Baltic Circle Theatre Festival in Arterritory

My write-up of the Baltic Circle Theatre festival, which was 13th-17th of November in Helsinki, is up over at Arterritory and details a few of the shows that I saw. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to capture a lot of the program for logistical reasons, leaving me with a slightly skewed version of events.

Still, it was interesting to revisit the festival after 10 years and notice some significant changes.

All the Sex I Ever Had

It's possible that sex and I aren't best mates. I kind of view the subject with some awkwardness, a degree of suspicion, and occasional periods of unbridled enthusiasm. That doesn't make me weird - after all, attitudes and feelings about sex don't just come from within ourselves, but from our environment, and sex appeared in the environment of my childhood years in rural Australia mostly as a weapon in the fight for dominance in schools, sporting arenas, and other competitive situations. Forgive me if I remain more than a little scarred from that.

So to this day I appreciate when someone can give honest information about the topic, because for me just about the only source outside the family was the book Where Did I Come From? (surely a bible of sorts for many kids of rural Australia) which at least explains basic heterosexual biology and potential outcomes when bodies are arranged in certain formations. Another manual was John Marsden's Secret Men's Business, which explains things that are otherwise only referred to in the schoolyard through innuendo or hinted at in certain TV sitcoms. In both cases, what I appreciated was the directness, which, though it seems simple, may actually be difficult or embarrassing to achieve.

All the Sex I Ever Had is 6 seniors sitting at a desk and talking directly to the audience about their sex histories. Beginning at the birth of the eldest (for us in the Espoon kaupunginteatteri in Espoo, Helsinki, it was 1932), the history is chronologically recited as experiences happen. After the eldest, the other 5 slowly enter the picture, often following the first in their (fairly diverse) life experiences. Our actors (selected from the local population, I assume with diversity, excitement, and dramatic weight of their narratives in mind) masturbate, fall in love, break up, marry, and just fuck their way through kitchen tables, hotel rooms, nightclubs, family holidays, and boats. Every 10 years, the readers are interrupted by a dance-break with the cheesiest music that can be found in that period, which also plays gently in the background (as kind of a 'smoother') as they relate their stories.

Photo: Singapore Arts Festival performance of All the Sex I Ever Had

From the opening pledge which the audience takes not to reveal any of the information outside the theatre, there's immediately a sense of stripping back a lot of these covers, and attempting to directly address the audience in a type of communication that isn't possible outside the theatre. This creates some interesting moments, and when the mics are given to the audience, and it's our turn to answer the questions (which range from the innocent 'did anyone ever play doctors and nurses' to the more real-world 'did anyone sleep with a married person?').

Baltic Circle, Helsinki

My small northern tour continues with Baltic Circle, an international theatre festival I haven't visited for 10 years. Much seems to have changed - the intimate, inner-city feeling of the festival has been replaced with a hub of the post-industrial circus venue Cirko, and much of the venues have moved to the edges of the city, presumably in response to a combination of arts funding cuts and gentrification.

I'm pretty tired, to be honest, from writing, but I'll try to force out of a couple of reviews in the next few days.

Невесомость

Sometimes I just enjoy shows without really knowing why. Partly it's a matter of choice. But there's also definitely an element of mystery to it. I must get some kind of strange pleasure from non-conformity in audiences. I have a small bug inside me that jumps around the trap of consensus, looking for a way out.

The last point is, I think, a feature of any worthwhile critic. Whilst you should be able to understand how a text is likely to be read by the dominant cultural forces, you should also understand the possibilities that alternate readings might bring. I don't mean just subject positions, or identities, (although those are important, too) but radical readings that open up new possibilities for art - sometimes even totally against the intention of the artist. I'm an advocate for this because I think it is one of the key things that criticism can contribute to artistic discourse, and because it makes criticism an imaginative and generative autonomous practice - not just a reflector of what is already clear to everyone anyway.

At about the 10 minute mark, I began to really enjoy Невесомость (meaning 'weightlessness' in Russian), a collaboration between author Ruslan Stepanov, sound designer Artjom Astrov and lighting designer Oliver Kulpsoo. It would be difficult for me to pinpoint why. This might be a valid question from a neighbouring audience member, who sees only a set of repetitive etudes accompanied by occasional adjustments - fidgets almost - from the designers.

Photo: Lee Kelomees

Indeed, Stepanov states in his description that the show is about 'boredom'. From the beginning our attention span is played with, offering only a simple set of what could be warm-up exercises (descended from the artist's ballet training, I'm reliably told), a loop of which lasts for perhaps 6 minutes before being repeated. These exercises are undertaken by Stepanov himself, underneath a 'stadium roof' of fluorescent lights, which intrude everywhere from the top down. Occasionally, Astrov interjects with sound, such as a low repetitive moan, or enters the stage to make sounds at a standing microphone. At one point, he exits the side door and plays music from behind like a disgruntled teen.

Workshop

Back in Tallinn again for the mini-festival Draamamaa, which showcases internationally-exportable Estonian work to international curators. I won't have much of a function here, as such events tend towards being anti-critical and are more about networking and connections (although in a recent article in Sirp, it's also claimed to be about külalislahkus, or hospitality). Nevertheless, perhaps criticism can still be some kind of conduit to... something... operating underneath, or alongside, such functions. Maybe this is even where it's the most important.

It's worth mentioning that my visit occors in the midst of the death of Estonia's contemporary theatre stalwart, the group NO99. Rocked by the sexual misconduct of its artistic director towards a younger actress, the group last Wednesday announced that it would not continue working. Such is the interest in theatre in Estonia that 9 out of the top 10 most-read articles of the national newspaper were dedicated to the ending of NO99. It ends 12 years of often seismic experimentation, with the group and its resources to splinter across different areas or Estonian and international cultural life. I'm happy to be catching the end of it.

Workshop

Anyone who has ever turned to YouTube in search of the answer to a household question will understand me well when I say: instructional videos are a new type of performance. No sooner has one innocently clicked around for how to change the back tyre on your 3-speed bike, or how to install a Bosch 3X-GT8 washing machine, than one is inevitably drowned in the dulcet tones of some well-meaning US Southerner or Northern-UK fellow (it always seems to be one of these two, although possibly that's just the things that I search for) offering his banal and pathetic - but so helpful! - step-by-step on the subject. To say it's a new genre of performance is probably an understatement: it's a cult of DIY that inserts performance into our most vulnerable situations, the questions we need to know but were always afraid to ask. Previously the realm of the mother or father, now this role is played by Bob from Kentucky, providing a safety net for our insecurities with his inoffensive and calming procedures.

It's a rich site of performance, and one milked earnestly by the performers of Workshop (actually 3 members/affiliates of NO99) - Mart Kangro, Juhan Ulfsak and Eero Epner in this situational performance. The audience enters the space and sits at a giant communal bench, covered in work-lamps. Eero Epner begins to meekly address us with the first of many instructions - a brief history of lamps in Estonian art, with the dialectical point: to look out for 'what is not in the image'. He is soon interrupted by Kangro, who offers a short lesson in how to correctly saw a piece of wood. Then it's Ulfsak's turn, and he instructs us in how to find the end of a roll of cellotape, and how to poke the key out of a doorlock from the other side. And so on, and so on, at times veering on the pointless, comic, or ridiculous (What do you do if there is no armrest on your chair? Position it close to the table, and lean your arm on it. Of course).

