On Loneliness and Alienation

There's something about the concept of Christmas as I know it that has always seemed a little distant to me. I don't know if it's growing up in a place where the imported traditions are so disconnected from the reality - where you eat a huge lunch in 40-degree heat, or celebrate cozy candle-lit togetherness at a time when it would make more anatomaical sense to stay far away from each other's sweat. Maybe it's the concept of "family" which is forced upon you by a relentless media barrage of Australian magical thinking, giving you a superficial version of happiness that ensures that any celebration will be never quite satisfying enough. Maybe it's the equally relentless consumerism, offering you a life out-of-reach and presenting this as normal.

But I always experience a special type of disconnection, on top of what is a part of the cynicism of everyday life. In a situation of this 'doublespeak' dual-reality, as Orwell attempted to define it, where one veneer presents an available source of power, while the supposed conter-argument, the "alternative", reveals itself as equally false under interrogation. Christmas seems to represent this binary well. Originally a pagan ritual, later adopted by Christianity, it is today the ultimate gesture of mainstream categorisation, leaving no space for variation, thriving on exclusion. So follows the line of many conversations at the dinner-table, as nuance, empathy, and understanding give way to the violent reinforcement of status quo. Is a charitable Christian gesture still possible at Christmas? Yes, but as an exception only, itself designed to excuse the impossibility of charity itself.

I am always lonely this time of year, and I don't think I'm alone there.

It is important to write about alienation at the moment, because alienation is the defining characteristic of our contemporary moment, and addressing it is largely impossible. The COVID-19 pandemic began 3 years ago, but its presence echoes in a fear of intimacy and togetherness. We live now a life hollowed-out by the knowledge that at any moment those rights we think of as sacred, and hard-won through the struggles of many over time, might be slipped away from us. Our places of safety are banal technological reflections - halls of mirrors, architecture defined by Big Tech and sold to us soft, where we can safely avoid the difficulties of contact with 'the other', thinking of this as too difficult and unsanitary. And indeed, when contact with other people comes, it is in the form of a cry for help, a relentless demand which we cannot possibly satisfy.

One of the most disturbing parts of the last 2 years has been the casual, almost relaxed way we turn to war, and how easily and naturally this mode has been assumed. I have been close to this in my own way, and it is disturbing how the mechnisms of culture, especially social media and Hollywood narrative, serve to smoothen the delivery of war as a mode of life - not so much a state of emergency or crisis, but as something unremarkable. Amidst the carnage expressed as emojis and the men-in-suits geopolitical game, you need to turn back to the poets to get any sense of the reality of war in this moment, it is so lost in a mix of spectacularity, emotion and simplification. What is reality like on a front line? I think of it as the same as it's always been: awful, banal, somewhat bodily, with moments of sublime but ultimately robbed of the most precious of human tools: purpose. What is it like as a civilian hiding from a coming attack? Again, not some brand-new story, but a reflex that shows the worst of humanity, reduced to an animalistic, no-win game between dominant predator and submissive prey, where control and autonomy are lost for both.

If the mode of war reveals anything, it is the absolute imperative of nurturing and protecting the parts of ourselves that are capable of stepping outside this reality - not as a fantasy, but as imagination. To imagine different worlds is the job of the poets and artists, and the gesture of doing so is to act against the world-creation-by-force occuring on the other side of the trenches. This is the best definition of the power of art that I have. When it is done as a collective practice, through collaboration, it is not only an act of preservation or salvage. When based on togetherness and co-operation, that overcomes the baseness of aggression. This is far from the definition offered on social media, a world of surfaces where art is something a beautiful afterthought: no, it's the whole point. Love, togetherness, and finding this in these moments where the pressure of atrocity is close, are likewise not afterthoughts - they are everything.

Orwell is often falsely quoted with the famous line "in a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act." But his comments on the function of "desire as thoughtcrime" are more telling, as is the final section of Part 2, Chapter 2, of 1984, in which the act of sex between the characters Julia and Winston (in this context, meaning the resolution of desire, a bit romantic) is exposed as something resonant outside of the individual:

"No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act."

The theatre is a different type of togtherness, but equally, staged reality is a place where we can situate our desires within the mess of fear and hatred, to be set free of the violence of dominance, emotional control, and aggression that defines the mode of war. The stage reduces these things to objects of play, where they can become gestures at our disposal - and not ones that dispose of us.

