FAKI Festival, Croatia

Hello from the bus.

Over the next week I will be performing at, and writing criticism for, this small festival in Zagreb: FAKI Festival.

Festival website: http://attack.hr/?lang=en

This Thing Called Artist Development

On the 22nd of May I was invited to speak at an event, irreverantly titled 'This thing called artist development', at the Ovalhouse Theatre in London. Artist development, as the title suggests, can be a strange and elusive idea. It is clear, on one hand, that it exists - that historically, an artist's career can be traced back along some sort of line. The audience included artists, funding bodies, and independent producers.

This is an interesting organisational idea, and may exhibit the best kind of 'throw people together in a room and see what happens' mentality. The structure of the day was fairly loose, and consisted of some morning provocations (of which I was a part) followed by the all-important lunch. Some community hall style discussions on various topics allowed a more conversational dialogue-driven form, and the subsequent artistic interventions abstracted the concepts into a form in which everyone was in many ways much more comfortable. Finally, we were invited to speak into a fossil about what the day meant to us.

It would be fair to say that I am not convinced about the state of UK theatre at the moment. From where I sit there are many problems, most of which are deeply embedded in economics - not least the City of London which is doing its best to price itself out of any kind of artistic lifestyle - and unlikely to change at any time soon. The day was clearly an attempt to generate new ideas and concepts, as well as to promote the Ovalhouse as a space for developing artists, and to bring in new collaborators who might contribute to the community. Within this context, it's a nice event, in that it gives people a chance to step back and discuss what they are doing, where it's all heading, and to try to steer the conversation in a certain direction.

The Inquiline

The Inquiline is a physical theatre piece about science, and a significantly honest attempt to articulate a darkness many scientists are existing in at the moment.

Written for Exeunt Magazine in London- link below.

http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/the-inquiline/

100 Grad - Sunday ('Catastrophe Sunday')

'The road to hell is paved with good intentions', thought your correspondent, as I wearily arrived at HAU 2 about 90 minutes after planned, panting from a long (8.6km) walk from Pankow to Kreuzberg. After having my original plan to catch the free shuttle service from nearby Ballhaus Ost - the third venue in 100 Grad - foiled by that venue not having any events on Sunday (and therefore no bus) I decided that Sophiensaele was not too far by foot, and kept going. Waiting for half an hour for that bus from Sophiensaele to HAU, my destination, I experienced 'nature calling', and ran inside for 5 minutes, only to find that the bus had chosen those particular five minutes to arrive. Deciding that now both my planned 5pm and 6pm shows were a write-off, I saddled up again, and continued walking to HAU, briefly taking in, by force, the tourist delights of Berlin.

Gotta get that bike fixed for summer...

Hamlet Private

My good fortune finally came when I somehow caught Hamlet Private, a piece of international  microtheatre directed by Helsinki-based, Swiss-born director Martina Marti, and which had just six performances during 100 Grad over a three hour period. The work has been in Berlin before 18 months ago, and has 'toured' internationally through several different performers in different European countries. It's a one-on-one performance, and can be performed anywhere with a table, two chairs, a candle and a deck of specialised playing cards. The performer (a mystical Claudia Schwartz) sits you down and explains to you that Hamlet is 'inside the deck of cards', and then proceeds with a kind of customised tarot reading that incorporates elements of the play.

It's possible to read Hamlet as being a play entirely about Fate. The references to free will and autonomy are littered throughout the text, taking on new resonance these days by the fact that the play is so well-known, and therefore that any audience comes to it knowing, in some sense, their fate. There's a sense of inevitability about Hamlet's death drive, he is in some ways a character waiting to die, intuitively deducing that this is the only way to really resolve his inner crisis of identity and authenticity. Even a surface reading of Hamlet reveals a play obsessed with mortality. 'To be, or not to be' is at once a simple musing on the false choices that constitute an existence under sufferance. After all, if the choice is between different ways to suffer, that is, indeed, no choice at all.

100 Grad Festival - Saturday

Berlin's annual 100 Grad (100 Degrees) festival is an opportunity for Berlin's three main independent theatre houses - HAU, Ballhaus Ost and Sophiensaele - to improve their brand and market themselves as key centres for new theatre in Europe. The rules are simple: anyone can make a submission in November each year, the performers don't get paid and come from everywhere anyway, and it costs €17 for a day pass to as much theatre as you can handle. The venues get free labour, and the performers go home with some photos of their 'Berlin stage moment', or access to an audience that, due to low expectations, are likely to see any actual art as a bonus.