Photo: Veiko Tubin

These are all relatively mundane tasks. But slowly, as the dramaturgy unfolds, there's a kind of accumulation that creeps up - sometimes, instructions are connected to one another, sometimes they refer back to an earlier instruction, sometimes even repeating the instruction of another as though it was the first time. Death intervenes - and we are offered instructions on correct treatment of a body (played with some physical discomfort by Epner) and Ancient Egypt's development of a special sheet to protect the eyes from being pecked out.

Panel Discussion: Latvian Theatre Showcase

In early November I was invited to participate in the annual showcase for Latvian Theatre. The press conference included experts from Slovakia, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania and... me. See below.

Video: Spelmenu Nackts
Featuring: Featuring Miriam Kičiňová (SK), Richard Pettifer (AUS/DE), Rūta Mažeikienė (LIT), Tatiana Zelmanova (BEL) and Evgeniya Shermeneva (LAT)

Latvian Theatre Showcase Press Conference from Richard Pettifer on Vimeo.

Lenin's Last Christmas Party

The last days of Vladmir Lenin are kind of secret in-joke. The father of the revolution, he is known (but not exactly proven, because there is no much misinformation and mythology surrounding the event) to have become so sick that his speech became largely delusional, and he had to undergo various bodily transformations that happen when one is sick to this extent. Of course, such mortal conditions are not fitting of a revolutionary leader, around which there is necessarily a massive ideological apparatus legitimising leader and political system equally. Therefore, his last days are somewhat mysterious, as various accounts seek to hint at a reality of a man in decline, whilst not being able - because of protocol - to directly say what happened.

So the actual cause of death and details of his last days are a site of endless speculation for conspiracy theorists, as if they might hold the key to the legitimacy of that which preceded them. Monumentalised in a mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square, his body now stands (or rather, lies) as a paradoxical reminder of the immortality of the idea opposed to the inevitable mortality of its subjects. Though the person himself died, the ideas lived on! Albeit in an, *ahem*, occasionally slightly different form.

Lenin's Last Christmas Party is a fascinating attempt by Latvian philosopher and first-time director Uldis Tīrons to capture the resonance of those last days in the situation of theatre. Based on documentary evidence from the accounts of his nurses, the play abstractly recreates the Christmas occurring roughly one month before his death. Lenin is waited on by his doctor, nurses, and family, who tolerate his incomprehensible ramblings and mischievous jokes. The source material is first-hand accounts from nurses waiting on Lenin, some of whom are also characters in the show.

Tīrons adopts a pastiche style to recount the story, somewhat reminiscent of Robert Wilson with its colour palette,  disconnection of gesture from meaning, white-face, and reliance on a kind of stylised dreamscape. The set (Rūdolfs Baltiņš, Dace Sloka) is a kind of cube or prison on stage, with holes the actors sometimes peer, poke, or speak through. The costumes (Dace Sloka), likewise, are about as far from period as you might imagine, rather offering structural compliments to the gestures of actors. Lines are delivered with a tight, musical inflection, as if to suggest an underlying stress beneath. Discussing the paradoxes of the moment, the doctor (Kaspars Znotiņš) says "The church promises us immortality, then philosophers try to convince us that to live is dying. How can we not give in to fatalism?"

Photo: Jānis Deinats, Jaunā Rīgas teātra arhīvs.

A blithering, befuddled, trickster Lenin (Vilis Daudziņš, in a much-lauded performance) appears from a cupboard at the back, and from this point on he and his health are the central focus. Undergoing confusing medical treatment, he plays jokes on the over-earnest nurses using a false foot. As the play moves towards the Christmas party itself, things become even more absurd (the announcement of its beginning is translated as "And now, children, let's fucking sing songs and recite poems"). The characters don their animal masks and begin to celebrate in earnest song-and-dance routines performed for the audience in formation (the chorus of one of these is 'Coca Rosa' which is possibly a type of ecstasy). The climax occurs when Lenin takes the mask off one of the actors to reveal... Lenin himself.

The Soul Boot Sale

Over to Riga now, where I am spending 5 days at the annual Latvian Theatre Showcase: nominally a selection of the year's best shows gathered into a short period.

As usual, I go in blind to much of the subtleties of the context of Latvian Theatre, with its heavy historical and contemporary Russian influence (or perhaps German if you go back far enough).

I'm being hosted here by Latvia's Theatre Labour Association, who will also nominate awards for some of the works, and run a press conference where I will discuss the works viewed together with other experts from Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Russia.

Sometimes we're being required to piece together information from different sources - synopsis, google-translated text, so on. Nevertheless, there's something about great theatre that doesn't need translation, so I will be relying on that universality here to pull me through. (As usual, actually).

The Soul Boot Sale

The way that history is passed down through generations as collective memory is discussed extensively by theorists in psychology, sociology, geopolitics and other fields. The former USSR and Eastern Bloc states can appear to outsiders to be largely obsessed by it - continually reworking their national identities in response to newly-found (and simply re-evoked) historical disputes large and small. Germany is perhaps the king of this, forever occupied with its previous atrocities, the country is occasionally unable to properly conceive of its current ones. Trauma is constantly relived and reworked to suit new political ends.

It's a site of significant interpersonal and social politics, and a rich - if perhaps overused - site for theatre as well. This collaboration of young artists led by director Inga Tropa make full use of its potential in The Soul Boot Sale (Dvēseļu utenis), essentially the story of a sharehouse of internationals trading blows over their historical differences.

Given this slightly cliché premise, The Soul Boot Sale really shouldn't be good theatre. But it really is. The conceit of the sharehouse is present in the form of 6 freestanding refrigerators (set: Pamela Butāne), each containing an actor invisible to the audience, which open and shut as the protagonists talk - immediately creating a feeling of teenage drama, complete with regular slamming of doors in disgust. The bickering over minor details begins almost from the outset ("do I ever complain when you forget to wash up your stupid saucepans?") as the housemates discuss Dollar's farewell party to happen later in the evening. The rapid-fire script (Justīne Kļava) begins in this gear and doesn't let up for the entire play, even as the scenes evolve.

Photo: Janis Amolins

Following this Beckettian opening, the plot gets even more futile, moving through a series of modules, as the set transforms in response to new states. The TV screens on top of the fridges (a features of many sharehouses) come on to reveal the actors inside the fridge - showing first their mouths, then the eye, and finally entire bodies. The effect is a sextych of portraits interacting with each other - eerily synchorinised as well (I actually thought it was pre-recorded) as the actors trade racial slurs and jibes about housekeeping, smoke and set off firecrackers inside their tiny rooms, and generally trade blows in violent, energised contest.

Later

Later, the penultimate performance of Tallinn's NU Performance Festival, is something of a mystery to me. Developed by Mexican/German artist Julia Rodriguez, the performance is a contemplative, choreographed meditation on objecthood. Rodriguez begins with objects on a white stage, clothed only in a long t-shirt, sitting in the corner, with legs spread in the best impersonation of  Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du monde*. The performer eyes the audience as they enter and take their seats, a plodding hotel-lobby soundtrack accompanying, that will be present throughout the performance.

It's an affronting opening, in a way, if nothing else for the diversity of objects without obvious relationship to one another. There's a particular violence to that, and it's one Rodriguez exploits throughout as she proceeds through the performance. The main question for me is the theme, which is only loosely described in the program notes and which does not obviously reveal itself throughout - rather existing as a puzzle of objects which the audience may piece together into a meaningful whole. Or not.

Digital Technology

Following my apparent 'writing from anywhere but Berlin' policy, I'm back in Estonia as a somewhat incognito visitor to the NU Performance Festival Tallinn - a (relatively) small biennial of performance happening in some of Tallinn's theatres over the week.

