Taneční aktuality - Kiosk Festival

My writing about Kiosk Festival over at Czech Dance News:

https://www.tanecniaktuality.cz/en/reports/kiosk-festival-stuck-in-the-mud-at-humanitys-frontier

Thanks for the editing support!

Kiosk Festival Epilogue: 'Before and After'

 

Before every show comes a sense of nervous anticipation. The murmur of the audience dips with the house lights, a hush settles in, making a hollow in the room. Suddenly the faint sound of breathing is amplified, along with the slight friction of one surface rubbing against its neighbour, trying to find a good fit. Perhaps there is a creak from a floorboard backstage, as an actor slightly shifts their weight. Perhaps she was already prepared, and the creak comes from some mysterious, magical source - as unknown as the beginning of the universe.

So it was, perhaps, before the birth of humanity - supposedly the greatest show on earth. Did it ever really happen? Like any really good show, the time seems to have flown by. The reviews are in, and it's a mixed bag. There's plenty to celebrate, but at times, particularly towards the end, the cast an crew somehow seemed a bit lost. Was it supposed to go like this? Wasn't there a different script written for us? It seems, at some point, as though it became a bit difficult to focus on the narrative.

Over four days, the puddles under the overpass adjacent to STANICA Cultural Centre offered a backdrop to dramatic spectacle both humane and inhumane. We watched robots, humans, machines, screens, nothing, and each other, contesting the narrrative, each with their own claim to centrism. Day 4 added to this with Dead in the Pool (reviewed here back in May) and Exergonic Odyssey, an installation from collaborators Zebastian Méndez Marín, Lucia Kašiarová, Juraj Poliak, and Andrej Boháč, a vast underground playground of gags. The show fitted in perfectly with the often-playful approach to a serious theme.

 

From Milo Juráni's installation White Man and his Plan (to Save the World)

 Photo: Natália Zajačiková

Were the locals of Žilina impressed? It's hard to see how the theme of "After Human" can connect with the lives of Slovakia's third-largest city - it seems place of continuity of tradition, if nothing else. But the interruption of the festival to daily rhythms may yet prove meaningful. Bringing discourses such as posthumanism, non-human agency, robotic theatre, and the Anthropocene outside elitist spheres of academia and the Art World may meet some discomfort at first, and yet these are themes that are currently under acceleration, with the mainstream catching up on them only after it's too late. Kiosk 15, then, offered a unique opportunity to democratise these strands into meaningful stories, and placing them into a concrete a social context. Created partly as a response to the misanthropy and self-hate that characterises Russia's most recent invasion of Ukraine, it stands as a meaningful, playful response to one of the darker lines of current times, fusing this with well-covered ground in the relationships between humans, technology, and environment.

 

Photo: Natália Zajačiková

Are performing arts the right mechanism to play with this theme? One one level, the inescapable humanism of the stage leaves no space for pure technological spectacle, necessarily re-inscribing the human into the sphere of existence that is, after all, largely becoming all its own making. On the other hand, theatre's own transience and immateriality make it an inappropriate metaphor for capturing the permanent effects of change - as though history is washed away with the curtain's close, as though tragedy ends with the exit of the audience. Where contemporary art is invested in the creation of objects and their proof, performance refers repetitively to our ephemeral and impermanent nature - "lights on" for the creation of life, "lights off" for its end.

Kiosk Day 3: Fragments, Humans + Machines

It turns out that as well as being a functioning train station, cafe, and stage, STANICA Cultural Centre also converts into a handy club. So after quite a lot of rain and some great spinning from DJ Laura Plis, it was hard to pick myself out of my flooded tent, complete with improvised fly and sticks as pegs, and switch on to the offerings of Day 3. No regrets. However, I confess that the shows of Day 3 are seen through something of a haze, not all of it from the fog-machines on stage.

