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