I am coming in at Day 5 of the festival, with many works and events already having taken place. The afternoon panel, loosely organised around the theme of 'Audiencology', featured a variety of interesting guests with fields spanning architecture, contemporary art, and practice and theory of performance. The discussion was a little unweildly, but propositions from Maarin Mürk regarding Markus Miessen's The Nightmare of Participation and Clare Bishop's elaboration on relational aesthetics, as well as Sille Pihlak's reflections on community participation in architecture, were particular highlights.

Digital Technology

I admit it: I thought I wouldn't like Digital Technology. Something about Swedish/German artist Mårten Spångberg's approach grated with my sense of responsibility as so much of contemporary art can do - making a provocation from a position of perceived neutrality. This position is best articulated in the afternoon panel discussion where Spångberg, who dominated the conversation at the expense of his female colleagues, went so far as to suggest that that we should be able to co-exist in performance in a relatively passive way: "As long as it doesn't ask for anything, I can be with it forever".

Photo: Kristo Sild

It's a kind of relaxed statement that's unlikely to get this punter too excited in an age of apathy in Europe - where a new generation is born into privileges it can never hope to understand, and doesn't bother to seek answers about. And indeed, looking around at the blank faces of the audience in Digital Technology, you might think the artist has achieved exactly what he set out to do, for better or worse.

Baltic tour (Tallinn-Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki)

I find myself unexpectedly on the road again, back to the Baltics - a region I knew little about before September's Draama Festival in Tartu.

This time, it's a more extensive exploration, beginning in Tallinn with the biannual NU Performance Festival, followed by a trip to Riga for Latvia's annual theatre showcase for a week. Then it's back to Tallinn for the Estonian Theatre showcase (Amusingly called Draamamaa), before heading up to warm and sunny Helsinki for Baltic Circle - I festival I have not visited since 2009.

It's a bit of an impromptu tour and I don't pretend to be an expert on the theatre of the respective countries - here the process of writing criticism becomes very much a learning experience. Still, I hope to share that process through writing, and hopefully see some great theatre from this interesting region. `Stay tuned.

Note: I am grateful to the Goethe Institute Riga for their generous support, and to various friends old and new who make this possible through their generosity.

Estonian History + Theatre = Disaster

The following article appears in Estonian cultural magazine Sirp.

Estonian readers can view it here in their beautiful language: http://www.sirp.ee/s1-artiklid/teater/eesti-ajalugu-teater-having/

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Estonian History + Theatre = Disaster

an outsider view of DRAAMA 2018

I went into the 2018 DRAAMA festival as an idiot, knowing almost nothing about Estonian history, theatre, people, and culture. The experience was (therefore) full of surprises: the higher-than-expected cost of living, the local politeness, a 10pm alcohol-purchasing limit… at every street corner of Tartu I was met with something I didn’t expect. These surprises could be very good, such as experiencing a sauna on the Emajõgi, or hearing for the first time the quiet beauty of the sung Estonian language. They could also be, well, not-so-positive. And the Estonia 100 theatre series ‘Tale of the Century’ – a set of 13 works, each addressing one decade of the Estonian Republic’s history – threw up plenty of the latter. Commissioned 5 years ago, these projects made up the bulk of the English-language programme of this year’s DRAAMA, and provided many discussion points for members of the Baltic Forum (such as myself) who came from the Baltics and beyond to get a sense of Estonian theatre practice.

The decision to programme shows expressly to celebrate the founding of Estonian Independence must itself be called into question. Many artists seemed to grapple with their new function as advocates of Estonian identity, creating works that were, at best, confused by the brief, and at worst flirted with something close to nationalism. All the while, aesthetic experimentation seemed to take a seat in the second row. The latest work from NO99, NO34 Revolution, successfully continued (or re-started) the company’s experiments with movement and innovative dramaturgies, taking the transformative period of the 1910s as a counterpoint to our cynical perspective on revolution today. The opera Estonian History: A Nation Born of Shock (Estonian National Opera and Kanuti Gildi SAAL) managed to develop some new aesthetic proposals from the clash of its form and the extensive historical research (from the 13-plus members of the research team). The end result was an unexpected experiment that produced its own type of formal shock, largely through the use of speech, comedy, and silence. 

 NO99's NO34 Revolution. Photo: Tiit Ojasoo

Several shows in the programme seemed to understand the magnitude of historical representation to mean the production of large-scale works. While notable for their ambition, shows such as BB at Night (Von Krahl Theatre and Tartu New Theatre) and Before Us, the Deluge (NUKU and Vaba Lava) seemed to overcompensate, generating huge, impressive, production-heavy shows which might be more suited to national celebrations in Russia or China. In both cases, the shows themselves achieved their goals – creating types of ‘total theatre’ in the form of multi-faceted and comprehensive theatre texts. However, they left little in the way of openness, and, on both counts, almost no room for interpretation. In the worst cases, the brief of representing a whole decade of a nation brought with it a kind of anti-experimental attitude, such as in The Mistress of the Raven’s Stone (Endla Theatre and Kuressaare City Theatre) – again an entirely successful show, it just seemed to be written in the late 19^th century, even as it addressed the period of the 1950s.

The exception to this aesthetic trend is Journeys: Promised Land (Soltumatu Tantsu Lava) – a small show in production, but one that sticks out for the experimental nature of its approach. Rather than attempt to deal with the entire 1920s, performer Kadri Noormets addresses a specific as a metaphor for the whole: an Estonian migration event to Brazil. The performance doesn’t trade in massive production values, dealing instead in exchange and negotiation with the audience: its currency is nothing less than your own agency as spectator. In this, the performance goes into a brave new world, departing from the historical roots of the chosen frame, and reflecting on migration as a particular mode of human (Estonian) experience. Noormets channels the improvisational energy necessary to migrating – encountering, as it does, the unknown – into a kind of live decision-making and joint exploration with the audience. The result could be seen to generalise the source event, but it instead works to magnify its material through a process of abstraction, bringing us closer to its subject through radical human connection than a historical analysis ever could.

Notaufnahme - Hospitali

Going to Vierte Welt (which means '4th World' in German) is really like stepping into another dimension - it's a place where theatre absolutely should not exist. For one, there are these 4 giant pillars in the centre of the room, presumably needed to support the goliathic apartment building in which the theatre is housed, and guaranteed to block the sightlines of even the most flexible giraffe. The room has the feeling of an office-block, with major light and sound bleed coming from the raucous, inescapable Kotbusser Tor outside.

It's not a coincidence that I've never seen anything to really blow me away in Vierte Welt. It's that kind of space, too connected with reality to offer the transformative, escapist experience people (myself included) have come to expect from theatre in the West, based in the illusions offered by the Ancient Greeks.

The design of Notaufnahme - Hospitali (primavera*maas) does just about as good a job as any show I've seen at dealing thoroughly with the space. The action - centred around a Berlin artist from Tanzania with mental illness - is supplemented by pre-recorded screens which approximate the action (rather like looking at a poorly lip-synced animation, but very effective). We follow the central character through his struggles with the German medical system, as in a maze of bureaucracy - mirrored by the scrawled wallpaper depicting a city skyline - and a fragmented, confused story emerges of the difficulties in addressing mental illness.

DRAAMA Festival Day 7: The Future According to Russians Living in Estonia, and Language

The last day of the festival saw a public critical discussion about the shows we saw in the festival which, being in English, was mainly focused on those shows which were part of the 100 Years of Estonia centenary celebrations. The conversation remained typically polite but was, at times, fiercely contested. Particular attention was paid to national identity, with several responses indicating a kind of 'trap of representation' occurring within the works that were part of the celebrations, which were forced to engage national identity even though their work may sit uncomfortably in this frame. The projects were all initiated 5 years ago (apparently pairing smaller and larger companies for collaboration via a random ballot system - which seems far too democratic to me), and over this period the conversation around nation states has also shifted considerably, to the point where the celebrations of the Estonian republic are occurring in a Europe which increasingly heads down a nationalist, and in some cases, extreme nationalist path.