C R ASH 

The first show of the day plunges us immediately back into darkness, offering glimpses and snapshots, elusive and half-lit traces. Smoke further obscures our view, and the top- and side- lit performers (Jazmína Piktorová and Tereza Kmotorková) propose a range of gestures and tableaus, perhaps hinting at fragments of a relationship (or several relationships) through time.  The scattered soundtrack (Jakub Mudrák) further splinters the stage into a ever-dividing room of pieces and half-pieces, performers perhaps struggling against a fading memory. Eventually, the movement (co-ordination by Daniel Raček) is drawn out into a type of crime scene, or a dependent relationship trying to struggle through snow, and the soundtrack dissolves into the pure noise of a blizzard.

C R ASH is an interesting experiment in the stagecraft atmospherics from Bratislava-based director Martin Hodoň, created together with the performers Kmotoroková and Piktorova. The movement is very much through emotional terrain, perhaps one or a series of relationships, as the description states, running the gamut of "love, pretense, defiance, illusion, violence, abandonment, forgiveness" and incorporating "family, partnership, and friendship" (so: most relationships then). There is a desperation about the work, as though it is urgently trying to show us something, which sits together with its visual focus, and creates a stage that - whilst seeming relatively defined - is also exceptionally busy with emotionality. It's a story mainly told through lighting, with a star of the show undoubtedly Lukáš Kubičina's lighting design, which jumps and slides through elusive illusions and shadows, pools and floods.

Photo: Banskej Bystrice, Marcela Záchenská

Such relational stage work relies heavily on the emotional quality of its connections and distances, and a sense of precision and control over the tools of the stage. For me, C R ASH doesn't quite nail it's collision of form and content. It doesn't quite control the emotional runaway train. But it comes close at times. To be fair, it's probably a show better suited to a late-night time, and the capacity of STANICA's S1 studio probably limits the intensity that can be achieved in realising the performance. But with such an abstract point of focus, the show really lives or dies on complete commitment and 100% execution - without this, it falls flat. There is an interesting conversation about whether this type of theatre should even exist - whether such a goal of precision and aesthetic aspiration is worthwhile, or whether it removes some of the wondrous and all-too-human ambiguities of stage. Nevertheless, C R ASH is far from an untidy 35 minutes in the theatre.

Kiosk Day 2: Pranks, Objects, and the Failure of AI

Staring down at my almost-incomprehensible notes, muddied by the rain that inconveniently intervened the day before, you can see the chaos of festival-time. The blurs of the smudged grey lead blend with watermarks to create a beautiful diorama of activity. 

This is an accurate representation of Day 2, which presented a chaotic array of colours and shapes, occasionally punctuated by discernable segments of text. The following is only a representation of a few of them - even of those I saw, it would be too many to write about. 

LIVING ROOM

"Sometimes I think culture is just moving things around".

This comment is attributed to a worker from STANICA Cultural Centre - a festival hub for Kiosk - while moving a table around as he set up for a performance one day. It seems an apt metaphor in some ways. The object, the structure, play a central role in defining the theatricality of a situation, including its sources of power.

STANICA is also the location of Living Room, a work of object theatre from artist Lukáš Karásek that, as the title suggests, is primarily occupied with animating furniture. Indeed, there is a lot of 'tinkering' involved in this work, that follows the journey of a closet and set of drawers through time, space, and the limitless universe of animation in performance. Our cupboard-hero, sitting on the head of the solo performer and with handles forming a comically-blank expression, encounters various frustrations and travails as they attempt to undertake various tasks inside the logic of the staged world - a sort of magical, playful, literally living, room.

Technically, it is fantastic to witness, and Lukáš Karásek's relentless control is among the best I've seen for this type of theatre. There is always something magical in witnessing this type of art - as Karásek creates and dispels various illusions, the audience can fill itself with a childlike wonder. Beginning in the closet, Karásek spends a good deal of stage time simply trying to escape, finally pushing himself against the set of drawers, which then becomes a type of anthropomorphic face. This transformation from the invisible closet to humanoid draws begins the playful journey, comic for a type of reverse-frustrationism, where objects become animated precisely through their frustration with the behaviour of other objects. The different stages of the journey (dramaturgy: Viktor Černický) are marked by the pulling of a light-switch, which the performer sometimes amusingly cannot reach, depending on the constellation in which he finds himself in at the time.

