AWAL / BEGINNING (tanzschreiber.de)

A trip out to Berlin's Indonesian Cultural Centre finished my year publishing for Tanzschreiber.de, with a look at Ruben Reiners and collaborators total work AWAL / BEGINNING.

https://tanzschreiber.de/en/a-phantasmagoric-gamelan-frenzy/

Die Steuer-Erklärung (tanzschreiber.de)

Facing my darkest fears of the German state, I bravely marched into Berlin-Basel based hannsjana's Die Steuer-Erklärung (which would translate to The Tax Declaration), the first show for Tanzschreiber.de that was all in German language.

While I speculate on its capacity to make real change to its chosen target, there can be no doubting the target itself. Maybe it should be surprising to me that I haven't seen a show about tax in Germany until now....

More after the jump.

https://tanzschreiber.de/en/die-steuer-erklaerung/

Dancing with Violence (tanzschreiber.de)

 A review of Min Yoon's Dancing with Violence as Hosek Contemporary:

 https://tanzschreiber.de/en/in-the-dark-dark-ship/

Contemporary Freedom and the New Crisis of Theatre Between Ideological Extremism and the 'Cancel Culture' Bratislava: paper

Back in May, I presented some reflections on 'Cancel Culture' within theatre at the festival Nova Drama, as part of the conference  "New Crisis of Theatre Between Ideological Extremism and the 'Cancel Culture'"

Richard Pettifer - "Cancel Culture and its Purifying Appropriations", Nova Drama Conference, Bratislava, May 2022 from Richard Pettifer on Vimeo.

Pepe Dayaw: a portrait performance (tanzschreiber.de)

 Over at Tanzschreiber again, my review of Pepe Dayaw: a portrait performance at Ballhaus Naunystraße.

https://tanzschreiber.de/en/floating-over-the-philippines/

Take me somewhere nice (tanzschreiber.de)

I was recently appointed as one of three critics for Berlin's only dedicated online dance criticism platform, Tanzschreiber.de.

I will be writing about dance in Berlin twice a month, in English with the occasional German translation.

My first article is about Christina Ciupke and Darko Dragičević’s Take me somewhere nice, a work that investigates the essence of travel.

Link is here: 

https://tanzschreiber.de/en/a-brief-chance-for-dwelling/

swallow me

There seems a glut of performance work revolving around 'nature' lately. With the coming of tangible, visible, material and consequential effects of climate change, art has made a strong pivot towards rethinking our relationship with nature - words like 'Anthropocene', 'decentering', and 'non-human agency' seem to litter the wasteland of cultural work in Berlin, risking either labouring a kind of obvious point, or being overused to the extent where they are almost meaningless. It can be that, some 50 years  after the initial evidence of climate change was presented and almost as many years since consensus of dangerous anthropogenic influence over climate was established in the scientific community, such works are attempting to explore a territory that can best be defined as 'too little, too late'.

swallow me is a solo performance firmly focused on contextualising a relationship with nature through the artist's self-empowerment journey. Josephine Haas begins on the stage of Hošek Contemporary (which is actually on a boat docked in Berlin's Mitte district) immersed in the sound of crashing waves on a shoreline - already presenting a nature that offers the threats and pleasures of envelopment and submission, as well as potential for defiance. The artist begins in almost fetal position, gently rocking and swaying, perhaps mimicking the boat, or a cot of their childhood. As the sound of water evolves into a trickle, the movement becomes jerky, and Haas appears pulled around the stage by invisible forces out of control, before then flowing into something more harmonic and later 'splashy'. 

Photo: Turlach O'Broin

The spell is somewhat broken as we descend into first-person testimony with the sudden interruption of Haas' story about a nosy hairdresser, who is full of worldly and unwelcome advice about how to deal with the burden of her plentiful hair ("It's like a history book"). There follows a karaoke version of 4 Non Blondes' classic What's Up, and another story about hair - this time Haas' father brushing it at 6 years old. At 7 years old we are taken (in a storytelling sense) into the swimming pool with Haas - a place of security, but inevitably punctuated by the artist's self-talk that sounds almost punishing ("Stop it! Get off!" or "I know!").

Kiosk Festival - Interview with Artistic Director, Michaela Pašteková

Michaela Pašteková heads Kiosk Festival in Žilina, Slovakia, together with Martin Krištof.

This interview was conducted on the seating bank of Mestská krytá plaváreň Žilina (Indoor Swimming Pool Žilina), apparently the first Olympic swimming pool of then-Czechoslovakia, approximately 30 minutes before the festival finishes. As we witnessed the final performance of the festival, the durational Dead in the Pool by Tereza Sikorová & Tomáš Moravanský (CZ), we reviewed the 4 days of the festival this year, what just happened, and the festival theme of ‘After Human’.