From colleagues in Lithuania and Latvia, it was expressed that Estonian theatre and culture more generally seems to have thoroughly processed its atrocious past, and be well on the way to developing new futures: "Your suffering is already passed" as Lithuanian dramaturg and critic Monika Jasinskaite stated. This is relative of course - for me it was interesting that national identity was deemed an important project at all, especially one worthy of such huge public investment in culture. The strange nature of some of the collaborations was commented on by a colleague from Nigeria, Michael Anyawu, who proposed that they were quite strange and imbalanced. The absence of Baltic German histories was noted by another colleague, London-based academic Mischa Twitchin, who suggested there was a total erasure of history between 1914 and 1939. The general popular appeal was noted by many critics as a shortcoming of the festival, in that it meant a forgoing of experimentation, especially in light of the 100 years of Estonian Independence celebrations. A country is only as independent as its artists, perhaps.

Two performances to write about today (a little later than I should be writing, but hey, it takes me a while to get home from Estonia). The first, To Come/Not to Come. Estonia in 100 Years from Estonia's Tallinn-based Russian Theatre, is a gamified choose your own adventure into the future. The second, Journeys. Songs of Terra Mariana is a juxtaposition of operatic monologue and choreography eximining the period of the 1920s, and forms a (very) loose pairing with Kadri Noormets work on the opening day of the festival, Journeys. Promised Land.

To Come/Not to Come. Estonia in 100 Years

Estonia has a quite large Ethnic Russian population - about 25% of people speak Russian as a first language and 66% speak the language. In recent history, this has not been a recipe for a very stable relationship with Russia, whose territorial incursions on the basis of ethnicity have included South Ossatia, Crimea, and, more recently and continuing, the Donetsk region of Ukraine (although the state still claims to be hands-off on that one, it made the same statements about Crimea... but was at very least an extremely enthusiastic participant). Estonia seems different, with its ethnic Russian population forming a respected and valuable contribution to cultural life, even if Russian language is declining in popularity among the rest of the country.

The Russian Theatre's contribution to the festival takes a fairly unique voting system (unfortunately all in Russian) to control the narrative, which can be voted on live through visiting a website. Audience vote their preferred future, with the actors playing out that scenario for a future Estonia. The scenarios themselves are repetitive in format, beginning almost unanimously with a projected news broadcast (Viktor Marvin) from a futuristic TV host, who explains the situation that was the result of the vote. Then there's a dinner party, where different beverages are served and certain protocols and rituals take place. Then there's a celebration or event, which takes the form of musical spectacle.

 Photo: Gabriela Liivamägi

The scenarios follow familiar themes with regard to speculations about the future: environmental crisis (where humans attach themselves to plants in space suits to keep their oxygen), technological utopian (where we develop an artificial sun to make the temperature always comfortable), and multiculturalism (where the news broadcaster switches languages between sentences). One scenario has humans with both sets of genitals. It's not supposed to be particularly imaginative, just following different threads of today - and the important thing is that these scenarios have a connection with discourses of the present day.

DRAAMA Festival Day 6: Pensioner Exploitation and Cyborgs

The sun rises on the last day of DRAAMA. Some 40 shows have been staged over the past week, and by the end of tonight your correspondent will have seen a mere 16, and written on a (mere?) 13. That's only about a quarter of the program, and as I stated in the beginning, it's almost all the stuff that is translated or performed in English. These are inevitably the bigger works - such that my perception of the festival is inevitably, frustratingly skewed, towards the larger, bigger budget works that make up the 'Tale of the Century' 100 years celebrations of the Estonian republic.

All of which to say - there are other shows here - which would warrant my attention, perhaps even more than those I actually had the chance to see. Nevertheless, I am not stupid enough to criticise the festival for this - there are a lot of text-based works here, and making a single live translation of a theatre work takes a huge amount of labour, which has been done with precision and professionalism by dramaturgs and staff of the festival here. There has been many moments when I've been sitting in an audience with the headphones on, marveling at a twist in the language, or a measured piece of delivery from a reader. The synchronicity required, the delicacy, and the complicity are an uncelebrated part of theatre art.

Over the course of the week I have grown to love Tartu, and that was never clearer than my walk to yesterday's conference venue. Taking a slightly roundabout route (which left me pretty late actually) I found myself wandering through a park and stumbling across the ruins of Tartu Cathedral, perched on the hilltop of Toomemägi Park. With no time to inspect, I was forced just to glimpse briefly in surprise - an apt metaphor for my time here, which has been only the most superficial sample of Tartuian and Estonian existence.

The purpose of the International Conference on Baltic Drama was an exchange of ideas between Baltic countries, and this was divided into themes of National Identity, Comedy, and Drama Export, each presented by a panel of three speakers. Not all of the categories were followed thoroughly, although the Drama Export produced a lively debate over whether exporting of theatre should even be an objective at all - inevitably resulting in some staunch defense of theatre's old export systems of the playwright, the translation, and the tour. My (naive) feeling is that the context of the Baltic region and potential partnerships calls for new methods, strategies and show, but, like much that is old, the systems of commodification can always be re-invoked at the drop of a hat. People are always mighty impressed when your play is read overseas, after all.

Along with the conference, I saw 2 shows on day 6 - the strangely-written Million Dollar View and the impressive Beatrice. Both sat in a strange place for me, achieving what they set out to do, but with that thing leaving me somehow unsatisfied, like Tartu's indecisive September weather.

Million Dollar View

A common form of thievery is to get old people to sign away their properties without full consent. It's a brutal practice, taking advantage of a vulnerable person for personal profit, and it goes largely undocumented. Mostly, it's the families of the person themselves, who effectively seize property from dying 'loved ones' under the guise of acting in their best interests. Sometimes, though, it's an outsider, normally posing as an authority or figure of trust, who deludes the person into signing something they would never willingly sign. This doesn't just happen with property and it's not only criminal - old people's non-consensual spending represents an important part of the Australian economy, for example, where in particular gambling machines lead to financial tragedy in many Australian families.

Million Dollar View is a social drama by Paavo Piik that approaches this subject directly, but never quite explores the possible tragedy of the situation. Uncle Ants (Egon Nuter) is an aging pensioner in a poorly-maintained property in the city centre. His family come to visit him, but only to 'check on his health' - meaning, they are waiting for him to die. The play begins with the news that they have achieved permission to develop the site of the land from the city council, joyous to the family, but irrelevant to Ants, who has no plans to move anywhere. Appearing to take sympathy with him, Pilleriin (Saara Nüganen), the girlfriend of the son of the family Erki (Märt Pius), Pilleriin, returns to do him some favours, and to "take care of him a little". Only too willing to have beautiful, young help around, Ants shares stories of his time as a ballet teacher, and promotes his newly-found physical capabilities. The two grow close over the coming weeks, and when Pilleriin asks Ants to sign a document, he doesn't think twice about it. Meanwhile, the ghost of his wife comes back to haunt Ants, who may or may not be becoming demented.

