Contra spem spero! (Hope Against Hope)

By Lesya Ukrainka (1890)

Away, thoughts - you heavy, autumn clouds!
Now the spring comes, gleaming gold!
Is it with such pity, lamenting aloud
That the stories of young summers are told?

No, I want to laugh through my tears,
And sing songs amongst the fray,
Without hope comes fears,
Let me live! Sad thoughts - away!

Standing on poor and sad fallow land
I will sow colourful flowers,
I will sow flowers in cold sand,
I will give them bitter tear-showers.

And those tears will melt hot,
That crust is ice, strong,
Maybe, flowers come up - and plot
A spring for me that's happy and long.

On a steep flint mountain
I will lift a heavy stone
And, bearing that terrible burden,
I'll sing a fun song.

Through the long, endless, dark night,
Not for a moment will I close my eyes,
I will search for the star that lights,
The clear, bright mistress of the skies.

Yes! I will laugh through my tears,
and sing songs amongst the fray,
Without hope comes fears,
Let me live! Sad thoughts - away!

Translation - Richard Pettifer (2022)

with Olha Velymchanytsia

A little note on Ukraine

Ukrainian theatres and other cultural infrastructure are currently under bombardment and heavy artillery fire from the Russian military.

Many of my Ukrainian colleagues are displaced, others have been forced to put down their paintbrushes and picked up weapons to defend themselves. This scenario is a nightmare.

As a critic and theatre artist with a 15-year history of performance and exchange with Ukrainian people and Ukraine, I naturally join others in deploring the destruction of cultural infrastructure and the threatening and sometimes killing of Ukrainian artists and people.

In my visits to Ukraine, I have only ever discovered people turning their backs on their militarised history, and struggling for a better future against great odds. This has particularly occurred through cultural development, which takes generations to develop - and is destroyed in days. Obviously, this destruction must end immediately.

Vale Ben Landau

I have received tragic news of the passing of performing artist and friend Ben Landau.

Ben was a generous collaborator, with whom I was in regular dialogue about issues of aesthetics and community, beginning with our time together at Queen's College in Melbourne when we were both students in the early 2000s. 

I will remember Ben for his openness and flexibility, as well as his imagination and curiosity.

I am greatly saddened by the passing of a great artist, friend to many, and member of the community.

Vale Ben Landau.

Review of the Exhibition 'Projections for Future History'

 My writing about this exhibition at B5 Studios, Targu Mures, was published over at the Romanian magazine Revista Arta.

Available here: https://revistaarta.ro/en/an-audience-without-the-public/

Or, if you read Romanian, here - https://revistaarta.ro/ro/o-audienta-fara-public/

The Artist is Absent: Publication in University of Tartu journal "Methis"

Among the more interesting developments to affect theatre practice lately has been certain adoptions of Non-Human Agency - basically the concept that other-than-humans may be capable of independent action.

I wrote about this at length for a special edition of the University of Tartu's open-access journal Methis, following the presentation of these ideas at a conference at that same university in 2019. Written as I was intensively developing an opera and coinciding with some health issues, it's publication is something that I look at with some sense of pride and achievement.

The publication is available here (21-pages PDF),

 https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/methis/article/view/18443

...while the full edition, which contains some rollicking papers about technology and percpetion in the theatre, with a particular focus on the Estonian context, is available here:

https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/methis/issue/view/1297/62

Youth Everlasting And Life Without End: Flogging the mechanical horse in Timișoara

Like your best friend at a party, fairy tales are always with us – even when we need them to get lost. 

Petre Ispirescu’s fairy tales, collected from various folk tales (à la Brothers Grimm) and published by him in the 1800s, are a source of Romanian national mythology – appearing countless times as puppet shows, on television, or in school curriculum. Though as fairy tales they are saturated in Romanian culture, there is simultaneously a lack of specific or critical perspectives on them. In this way, they sit under the surface like crocodiles, unquestioned, dormant, yet filled with a certain type of potential.

Performed for three sweaty July nights in public space in Timișoara, Western Romania, Youth Everlasting And Life Without End revives one of Ispirescu’s most loved stories about a prince temporarily escaping the problems of the real world.  It's all part of Europe’s Centriphery project – a roaming, multi-year project that develops site-specific events across ‘peripheral’ locations of EU states. Romania’s entry to Centriphery, which also forms part of Timisoara's hosting of the Capital of Culture, takes the form of a spectacular live-action puppet extravaganza, with gargantuan characters parading around Piața Libertății (Freedom Square), to the sound of a wailing, multi-harmony, live, rock-inspired soundtrack.

 

Photo: Flavius Neamciuc

There’s a lot to like about the outcome on a local level, even if the network of partners and stakeholders that creates it is pretty complicated. For one thing, the situation offers the artistic community of Timișoara a chance to strut their stuff on a big, big stage. The costumes by Lia Pfeiffer are a highlight, as are the gargantuan puppet-heads made from recycled materials by Ciprian Tauciuc. The music by Sol Faur, with sound by guest artist Connie Zenk, pulls you along in its ebbs and flows, incredibly supported by a quartet of vocalists (led by Choir master Beatrix Imre Leila) that begin in the first minute of the performance and do not stop singing until the 90^th. 

Soul Chain

I have only really seen the works of a few Israeli choreographers, and for some reason, each time I have felt the eerie presence of military on the stage. In some cases, this was quite literal – as with Dror Liebermann’s Neither Soft Nor Light in 2016, which was performed by an ex-member of the Israeli Special Forces. But often the presence has been more implicit, and points to the intertwining of military in Israeli cultures – maybe best seen in their famous compulsory conscription program, which has seen many contemporary artists, poets, and even supermodels get a good feeling for life from behind the gun.

In the case of Israeli-German choreographer Sharon Eyal’s Soul Chain, the presence is more abstract, in the form of the relationship between choreographer and dancer, and the fixed chain of command existing between both. Soul Chain begins with a whisper – two tip-toed, uniformed dancers move diagonally across a smoke-defined stage to the early pattering of Ori Lichtik’s soundtrack. Over time, it accumulates into a sort of organism or ‘shared body’ – the dancers float largely in unison, one occasionally standing apart, like a school of fish, as the music gathers and falls into various peaks and troughs.

 

Photo: Andreas Etter

The choreography sits in a sort of uneasy dynamic, never quite certain of the outcome for these fish-entities. What’s certain is the presence of discipline – if they are a collective, it is one without solidarity. The outcome is a kind of targeted aesthetic strike, executed by a group that has had the humanity drilled out of them by countless repetitions and exactions.

“Such is dance”, you might say. Yet the work, which won Germany’s DER FAUST prize for choreography in 2018, has drawn an unusually large following, reproduced across stages in Europe, among them, this re-staging from 2019. Given it’s fairly clichéd regurgitation of staid concepts (the human as animal, subject to control and existing relationally), we might well ask, viewing this in 2021 amidst a public health crisis that has seen a perhaps unprecedented crackdown on assumed rights, what exactly is the attraction.