If the above sounds like reluctant critique, it's because although it's clearly problematic, 100 Grad is one event where I just can't muster the cynicism. Sure, there are many things not to like, and it may be continuing a sorry tradition of Berlin being a mecca for new models of artist exploitation which are then exported to other contexts, but there's something about drifting between the three venues, meeting old friends in bars, and the unique character of each venue that leaves you spellbound, regardless of your predisposition. It's quintessentially theatre - and literally irresistible. Entering its final year this year, it will be replaced by something else next year, (probably more problematic, and developed "in dialogue with various venues, artists, and the Berlin Senate department for culture and the economy". Hmmm. Sounds exciting. Will the artists finally get that minimum wage they've been seeking over the last, well, since forever? Something tells me, no).

Not to mention the generally high quality of work. Berlin is a place where many skilled performing artists live, and many more take the chance that 100 Grad offers to come here and perform. The result is more hit than miss, and a surprising amount of artfulness for a festival that is only loosely curated.

This year, the festival runs over four days, Thursday-Sunday, and takes in a seemingly endless number of shows. A lot of dance, a mixture of mostly German and English language,

Some of which this reviewer saw - but not many.

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Mauser
(Minsk, Belarus)


Mauser is a militant enaction of Heiner Müller's 1970 play of the same name, which addresses a paradox of dissent and collectivity. The audience enters the space to find themselves milling about nervously on stage with their fellow audience, whilst officials roam around enacting a mock registration process. There follows an oddly choreographed text segment, which combines menacingly spoken sections from Müller's play and rigid, military movement. Finally a symbolic massacre of the audience takes placethrough the medium of balloons.

White Night Melbourne, and 'the corporation as artist'

My article about White Night, an event in Melbourne modelled on Paris's Nuit Blanche which itself takes its name after Saint Petersburg's White Nights festival, was published over at Spook Magazine.

http://www.spookmagazine.com/finally-corporation-artist/

The article makes an argument for these city-festivals concealing their true objectives - raising capital and branding the city, and appearing as 'arts festivals' to the detriment of art and art dialogue. This is inevitably an unpopular argument in Australia, where the distinctions between public and private are seldom visible - making it a perfect melting-pot for new forms of creative capital. The Audi Artcar is a sad example.

Staging a Dialogue's Collapse: Artist Orginisations International

First, a disclaimer, or perhaps a statement. It's now been three weeks since Artist Organisatons International, over which time your correspondent has found himself more than usually stranded, and unable to publish anything. The cause: the feeling of... well, dread, that the event inspired, together with a frustrating combination of self-reflection, a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between different positions (not at all in a healthy way) and an overpowering dose of pessimism. No-one can deny this was a difficult event at a difficult time.

Writing under such circumstances is also difficult, and this might indeed be my worst writing. Reaching a firm conclusion is impossible - and has resulted in several different attempts over the past three weeks to fill this yawning void (shared by most audience, judging by the various explosive groans and mutterings around me at different moments).

One such feeble attempt can be found below. I do not deny that I have failed to meet the task of critic in this event, and for that, I blame the extraordinarily high stakes, as I perceive them. This sense of dread is overpowering and nauseating. My decision to publish an incomplete argument should not give the idea that I think these things are unimportant.

Artists Organisations International may prove to be a landmark moment - possibly for the wrong reasons. The decision to publish is because of this. I don't pretend to give a definitive or privileged account here - rather, a selective one, divided into some key concerns. There are some which are urgent, and which Artist's Organisations International may represent. As to the significance or validity of the event itself, I will leave that to others to discuss (at length, no doubt).

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PRELUDE: ARTISTS KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DISCUSS

Everything is lost.

That was my feeling walking out of HAU on the first dramatic night of Artist Organisations International, a Ted-Talks style 3-day art forum curated by Johanna Warsza, Florian Malzacher and Jonas Staal. 3 hours of exhaustive, chest-puffed dissent, in the form of staged contests - so much futile expenditure of energy, and only a particular variety of nothing to show for it.

Art is an elusive feeling, thought I. It's an energy. It's non-tangible, and indirect. Perhaps as consequence, its agents - artists themselves - are elusive creatures, traditionally not prone to explanation or other causal processes associated with the outside world. Rarely do they talk about what they really mean. Art is symbolic, after all.  It's a code. It operates among that which cannot be spoken in words.

As a result, art says one thing and means another. I wasn't the only one left fairly bewildered by the, sometimes furious, but always tense, dispute. Over what, exactly? Was it simply a fight for dominance? Was it supposed to be some kind of metaphor? For what?

Sadly - my conclusions that night as I left HAU were quite dark. But then, maybe it was the time.

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STAGED COMBAT #1: FASCISM'S SEEDS