Photo: Siim Vahur

The family have a meeting with the local city Councillor, who informs them that they would be free to sell the property - if only it were in their uncle's name. Checking the records, they find that the property has been gifted to someone. Furious, they approach Pilleriin, and slowly discover the betrayal. Visited by the ghost of his dead brother, Ants undergoes a dementia test, brought by the family to prove that he was unfit to sign. He passes, but soon learns of the true character of Pilleriin when another pensioner turns up to live in his new home.

DRAAMA Festival Day 5: Satire! and Angst

It's Day 5, and by now the festival is starting to drag its way towards the inevitable finish line. The delegates of the Baltic Forum have settled into their daily routines, and we go to the theatre with a very 'once more unto the breach, dear friends' sort of attitude. Not that it's a chore, exactly, just that watching show after show is kind of exhausting. Being in a theatre audience is also a labour - and nothing makes you more conscious of this than watching 4-5 hours of theatre each day. That's a third of waking hours.

Tomorrow is Conference Day, in which delegates will present papers to each other and engage in critical discussion. So, your correspondent will limit himself (really this time) to a few comments about the two shows he caught today. One of these, The Swallows of Fatherland, was a biting satire with its false teeth removed, and the other To Touch the Moon, a blending of drama and choreography that felt like a soap opera on stage - some severely restricted comments on the latter below.

The Swallows of Fatherland

Oh, the pains of the 'country town'. All who grew up in rural areas know it well - the gossip, the xenophobia, the horrible, horrible restrictions placed on each other. The painful consensus, tragically miscalculated at times, painfully real at others, sometimes simply naively brilliant. It's a rich source of satire, not only because it is so laughable to an elitist, cultured, urban perspective to which theatre normally panders, but because it shows the perspective of the accusers for what it really is - not necessarily more or less legitimate.

The Swallows of Fatherland has a perfect satirical premise (although it's referred to as farce in the publicity material) - the drama club of a rural Estonian town stage a play about the War of Independence, to celebrate the 100 year anniversary. There's just one 'problem': they're all women! (Cue laughter). Some colleagues stayed away based on this premise, but I bravely soldiered on, and as I stepped into the rural-town-hall surrounds of Tartu's Student Club, I expected a connection to the most cringe-worthy aspects of my rural Australian upbringing.

Photo:Slim Vahur

In this sense, I was not disappointed. The play, written by Estonian favourite Andrus Kivirähk, is a sharp observation of Estonian small-town life. Starting with a few miserable, plonky, piano chords, aged member of the Northern Lights Drama club, Anu (devilish Ester Pajusoo), wanders onto stage, sitting down to knit. In comes Merike (Marta Laan), in a fit of rage, and launches into a detailed diatribe about how the toilet is broken again, and when will it be truly fixed, and if that bloody mayor would only do his job rather than lining his pockets in Greece etc. All lines of argument which are painfully familiar. As Sveta (Maria Klenskaja) enters, the discussion turns to the correct or incorrect attire for saunas (which Estonians are quite interested in, I'm told), and who is the correct sort of actor to play the lead in Madam Butterfly. The scene is set for the group's writer/director Pilvi (Ülle Kaljuste) to enter and proclaim that she has written their new play about the war of independence, and they won't be able to play in it - to much protests ("I could play a young man! I've even played a rabbit, and they're much smaller"). It becomes a game of trying to get the village men to participate, and when Toivo (Taavi Teplenkov) finally comes to fix the toilet, he's the first victim to this desperate circle of biddies.

DRAAMA Festival Day 4: Apartment Building Floods

Ah, that familiar feeling when you are behind on the writing. As shows accumulate, waiting to be written about, time marches on, and new shows inevitably begin. And so on, and so on, proceeding - as Kafka might say - into deepest darkness.

Nevertheless, here I sit on Day 4, with just a lazy single show to write about today, the enchanting Before Us, The Deluge. The extended chaos of yesterday's Hippie Revolution was just too much for me - I appreciated the intent to innovate on a level of dramaturgical confusion, putting as many fight scenes, 70s songs, and unexplained events into a single 2-hour period as possible, but my brain just wasn't up to it. Maybe I am not cut out to be a flower child, after all.

Meanwhile, our hosts in Tartu tick along. The city is slowly unraveling itself to me - from its initial appearance as a lump of concrete in the form of H&M, Subway, and other shopping extravaganzas that plague the centre of Europe's cities, I have been quietly discovering some of the more secret facets - not without the help of friends and strangers alike. The wooden houses are a particular feature - originally built to house workers, today they stand as relatively energy-inefficient relics of Estonia's past (though possibly also pointing to the future, today Estonia is apparently the largest exporter of wooden houses in the EU).

Before Us, The Deluge

As well as his neoliberalising and imperialist military instincts, Ronald Regan was also known for having a comedic disposition, especially in relation to the Societ Union. One joke he tells features in Before Us, The Deluge. After some introductory notes that these are jokes told by people within the Soviet Union, who "have a great sense of humour but are very cynical about their systems", Regan relates that a man is putting down a deposit for a car, and being told to return for it in 10 years. "Morning, or afternoon?" The man asks. "What difference does it make?" the seller replies. The man says "Well, the plumber is coming in the afternoon".

"Ha. Ha. Ha." comes the slow, sarcastic reply from Anti Kobin, one third of the protagonists of Before Us, The Deluge - a sickly-sweet and darkly comic look at that microcosm of Soviet life: the apartment building. The stories centre around a particular apartment block, in Õismäe, a suburb of Tallinn, where tenants live out their tiny dramas on a never-changing landscape of malfunctioning amenities, apartment shifting, and tragicomedic incidents (incidentally, if you ever wanted an example of the astonishing urban planning projects of the Soviet Union, an image search of Õismäe is a good place to start). Here, artists trade apartments for a better view but no hot water, young girls imagine Swan lake is being sung to them by the radiator, and punk bands rehearse to the tune of noise complaints.

Photo: Siim Vahur

Before Us, The Deluge holds a mirror up to these events, using the apartment building as a metaphor for Estonian life in the 1980s. The stories of three protagonists are related in all their tragicomic detail. Anti Kobin begins, telling of his artist parents and their incompatibilities with Soviet life, trying to move their grand piano without the help of a maintenance lift, rendered faulty through its miscommunication of Russian and Finnish parts, and the fact that the Russian parts "weren't made for elevators anyway". Liivika Hanstin takes over with her narrative of trying to become a ballerina, having seen a production of Swan Lake on a Finnish TV station. Finally, Mihkel Tikerpalu provides an account of his ascent to punk status, joining the others in putting safety pins in their ears and rehearsing in their apartments, much to the chagrin of neighbours.

DRAAMA Festival Day 3: Back to where it all began

Day 3 was a heavy day. For one thing, the clouds hang over Tartu as though at any moment they might revolt from their summer codes of conduct and disturb the peace. There's a kind of hesitant energy, as well, with the university semester having begun but not yet in the full swing. Tartu is most famous as a university town - along with Saint Petersburg and Berlin, once forming part of a coalition of highest-quality learning institutions. Today, it's still one of the few in the Baltic universities to offer English-language degrees (no Russian, apparently).

Day 3 saw two heavy shows, the first - The Mistress of the Raven's Stone - is a new play that is so classical it made me think it was written in the 1850s, about events in 1950s Estonia. The second, dealing with the 1960s, is an opera called Estonian History: A Nation born of Shock,  and tells the story of Estonia from its beginnings, apparently with the meteor/meteorite Kaali in about 1500 BC. Both shows are part of the 'Tale of the Century' series, which make up a majority of the English language programming. Apologies to the honest work from the artists behind the late-night Cabaret Siberia - a dark cabaret that stylistically throws back to the traditions of the form. My Estonian language is just not good enough yet.

