you're very poor. No problem. You don't want to give us these notebooks, which we absolutely need, for free or in exchange of eggs? Then we will just stare at you until you do. And when you ask us never to come back, we will tell you that, naturally, we will be obliged to come back - when we run out of paper.

That Bad Word, That Brown Land

Sitting down again at my desk in Berlin after (yet another) wild movement across Europe, which took me from Italy to Scotland to London back to Italy and home again*, it strikes me that, having engaged in European theatre for the past 15 months now, I may be qualified to make some 'small but important' direct statements about the context in which I am currently operating, sometimes as - that bad word - 'critic'.

I resist these statements a lot. I know, for starters, how much contemporary life is about the performance of perspective, how capital is gained from I was here, or I own this idea. I resist for several reasons: I don't want to show off that I am in Europe, in perhaps its most fashionable city, that I have somehow, until now at least, managed to survive here. I know that Australians come here and take photos and say 'BERLIN, I AM IN YOU'. It is not my objective to gain power in this way, through simply being in a place, or generating a narrative through cultural assumptions. Life is just not that simple (or that successful).

But for those wondering: I have been living in Europe for the past 15 months and intend to continue doing so. I live in a small flat in Berlin, the rent is low, and it's as good a place as any to engage in struggles which, more and more, I see are important. We are moving into the time of perpetual crisis, as predicted by Orwell and others.

In this space, it is also becoming harder to write anything meaningful (and so I write less and less). Knowing, as I know, that the world is full of opinions, and seeing, as I see, that everywhere people behave in ways that support their various existences, I increasingly think the only space for change is that small gap which combines human drama and knowledge. This can be in the theatre, at a conference, or at a dinner table. This work is mainly done in person. So I generally don't write this kind of 'WHAT HAPPENED NEXT CHANGED MY LIFE' kind of structure favoured by freelance writers trying to get Facebook hits. Change - shock - is nearly always slower.

Terni Performance Festival Wrap-Up

About one third of the way through my time in Terni, I began to get the sense that I, a foreigner, a gringo from a culturally confused Leone film, had arrived at some kind of crossroads.

It's interesting, what's happening in Europe. There's certainly a wave of anti-EU sentiment, from Germany to Norway and certainly the UK, and this raises several questions about the utopian dreams that the political body once represented. This young, educated, mobile class - you know them - English speaking, experienced, working and moving between states, partnering across races and healing old wounds - may in fact never get the political agency they were promised. Likewise, the various fabrications upholding European cohesion lie exposed by a playful Russia - recently, for example, Hungary's decision to withhold gas supplies to Ukraine.

Not co-incidentally, Hungary has been following a largely traditional line with its cultural offerings of late. Likewise on a cultural level we see smaller festivals like Terni - whose 'satellite' feel in the programming is very much a product of such mobility, entering a fragile period of existential crisis born of an uncertain future. It's by no means the only festival going through this. Everywhere here, there's a crawling sense that these smaller, multi-disciplinary, multi-kulti festivals are no longer at the crest of the wave. As the cultural pull swings back towards tradition, one senses that they are, unfortunately, swimming against the tide.

I'll resist saying more about the context (although there is certainly more to be said - about xenophobia, about fascism, about the turning of blind eyes. About my home state, Australia, leading the way with all of this. Perhaps another day).

Photo: Michela Cinus