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.
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.
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.
'After Human' then, breaks this cycle, forcing us to begin with the curtain call, as the actors take their bows, and proceed into the unknown. As the tents are disassembled from STANICA and the participants disperse through the region and beyond, they carry with them the shifting, temporary moments where new worlds were opened and old ones discarded, leaving behind an emptiness that can never quite be filled.
It was nice to watch the world together with you, if only for a little while.
EXERGONIC ODYSSEY
Concept and non-performance: Zebastian Méndez Marín, Lucia Kašiarová, Juraj Poliak
Artistic and technical support: Juraj Poliak
Chemical consultant: Andrej Boháč
DEAD IN THE POOL
By Tereza Sikorová and Tomáš Moravanský (Institute Institute)
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.
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