The Mistress of the Raven's Stone

'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' is an idiom that applies in certain, mainly conservative theatre contexts. Why stray far from the dependable structures of Ibsen and Chekhov? They were the masters of the craft, the unassailable geniuses - right? We should just be making theatre that works, for god's sake, not all of this experimentation!

Not only is such a sentiment totally against the ethos of this writing platform, including the principles for theatre art as an entire practice, and the entire reason for making theatre in the first place - it's also bound to kill the art form itself, which is hindered, and not helped, by lack of experimentation. Thereby, as a general rule, I am unlikely to support something which engages in only storytelling, and makes no attempt to advance the craft.

Still, I can appreciate when something is 'good', in the way that I don't like - I don't like, let's say diamonds, but I am totally willing to put principle aside for a moment, and admire a well-constructed one. And The Mistress of the Raven's Stone is a good play. Everything in it works - from the drawing room set, to the typecasting, to the moments of phantasm. The plot, centred around 1950s Estonia and the testing occupation of the Soviet Union, functions perfectly, characters coming in to advance the plot, making sudden revelations that totally change the previous assumptions, burying historical detail and nostalgia flawlessly inside speech. There are turning points in the appropriate places, a cliffhanger introduction of a new character at the end of the fist act (no less than a Bogeyman!) and a quasi-political discussion about social obligations under an oppressive regime. All the ingredients are there, tastefully arranged.

Foto: Siim Vahur

Ilse (Lauli Otsar) dreams of the times before the Soviet Union, where you could get proper toothpaste, material for sewing wedding dresses, and dish recipes. Their collective farm has fallen on hard times, with not enough labourers left to grow potatoes. It's left to her fiancée Heino (Markus Habakukk) to remind her of the benefits of the Soviet project, including hydroelectric plants, trolly-buses, and apartments - "These kind of memories only get in the way". Enter the local lieutenant Eduard (Märt Avandi) to check on them, explaining during a man-off with Heino that "Sitting by the stove and criticising the authorities is easy". As he leaves, we first experience the wondrous powers of the Ravenstone, a mysterious artifact left to Ilse by her father (deported by Eduard, for which he is deeply sorry) which apparently has the power to commit small supernatural acts, such as preventing Eduard from finding the door to exit. Aunt Berta (Piret Rauk) comes in to offer practical wisdom ("Sometimes it's good that there are some things in the world we can't change") and the local mayor Harald (Ago Anderson) drops in to ask Ilse to paint a portrait of Stalin, and to borrow the Ravenstone to save the harvest. Act 1 closes with the sudden arrival of a wounded Bogeyman (Lauri Kink, doing that role where you wait the entire first act for your big reveal, then take a break for interval), providing the cliffhanger moment spurring the second act.

DRAAMA Festival Day 2: Brecht and Brecht

Some down-time for your correspondent today, as the two performances were so heavy on information that I could not - even with very well-executed live translation - glean a good reading of either. Both were undoubtedly 'good' performances, I was either too exhausted from the day before, or the performances themselves simply required too much of a mental leap for me. I will do my best to sketch out the directions below.

Meanwhile, the festival ticks on. It seems I've join a tight crew: each year, a delegation from Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia visit the national festival of one of the three countries. This year, it's Estonia's turn, so I'm accompanied by 2 national delegations from the institutions of their respective countries. For many, it's not their first time doing this - in one case, a representative has been coming here for 12 of the 18 years of the festival's existence.

All of which means I am very much an outsider, which of course makes me feel a lot more comfortable. Perfect dialectics there.

Tuesday was a day of physical journey if not mental, containing tours to the edge of Tartu and then, remarkably, to the north of the country by train.

Sirk's Estonia

The first journey of the day took us out to Estonia's impressive National Museum, built on the grounds of the former Soviet bombing airfield called Raadi. Keen readers will notice that I mentioned this in the first post - it was one place that I planned to visit when I was here. (The other was a far-fetched aspiration to visit Lahemaa National Park, which, although I didn't quite get there yesterday, I came surprisingly close in the second performance). So, I suppose, thanks to DRAAMA festival for organising my Estonian bucket list.

Sirk's Estonia begins with a site-specific piece, the foyer of the museum used to host a group of actors (Labyrinth Theatre Group G9) walking slowly towards the doorway, which slowly fills with smoke. As they walk, they strip off clothes, eventually disappearing into the smoke. I didn't make much of this - especially since the entire second half is a proscenium-arch Brechtian performance with apparently no connection to the opening. Further, some logistics were required to subsequently equip the (many) audience members requiring audio translation, check everyone's tickets, and physically relocate them to the theatre in the museum's basement. Some of these issues are undoubtedly connected with the transfer of the piece - which originally existed in the Estonian National Library in Tallinn, and contained a slightly different prefix.
 
The staging of the play is a Brechtian comedy  by VAT Theatre, which presents an alternative history of Estonia in the 1930s. The play is set in a present-day celebration of Estonian director (fictional) Ernst Meel, which has initiated a play written by a famous playwright (Ago Soots). However, a young upstart writer (Meelis Pödersoo) proposes an alternative play: one centred on the life of fascist revolutionary leader Artur Sirks (also played by Pödersoo) and his attempts to overthrow the Estonian government with the right-wing Vaps movement.

Photo: Siim Vahur

It's an approach that lets the writers (Aare Toikka and Mihkel Seeder) talk about 1930s Estonia, while's still reflecting from today's perspective. The Brechtian trimmings offer an access point to history that's educational, as does the comedic style. There are some nice lines, dripping with so much sarcasm that they could have come from the mouth of Brecht ("It's not a comedy, it's a historical drama" or "The Great Show is the foundation of Estonian national culture") as well as some which probably wouldn't ("Are there any female characters?"). The addition of the Woman's Choir of the National Library of Estonia, who assemble at the back of the theatre and sing responses to the action (sometimes in sweet harmony, and sometimes atonally), completes this play's credentials as the most Brechtian thing that has ever Brechted. 

DRAAMA Festival, Day 1: Revolution and Complicity

It's Day 1 of the festival, and already some of the awkwardness of the initiation is fading away. Having arrived at 2am at the hostel, only to find that some of my co-passengers on the late bus from Riga were also attending the conference, I woke up a mess - but happily anticipating the beginnings of the festival in earnest that evening.

This is the 18th rendition of DRAAMA festival. As far as I can tell, it's always had an institutional bend - mostly, it seems, the year's best Estonian works come to Tartu to be seen by whoever is interested in seeing famous work. This, from my experience, is not quite as cynical as it sounds - versions of this exist across Europe and abroad, and there are regional programmers who just don't have time or resources to visit Tallinn every second Tuesday to see the latest hot show, so having everything in one place can be very helpful. Audiences who might simply not have time or geographic location to see the shows they want to see can find them all in the one place.

In this case, the 100th year anniversary of the Republic of Estonia brings with it mixed blessings. On one hand, a solid English-language program consists of 13 shows, either performed in English or in translation. On the other hand, all of the shows, with I think a single exception, have solid institutional backing - so don't expect work with too much independence.

Two outstanding performances from Day 1 followed the afternoon welcoming formalities, and each of them were significant in their own way. In the small theatre of Tartu's giant Theatre Vanemuine, NO99's NO34 Revolution is a tightly choreographed work contemplating the impossibility of revolution and its consequences. Performed in the Harbour Theatre in Tartu's riverfront, Kadri Noormets's Journeys. Promised Land is either an incredible experiment in complicity, or I have totally lost any objectivity in a haze of 'audience flirtation': I'll let you decide. Will from Tartu New Theatre was unfortunately cancelled, and thus marks the only casualty today.