Photo: David Konečný

The journey culminates in a fascinating epilogue, in which marbles are accidentally scattered on the stage in an act of infinite chaos. The final phase elevates Living Room out of a simple play, and into a discussion about human imagination and its limits. It's a traditional theme, but lovingly told, and a useful reminder of the stage conventions that feed so much of human self-conception through the stage.

PRO(S)THETIC DIALOGUES

If I generally don't like artworks that address AI, it's because it works with an annoying version of 'the unknown'. I've seen otherwise normal artists, when faced with the theme of AI, suddenly become drunk on power and weaponise it as a limitless source of ideological force. Yet AI has limits, sometimes extreme ones - something that Big Tech often refuses to acknowledge, and which are not popular to discuss. Such is the human investment on technological solutions today, that warnings, critiques, and even obvious points are simply refused, in favour of a view of AI that is "inspirational" "boundless", and therefore "hopeful" in a bleak context. We need the technology to work - to imagine otherwise is fast becoming unthinkable.

Kiosk Day 1: Lifelines and the Body, Barriers

 

The more you work with stage, the more you understand that far from an empty space, it's full of barriers -  not only Brecht's famous "4th wall", the dividing line between performer and audience. There is also the invisible barriers that exist without us knowing: financial, demographic, of time, of location, of systems. You could even say (and Artaud, for example, might) that every act of theatre is an act of violence: an attempt to organise systems, resources, and processes to flow towards a single, finely-directed point.

Because of this, often life gets in the way of theatre. For example, when you have no resources, no access to the stage, when you can't reach a show for some reason.

So it was that I arrived at Kiosk Festival later than expected, beset by train delays and some mild confusion of ticketing, both magnified by my own insistence on being social and wandering around the city. To make matters worse, I have forgotten both my tent pegs and my waterproof fly, meaning Saturday's rain is looming ominously, and giving me an opportunity to experiment with using sticks for tent pegs. I'm sure that will hold up.

Day 1 of Kiosk saw me catch only one show - the dance work SARX, performed in Žilina's New Synagogue,  an actual reconstructed synagogue that is converted into a festival hub for the duration of the festival.

SARX

The title of SARX, a new work from Czech artist and choreographer Martin Talaga, has both ancient Greek and biblical connotations. The christian bible sees it as a site of punishment, referring to the fallible human form of the body (as opposed to the immaculate essence of 'god') and a source of some significant discussions in theology. But it is the ancient Greek definition that Talaga draws on in this work - first offered by Stoic philosopher Posidonius, and which sees 'sarx' as, in Talaga's terms, "the tangible, graspable, and disassemblable body". 

The work itself opens with an absence of the body: a low rumble  of a soundtrack, and the soft glow of a green light, illuminating a architectural, jungle jim-like structure centre-stage (set design Dušan Prekop, Matej Kos) - sort of looking like a bunch of painter's easels stacked together, with mirrors instead of canvases. As the dancers enter, the lights switches to red - a colour of both the body and of imminent threat - and the soundtrack (Filip Mišek) evolves into a more choral-inspired, reverent backdrop. The dancers, naked from the waist up and with blood-red, distressed short jeans (costumes: Vojtěch Bašta), base themselves in stillness and organise into an array, briefly breaking out into movement. The formations progress through various phases, becoming at times frogs twitching in an organised series, at time more bird-like. The structure itself is barely interacted with in this first phase: only later are the mirrors removed and played with by the dancers, bouncing the light around the room, as the soundtrack becomes a circling, scattering pattern of scrapes, a little like an amplified scamper of a spider or mouse. The ending culminates into a rapturous ascension - pointing (perhaps sarcastically) to the ascension of humanity out of the supposed torment of material existence.

Photo: Magdalena 'Majfi' Fiala

Kiosk Festival Slovakia Preview: the "After" and the "New"

 

It's hard to make new stuff.

