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.