NO34 Revolution

Tallinn-based NO99 opens the festival, tasked with responding to Estonia in the 1910s. Their choice to focus on the concept of revolution makes sense, this being a time for significant revolution in the Russian Empire, as well as the Estonian War of Independence and a generally significant period of upheaval in the region.

We enter the theatre to a unison of gongs, played by the actors wearing red robes. Slowly, this gives way to a choreographed spinning - a kind of giddy spin that Maria in the Sound of Music would be proud of. Its a fairly astonishing act of discipline and stamina, the cast keep their formation for a good 10 minutes of stage time, accompanied by subtle changes in the harpsichord soundtrack (Jacob Juhkam).

Photo: Tiit Ojasoo

The spinning of the opening functions in multiple ways. Firstly, it makes a nice joke about Revolution - this having a double meaning in English, of 'circle' - mocking our assumption that there are some politics involved. 'You thought we meant overthrowing government? Really, we just meant to twirl'. That may seem like a bad joke, but it goes directly to the contention of NO34 Revolution - the superfluity and impossibility of revolution as a concept today. In this context, the gesture of spinning becomes both an accusation and an expression of disappointment.

DRAAMA Theatre Festival, Tartu, Estonia

Confession: Estonian theatre is not an area I'm particularly well-read in. Second confession: Nor is Estonia generally, in fact. Nor any of the Baltic countries, which seem to have their own EU, sandwiched between Russia, Poland, and Scandinavia. What I know of the country I know from friends, or the occasional traveler's tales. Sometimes, small oddities appear in relation to the activities of the Soviet Union - for example, the significant bomber base at Raadi or the secret submarine research facility in Lahemaa National Park (not quite akin to the military dolphin training facility in Simferepol, but at least a little curious).

One of the festival venues, 'Sisevete Saatkond', is also Estonia's oldest riverboat (a century old, in fact).

Nevertheless, here I am in Tartu, Estonia's 'second city', preparing to spend the week writing about Estonian and Baltic theatre as part of the annual DRAAMA festival. Like many other second cities, Tartu has a reputation for being quietly superior to its bigger sister (the capital, Tallinn) with a huge University population (about 20% of the city) and a significant amount of government installations. Sure enough, Tartu is filled with cultural institutions, and with a population of only 100,000, walking around the city's monolithic structures, one feels there must be one for every 1000 citizens.

Faki Epilogue: The End of Medika

  

Medika is a space without end. It spans multiple time zones and currencies - it is total. Walk in any one direction and before long you will be back where you were. Its halls are stained with the memories of life and death, love and suffering, art and banality. It vibrates in a state of perpetual lift-off. It lies cold and still, awaiting its chance.

Outside the train window, the plains of Croatia give way to the mountains of Slovenia and then Austria, and the memory of Faki begins its unravel and fade into the distance. Or does it? It feels like this year was the first time my yearly visits to the festival began to accumulate and fold back into one another. Links were made to previous years, the images of the shows resurrected and superimposed onto new offerings, creating a 4th dimension of the stage, stretching back to the past and away into the future.

Day 6 was another implausible day to end an impossible festival. I will admit to having my doubts about our collective capacity to deliver an effective forum around physical theatre in the scheduled 'Critics Forum', but these were quashed by generous contributions from festival director Natko Jurdana, Belgrade critic Radmila Djurica, and even myself (managing not to say something stupid in public for once). The linchpin, though, was the artists, who showed a capacity to reflect on each others work and their own - reflections which demonstrated a refusal to be satisfied with mere expression. My doubts about present critical thinking were challenged by the figure of the self-critical artist, capable of building meaningful discourse around themselves that go beyond the pleasures and freedoms of art, and connect with considerations of context - seeing itself for what it is, and what it is not.

Faki Kronik Day 5 - Lift and Carry

It's that point of the festival, where meetings, meals, parties, art, and discussions have accumulated to the point of a blissful overload. The barrage of interesting encounters snowballs over the course of Faki - from smelling flowers in the botanical garden to meeting a human resources manager who hates her life in the courtyard of Medika - collecting into a feeling that's at once overwhelming and blissful. It's like you reach the stratosphere of conception and then slingshot straight out into outer space (with accompanying feelings of freedom).

Day 5 is the last real day of the festival, with only a special 'Critic's Forum' to come today on Day 6. In this event, we will try to put the theme of Physical Theatre into a critical context, bringing together some threads that are lying around into a tightly-woven towel of critical conception. But as I try to get my head around the pronunciation of Croatian surnames and cases (in the program I am amusingly referred to as Richarda Pettifera, which apparently creates all kinds of headaches for the Google algorithm), I am thinking again about the role of criticism in such situations.

Criticism feels like a lost cause at the moment. Cultural norms have shifted in favour of the artist or author - the bearer of first-person voice - and away from the critic, traditionally a guardian of the 4th Estate. Defending this territory is actually more an act of perpetual revival, akin to bailing water after the floodgates have broken. Even understanding a little bit the problems of maintaining a sense of common public discourse (its whiteness, its patriarchy, its capacity for body-shaming, its erasure of certain histories, the list goes on) I openly and somewhat nostalgically advocate for critical discussion on (flawed) neutral platforms, without the personal and with a shared attempt to create empathy, cross boundaries, promote social advancement and so on. No platform is neutral, but some are more neutral than others.

The biggest attack on criticism comes from those who propose to support it. The protection of 'Free Speech' rarely refers to a public domain, and much more to instances where what is discussed is not convenient to their (visible or invisible) cause. That is never the point of criticism. If I write on work, I always do it with an explicit agenda of furthering public discourse and discussion, of introducing new ideas, conflicts, and challenges. It is much easier that we do not attempt to conceive artwork, because this may, heaven forbid, result in some shifts in cultural perceptions. The attack on critical thinking is motivated by a desire for are nothing to change.

My work today is to address the organised chaos of last night's Lift and Carry from NeverEndingCompany. The promised interview with Puzzle Pie(s)ces will have to wait for the train ride home tomorrow morning - among the accumulation, I have simply run out of time here.

Lift and Carry

Apocalypse is a dangerous idea. It's not that its false - the end of the world is undoubtedly a very real possibility in various ways. It's just that the concept holds massive fears for many, concerned with preserving the illusion of immortality in one way or another. This makes it open to manipulation and abuse by powerful interests and ideologies. Beginning with its conception in Christianity, apocalypse is evoked to ignore the more immediate and material suffering of others. Lately, this manifests as a difficult point of climate science - how to communicate the real and present dangers without sparking a slide into ecofascism or dystopian realities of white supremacy.


The end of the world is, of course, a reality. All things come to an end, like a good novel, or a festival. The way we conceive it is powerful, and various symbols have been created to attempt to illustrate and communicate  it - the subject of much religious art, for example. Lately, the media has picked it up as a recurring motif for human self-hate, that our capacity to destroy ourselves and our subsequent feelings of guilt make the best possible clickbait, a kind of obsessive existential doubt about human activity in general.

Lift and Carry's apocalypse event results in a short sweep and vacuum of the stage to the tune of one of Mahler's Chorus Mysticus. That's a comforting conception by any measure. There's a certain accountability to it - if you make mess, clean it up. And if you find that mundane, then please put on some music you like - something emotive. And at the end you can fire a glitter bomb as a special reward for your work.