First - audiences just fundamentally don't like it. If you are a strategic artist (or increasingly, "content-creator" or similar) then you can take something old and dress it as new, bypassing the discomfort of the unfamiliar. But making something truly new involves opening dramaturgical pathways of the human brain which did not previously exist. Like a journey to an unfamiliar place, it begins with a feeling of trepidation and a sort of premature exhaustion. It is fundamentally an uncomfortable psychological experience for both author and audience. It requires patience, bravery, and skill from both - and even then, sometimes it just doesn't happen, the combination is not quite right - there was either not enough control, or too much, for example.

Writing criticism, and wanting also to produce something new through this (a 'new discourse', or a new reality through discourse), inevitably leads you to new circumstances of writing. You observe after a while that most structures of cultural production discourage (even actively suppress) 'new' stage work. This seems the case especially with programs that are openly labelled as supporting new work - where the possibility of radicalism ironcally motivates an enthusiastic conservatism in new writing. Such structures invite the reproduction of the status quo, because, as cultural theorists from Adorno to Benjamin to Frantz Fanon to Brecht exclaim, this is where the power lies. Change is fundamentally difficult: the audience prefers the smoothness of the stream to the interruption of the hesitation. This remains true of audiences especially today, a period with myriad lures towards conventional viewing, and where each new Netflix release is rigorously evaluated for its narrative streamlining and emotional manipulation.

Yesterday's Potatoes made new: a photo from the train of a revived baked potato from last night's dinner party (with special thanks to Tetiana Krekhno)

Žilina ("Je-li-na"), Slovakia's 3rd-largest city, is not completely new to me: I visited in May, on the invitation of a friend. As I walked around, I immediately recognised telltale signs of depression that were a constant of my upbringing in a small town in Australia, and can be found in most places in Europe outside the bigger cities. Unemployment, xenophobia, and general lack of investment combine into a sometimes deadly cocktail of stuff, bringing a weird "hushed" cultural consensus, which can only be broken through intricate knowledge of local codes and norms (or the creation of a carnivalesque situation in which they can be completely turned on their head).

Of course, these are the naive observations of an outsider. And if I am looking forward to anything in this year's Kiosk Festival in Žilina in the next days, it's to interrupt my own perspective - not only of performance art, but of its host city. Kiosk is now in it's 15th Festival, having begun in 2008, is independent in structure, and claims to be a meeting-place for artists as well as actively involved in the presentation of works. A mix of dance and theatre, with some installation as well, it promises to be an interesting week of camping, hanging out, and seeing performance.

Goodbye to FAKI Festival: 8 years straight out of hell

This year was my final year at FAKI Festival, ending 8 years of visits to Zagreb.

FAKI is a self-organised and mostly artist-led festival that invites performing artists each year to perform and live in the former pharmaceutical factor Medika. Medika has a notorious reputation among Zagrebians - people seem to have had either their first overdose, witnessed something crazy, or had their first sexual experience there, sometimes all at the same time. Each year in the last week of May, the usual carousel of drugs and punk is invaded by a delicate community of international performing artists, who sit (sometimes uncomfortably) beside the squalour and splendour of the place.

To have this situation as a supermassive site of critical writing for 8 years might seem absurd, but in a context of increasing institutionalisation of theatre, where the stage is controlled by profit motives or political-cultural power, FAKI sits as a bright community-building project and a unique site of resistance. It has some strange features: this year, for example, was the 25th FAKI (meaning I was around for approximately 1/3 of its life). This makes it an oddly long-running festival, rivaling some much better-resourced counterparts and outlasting many.

In 2018 proclaiming the objectives of the festival as"world domination" 

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yepzEB7oSNo)

Bringing critical writing to this often informal space has its difficulties - some might even say today it would be impossible among the minefield of sensitivity, as I would not be able to make the errors I have made. Yet this problem is itself an indicator of a current crisis of performing arts, building the bridge from a protected space of cultural expression to a public (increasingly more like a 'mainstream') is increasingly difficult as the gulf between them becomes wider and wider. As protected spaces are built and funded, they (arguably) lose touch with more general conditions, and few stages today can say they are without elitism, racism, classism, or sexism of some kind, nor that they can conduct the act of translation necessary to bring these contradictions to a wider negotiation. FAKI has been an important place for me to navigate an un-navigable territory, and to an extent to attempt to document and publicise work that would otherwise leave little formal trace.