~

Richard Pettifer: How did the week go? How are you feeling?

Michaela Pašteková: Tired! And still deeply involved in the festival. I’m waiting for the time when I will be able to step out, and reflect. But the festival will be finished in 30 minutes. Then, I will see how I really feel.

So you’re inside the world of the festival still… is it a nice world to be in?

Yes. I’m doing this festival for the fifth time, it’s sometimes stressful but filled with different emotions. You see friends, there are a lot of hugs and kisses, then you have to make hard organisational things, then sometimes you are angry with your colleagues, and so on. So I leave with all sorts of emotions. Every year I say “this is my last year”, but on the last day I realise, this is the work that I love. Some years on the last show, I start crying with a mix of sadness and happiness. When I see how people are happy and they have fun, in the end, I say “ok, let’s do it again next year”.

  Michaela Pašteková. Photo: Marek Jančúch

I guess it’s very intense?

Actually we are working for the whole year, on different things – and July is very intense. The last years I learned that in the evenings I have to dance a little or have a drink. There has to be time to have some talks with artists and people around the festival, it’s really ok to be ‘one of them’ in the night. We really do everything from dramaturgy to production, buying food for technicians – we are not a hierarchical institution, when someone needs help, we do this or that. Because of that, it’s so intense. You have to be multitasking.

What’s the theme of the festival?

“After Human”

“After Human?”

We didn’t want to call it ‘Posthuman’. We didn’t want to work with this field of theory. The theme is in a process of coming to mind over the year – it begins when we are choosing the performance and pieces, looking to see if there is some connection between them or common topic. Sometimes, there are things that directly influence the theme of the festival – maybe 3 years ago, one of our buildings burned down, and it was one of the biggest dance platforms. It was a big disruption to our plans. So we switched the theme 2 months before the festival to ‘Burnout’ – it was a reference to this fire, and also physical or mental burnout. This After Human – it started following this year’s invasion by russia. Somehow there was a connection to this war – we saw the theme from another perspective. We didn’t want to make it post-apocalyptic (maybe it looked like that because of the weather during the festival!), but a certain pessimism was probably unavoidable – wouldn't the world actually be a better place without us? The theme was also inspired by the fact that some pieces and performances work with artificial intelligence or some non-human things, and start to eliminate the human. And we adapted also to these theatrical things, and we started to think, if theatre can exist without the human, when no-one is looking – and if something like performance can exist without human touch and contact. It’s not a new topic – but it’s always present in art and theatre in some way.

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.

Dead in the Pool

(Disclaimer: this performance was presented as part of Faki Festival, for which I was an Artistic Director)

"Where is the clown?"

I stood at the panorama of the famous Lake Jarun - the only lake for swimming in the city, and where I had never been in my 8 years visiting Zagreb - and scanned the different lifeguard-chairs. The approach had been fascinating, with the various desire lines and pathways through the surrounding bushes pointing to a often-repeated journey of Zagreb's luxury-loving population. Standing amid the beach-goers, looking for the central actor  of the performance Dead in the Pool - a clown intervention and 'indefinite cultural event' by Tereza Sikorová and Tomáš Moravanský - I was dwelling on the unique perspective, on the uniqueness of the situation: here I am, with people who possibly care only about the sun and the water, looking for an artwork without knowing the exact location, or even what I am exactly looking for. Finally, off in the distance, a black dot greeted me from the top of one of the chairs, and I trudged off in the direction of the clown.

Dead in the Pool is a durational (4-hour) performance in which a clown intervenes in a body of water - normally a swimming pool, this time adapted for Faki Festival to the shores of the lake. A creation of Czech former clown Sikorová and intermedia artist/dramaturg Moravanský, part of the Brno-based collective Institut Institut, the work offers a macabre underbelly to an otherwise mainstream human activity of chlorofied swimming. Previously staged in Brno at Lužánky City Swimming Pool, the performance creates a question mark amid an otherwise unquestionable situation. My own question "Where is the clown?" could equally, therefore, be "Where am I?"

Photos: Jahvo Joža

In keeping with the sharp negative tone of the work (the clown's costume is an ominous black-on-black ensemble, reminding somewhat of an adjudicator), Dead in the Pool is perhaps more significant for what does not occur. The intervention seems a minimal one: as clown, Sikorová sits atop the lifeguard chair, and does little apart from occasionally changing the direction of her gaze. Yet, as you bathe in the clear waters of Lake Jarun, you cannot help but be aware of the clown's perspective, and the significant element of doubt that it brings. Taking my first swim, I felt something like a guilt, or maybe simply a sense of connection, with those vast majority who, for whatever reason, could not enjoy a cool dip in the water. The clown in Dead in the Pool very much functions as an inherent critique: it asks a question merely through its existence in a particular place, at a particular time.