What precedes this deliberately anti-climactic plot device is essentially 3 separate performances, staggered in their timing over the course of four hours, and with each adding 5 minutes to a single performance (so 5' at 18.00, 10' at 19.00, 15' at 20.00 and so on). New renditions or 'openings' repeat the previous material, adding new perspectives to the pre-existing performance. The 'final' piece is displayed in its full 20 minutes in the final rendition.

I say 'final' because, really, the piece functions as a complete whole over the course of 4 hours, and audience arriving for only the last opening will have a totally different experience to one who was there from the beginning (I believe the same was true in a previous, slightly different version developed in Stuttgart's Akadamie Schloss Solitude). This is, in a sense, a privileging of viewing positions, and creates some nice divisions between neighbours - some of whom may be seeing a moment for the first time, some for the fourth. It also broadens out the festival theme of 'physical theatre' into something like 'metaphysical theatre', relating to the arrangement or assemblage of objects in time and space.

Faki Kronik Day 4 - Diaries, Shoes, and Playful Light

I'm actually not into festivals, in the sense that I suspect these days they are mostly city-branding project which have taken the concept far away from the idea of anything festive. Faki is different. For one thing, this is its 22nd year - a long lifespan for a festival, and one which seems to exist as much as anything else due to its inevitability, i.e as a simple routine. 'Should we do another festival?' never seems to be a question, and hasn't been for 21 years. It's a bit like asking 'should I have a birthday this year?' - you will have one anyway, even if you're in denial about it.

As the festival carries on, a diversity of approaches to the festival theme of physical theatre is revealing itself in the curation of Nathko Jurdana. The kaleidoscope is mirrored in the responses to the performances themselves, many of which are open to multiple readings. Physical theatre thus becomes a rich site for discussion and interpretation, bringing alive the graffiti-soaked walls of the former pharmaceutical factory Medika with discussions on power, impulse, and desire.

Two shows to write on today - the playful performance experience Peep Diary and the earnest tragedy of Anne Frank as told in Hey Kitty. Both are exceptional approaches to the form, with different advantages. As we move into the last real day of the festival, with Sunday featuring only a panel discussion with myself and Belgrade-based critic Radmila Djurica and Jurdana, the accumulation of ideas, meetings, and expressions reaches breaking point, and in doing so forms a complete picture of the festival - a significant cultural event and a resounding success by any measure.

Peep Diary

It's a cynical audience at Faki. People here are beat-up and jaded, in the best possible way. It's a feeling that pervades the building, too, and it also infects audiences. I've seen the most naive, beautiful offers in the theatre fall flat on their face here, simply becuase they are met with the full force of Faki's powerful, demonstrative 'meh'.

There are definitely times when this quality is really great - it has its downside, however. So it was that a young child and I were (with a few exceptions) pretty much the only spectators to really take up the offer of Peep Diary, an immersive spectacle where the audience controls the light with their cellphone torch.

From this simple* but ingenious frame, a delightful spectacle blooms. The three performers (Alice Monti, Fabio Castello, and choreographer Elena Copelli) begin in crouched positions behind frames covered in bubble-wrap, chanting softly. After being offered instructions, the audience enters the space to find them. Soon, they emerge from their cocoons, and begin to play with the lights, the space, and each other.

Faki Kronik Day 3 - Wonderful World

There's nothing like having your brain blasted out by Croatian punk, that stuff goes into your ear and directly through the vital organs of your body. I think my pancreas is still vibrating from the night before - who knew a drummer and a strummer screaming incomprehensibly into the microphone could still be so liberating. I thought the days of rewiring your reality through simple excessive force were over - how wrong I was.

Today the former pharmaceutical company Medika is reveling in its post-thunderstorm state, the fires of nature having swept through the bricks, glass, and wood. Unfortunately, it didn't sweep away all of the remains, with one visitor making his profound statement of resistance in the form of excrement on the floor of one of the bathrooms. Of course, the body is necessarily involved in any meaningful struggle, but... still... hygiene is one of the gifts from the field of medicine to which even the staunchest supporter of revolution should adhere. Compromises (of certain kinds) must be made.

Once again I am blessed with just a single review today - Collective B's work-in-progress Wonderful World. Tomorrow should be just a little busier, with multiple shows to write on and 2 reviews to try and concoct. Fast turnarounds are a bit of pressure, but I also acknowledge that they are what makes the writing I do here a bit different, even if there are some irritating mistakes that I only find out about much later. There's some act of direct channeling going on, or something.

Wonderful World

One of the things that's special about theatre is its changeability. As a mirror of society, it can adapt itself to circumstance. This includes formal considerations, where the different practices of artists can be arranged and rearranged in ways that offer particular energies, and resonate with particular circumstances. Consider, for example, the Dadaist approach to the theatre, where forms clashed and mixed, often producing a particular type of violence in their formal clash acting as portent to the violence to come and just passed. (As opposed to, say, former Volksbühne Intendant Chris Dercon's vaguely-defined hybridisation, where artists from different fields come together in event-based formats to sell a diverse mix of aesthetic approaches, creating a kind of grey mess of visual and auditory stimuli. But more to come on this at a different time).

These days, a reading of the world according to violence is at once legitimate and not. Legitimate, in the sense that - despite the hockey-stick graphs of living standards in the African continent often used to justify development - there is plenty of evidence that the world has never been more violent. Illegitimate in the sense that, with this heightened violence, our mechanisms for sterilisation have become more pronounced. So today we have evolved to an extent that it is possible to live a life completely cleansed of human suffering, even if that suffering is literally on your doorstep (Medika's proximity to the Westin might be a relatively tame metaphor - the coexistence of slums and luxury apartments in Brazil or India more apt).

Artists have been operating at the frontier of these collisions of wealth and poverty for a long time. Lately, there have been signs of returning to forms of more direct contact with violence from artists, of which the field loosely termed 'art activism' is perhaps a tame example, but artists such as Petr Pavlensky, Eugene Ionesco, or pre-Adidas Marina Abramović  attempt to cause a confrontation with this largely sterilised violent reality. The current United States presidency, in cahoots with other political turns, seems to have, if anything, further accelerated this sterilisation, neatly diverting the expression of reality into more simulation and staged protest, forever playing catch-up to a perpetual state of crisis. 

Formal play might seem a relatively tame response to current goings on. My experience in the theatre suggests otherwise, and that as an approach to violence, it remains a key tool in rocking the established aesthetic order, creating a sense of shock or destabilisation that is directly humanising. When it's done well, and combined with ambiguous or multi-faceted potential readings (a hallmark of physical theatre), it can reach to our very primal understandings of western hegemony, and the violence that sustains it.

Wonderful World, developed on residency at Cultural Centre Attack in 2017 and performed by two actors (Sonia Borkowicz and Elsa Mourlam ) and three musicians (Tomas Novak, Christopher Haritzer, and Voland Szekely), begins with a hesitation. The actors collapse onto the stage with a loud crash from behind the audience, with one character dressed as a bimbo and one as a kind of toy soldier. Their movement is immediately stiff and wooden, and accompanied by breathy contributions from the on-stage orchestra (comprised of bass clarinet, violin and percussion), who occasionally interject with eruptions of sound.

The characters proceed with an acrobatic set of movements that doesn't ever  resolve, and adopts a stop-start rhythm, full of bursts and silence, and accompanied by the almost-playing of the orchestra. The two figures seems to pass each other by, never quite connecting, and occasionally addressing the audience directly with questioning stares. They spend a good percentage of the play's 40 minute duration on the floor, although there is a suspension of time occurring within the world. The unholy green lighting throughout offers penetrates the piece with a feeling of fear. There's a sense of urgency within the piece, attacking a direct yet unseen target, that is as menacing as it is unspecified.