Occasionally these works have been outrageously brilliant, and the circumstances of the festival have brought out magnitude in works that never had a right to achieve such lofty heights. From the moment I began writing at the festival, community has been at the heart of each word as it has been with each gesture of the stage, an implicit support that fed the fire, not of wanting to define the art, but of wanting to connect it with the habit of thought - to share in the communal resources of discourse, and to insert it into a wider situation. It should also be noted that many have been burned, and scarce financial resources create continual conditions of unacknowledged labour. Reading through my some 100 reviews over the last 8 years, it's obvious to me that the results have also been some of my best critical writing - as I took the view that I would use myself as a type of tool for investigating performance in this specific situation.

Leading the festival in 2021 through an impossible period, where the choice was made to host a festival in a situation of otherwise absence and epic losses for the performing arts, was a unique privilege, as well as a huge burden to bear. I now know more about COVID-19 protocols entering and leaving Croatia than I would have ever imagined, as well as testing centres, emergency alternatives, and convivial shortcuts. Nevertheless, I will always claim this as an important gesture, building on the digital 'rescue mission' of Dina Karadžić and Vedran Gligo of FAKI 23 in 2020, that accepted risks which much better-funded festivals decided were not important enough. FAKI 24 - a relatively noncontagious platform that equally protected public health and the traditions, practices, and cultures of performing arts - will always be something that I look back on with great pride.

The reluctance with which I leave the festival is mixed with a large dose of hope for its future - with a confident community built around it, dependable if not substantial funding, and helpful support structures to build upon. The festival existed before me, and will of course exist after. May FAKI continue to build on its unique contingency and move from strength to strength - I will be watching with love and curiosity!

GREATEST HITS: SELECTED CRITICISM FROM FAKI FESTIVAL 2015-2022

Malik Nashad Sharpe AKA Marikiscrycrycry lifting the roof with his vulnerable, resilient celebration of Blackness (2016)

Sura Herzberg finishing her performance with a line of cocaine on stage (?!) (2018)
 

Blackism drawing on real-life incidents from their residency to attack the audiences for its microaggressions and embedded racism (2017)
 

Rosa Palasciano creating a pure, intimate moment in - honestly - a pretty disgusting toilet (2015)
 

Elisa Arteta answering audience questions and turning a simple etude into a mass participatory dance (2015)

Charly and Eriel Santagado building a choreographic language around therapy (2021, with Dijana Karanović and Liam Rees)
 

Collective B returning to Faki Festival with the triumphant Wonderful World (2018)

Sifiso Seleme dangling from the ceiling in a work of art-activism about domestic labour (2017)
 

Marje Hirvonen  and Anni Taskula announcing their Finnish FEST, drawing out a weirdly erotic-subversive reaction (2019, with Monika Jašinskaitė)

Tereza Sikorová and Tomáš Moravanský taking a clown to the shores of Lake Jarun and creating an existential questioning of everything (2022)
 

Andrea Lagos Neumann falling, over and over again (2018)

Dror Liebermann dressed as Spider-man climbing buildings in Zagreb's main city square (2016)

Syed Taufik Riaz acknowledging the courtyard of Medika with smoke and rose petals over the course of 1 hour (2016)
 

Evie Demitriou rhythmically hitting her body screaming "The more I dance, the more I get" (2016)
 

Chan Sze-Wei and Gabi Serani's live participatory-disciplinary slapping of the audience (2016)
 

and... me... "smashing the koala" (2021)

There were many more. Thank you to everyone that made this happen.

 --
Note: Current publication is done with the understanding that colleagues and communities from Kharkiv, Mariupol, Kyiv, Lutsk, and Lviv among others in Ukraine are currently under attack in an attempt to erase Ukrainian culture and identity. No artist should be forced to rehearse how to pick up the gun.