Rewards came when one shared the clown's perspective. Looking around, it seemed I was not the only one experiencing this existential uncertainty. A family joined nearby, appearing to largely ignore the surreal vulture-like figure perched on top of a lifeguard chair. Yet overhearing their conversation in Croatian (I think) as they entered the water to throw a ball, I could hear the word "Joker" as part of the conversation, even from where I was sitting some 50 metres away. Children came to stare, and, receiving only a mirrored-gaze in return, were left only to wonder. This is a work that exists as a splinter in the mind.

The intervention became more marked when the clown made what would be one of just two significant pivots: walking down the stairs of the lifeguard chair, taking the long journey over the pebbles, to take position on a second chair 100 metres away. I witnessed this with some sense of entertainment: initially, as Sikorová's black-booted foot hit the first step, it created a shattering interruption to my perspective sitting behind the chair. The journey across to the second chair was faintly hypnotic: the clown seemed to float across the pebbles, somewhat reminiscent of Death in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. 

The Present Silence

Could it be said that we are in a moment of at once a proliferation of noise, and at the same time, a weird, uncanny silence?

The last month I have provided a curious mirror to public space: where a proliferation of "things" have appeared, I have myself maintained an empty, reflective, sort of vigilant silence, whilst undertaking a subtle and total change of my work. Rather than writing myself, the Ukrainian poet Lesya Ukrainka has sat on this page, as a sort of monument to hope, in a moment where cynical calculation proliferated.

It has not been a quiet period at all. As well as a humanitarian one, the invasion by Russia is an intense philosophical tragedy which has caused a deep reflection on my almost 16-year relationship with Ukraine, as a spectator to its tentative and imperfect journey out of militarisation, only to be finally and unequivocally dragged back in to horrific, bare violence by Russia's booted foot.

The noise accompanying this fatalist, resigned gesture of attack has sometimes been disgusting to watch, as Ukrainian self-determination is channeled by those who are not Ukrainian and have no understanding of it or interest in learning what it means. An alternative position is to sit back with the popcorn - and cynically viewing on from the media, it is easy to ask "what about...?" questions, that neatly sidestep the specific ethical questions that these specific Russian atrocities bring. The worst of these positions support some fictional "other side", the validity of which is best accounted for with the 50-page revisionist Ukrainian history written by the amateur historian, V. Putin, in August last year (mentioned a lot, but rarely well-analysed or actually even read).

If I have entered a particular type of crisis, a sort of chosen writer's block, then my Ukrainian colleagues, and especially their inspiring determination, calm, and resilience in the face of meaningless aggression, have led - and continue to lead - me through it, without fear.

Next week, beloved Faki Festival enters its 25th rendition in Zagreb, with a mix of shows that are adventurous "Real-theater". As I gear up for my last ride in the festival, ending an 8-year relationship, it's an important moment to reflect on the massive destruction to cultural infrastructure that has occurred over the pandemic. For a tradition like the festival to survive, it needs support, and instead, its foundations are constantly eroded by the heavy investment away from social fabric, under the guise of 'building wealth'. Hence the festival theme of this year "Enough!", designed to simultaneously question resource distribution and draw attention to the wasteland of culture that the pandemic left behind, and the imperative to support its rebuilding.

Mixing with that activity, I am presenting at the conference  on the subject of "cancel culture" and its effect on theatre, a conference happening alongside Nova Drama festival in Bratislava. The conference is interestingly titled "Contemporary Freedom and the New Crisis of Theatre Between Ideological Extremism and the ‘Cancel Culture’", which automatically raises questions for me about what theatre - an extremely inaccessible artform - could possibly offer in relation to "Cancel Culture", which itself seems ill-defined in today's context.

Finally, I am proud to present a concert from two new friends from Kharkiv with whom I have started a shared studio in the fabled suburb of Kreuzberg. That event Friends of Friends of Friends, is bound to be the first of many livestreamed concerts, as my colleagues continue the activity that they were doing in Kharkiv before it was horrifyingly interrupted.  Consider joining the livestream and donating to their chosen cause: an actor from Kharkiv who has spontaneously found a new career delivering emergency food to people in Kharkiv.

The decision to continue publishing today is not made lightly. Current attacks on culture and identity of communities are seismic and worthy of unequivocal condemnation, made without fear. As an artist from Mariupol said to me once: Culture is a shield - may it protect those who continue to carry forward the stage traditions of people, and who work for change, in siege situations or otherwise.

Contra spem spero! (Hope Against Hope)

By Lesya Ukrainka (1890)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translation - Richard Pettifer (2022)

with Olha Velymchanytsia

A little note on Ukraine

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

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

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

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

Vale Ben Landau

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

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

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

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

Vale Ben Landau.

Review of the Exhibition 'Projections for Future History'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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