I wish all readers a happy and safe 2024, and thank you.

 

 

Image: Australia from the sky, December 9th, 2023.

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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.  

"Cultural Dialogue with Ukraine", Monday December 4th @ACUD Berlin

Monday brings a number of rare opportunities for me in Berlin: I will stage some theatre, be on a panel, and show a short film, all at the same event in dialogue with Ukraine.

Event Link - https://www.goethe.de/prj/gex/en/ver.cfm?event_id=25243361 

(free entry from 16.30)

The performance Factory Ukrainka comes off a few months of research work, following on from initial translations of Lesya Ukrainka's poetry that I undertook as a kind of cultural roadblock in March, 2022. Together with Ann Krekhno and Axxi Oma, with Olha Bohachevska in support, we will present the initial work-in-progress as a cabaret-style performance, showcasing a number of her poems and letters, weaved into a story of her life. The results will be important for continuing the development of our musical-theatrical exploration of the life and works of Ukraine's most famous activist-poet, and a founder of Ukrainian language and culture, which will be developed further as part of Bohachevska's residency with Cultural Workers Studio later in 2023.

The film Hanny in the Factory (2023), also starring Ann Krekhno, was shot in March, with our colleague Anita Kopylenko as Director of Photography. The film was shot at the former tram factory Flutgraben in March 2023, located at a key control point of the former wall between East-West Berlin, (and the home to our beloved Cultural Workers Studio). It follows the story of its protagonist Hanny, who leads an invisible male narrator around a former factory, telling stories of violence and social ritual, before defiantly stating her die-hard self-determination. The film enjoys its second rendition here, with a re-shot sequence and subtitles from Natalie Krekhno.

Finally, I am speaking on the podium discussion "It's not a bug, it's a feature", together with my colleague Ksenia Yanko, who I was proud to support in the exhibition The Bug-Out Bag in early 2023. I will be no-doubt proud of the firework performance Yanko and I create (Public discourse will never be the same again, I hope). Making up the panel are a pair from the Potsdam-based Artefact, Jenny Alten, Valeriia Buchuck, as well as the organisation zusa represented by Adina Constantin, with whom we will have the pleasure of collaborating in early 2024. The conversation will be moderated by Head of Culture at Goethe, Dr. Wolf Iro, and focus on problems in institutional collaboration.

The event Cultural Dialogue with Ukraine was assembled by Or Shemesh of Goethe im Exil, and we acknowledge the support of Or and the teams from Artists At Risk and Goethe Institute, which this year allows us to host another 6 artists from Ukraine - Katya Balabai, Rodion Prokhorenko, Oleks Safarov,  Olga Bogachevska,  Inna Gosha, and Elvis Cholpukh - and hopefully to grow our ever-expanding family in resistence against forces that attempt to threaten and attack artistic communities, specifically in a Ukrainian context.

See you there I hope!

 Photo from rehearsals of Factory Ukrainka in Flutgraben, Berlin.

Dialogue Beyond the Chat Room

Through the blurry Italian train window, things seem clearer.

 

This criticism platform is 10 years old - that's 10 years of writing about theatre, mostly shows or people that would otherwise never have been written about. It's not that these shows would be lost to the void: part of theatre's uniqueness is its ephemeral nature, it's elusiveness. If something gets lost, that's ok. Part of the game is letting go. Theatre, by definition, can't be pinned down, can't be commodified, can't be categorised. This is what we love about it.

Yet criticism is the best tool that we have for archiving and preserving some sense of feeling for what a show "was" - and so, the principles by which critical writing is undertaken are incredibly important. Many artist hate critics because they seem to think that the writing defines the show's reception. But it's more that the existence of a critic at a show, and that existence expressed through the written word, signifies and hopefully captures some sense of the show's essence. It communicates this witnessing to a new audience, to be resisted and contested. It's not about offering an authortative view, it's about building a 'forum' of a particular type, understanding that yours is one pair of a sea of eyes, and all you are is a vessel for the functioning of critical thinking inside a given social situation.

In the above paragraph you can already see some of the misconceptions that the critic deals with constantly under neoliberal capitalism. "You think you are an authority? You think you know my work better than I do? You are telling me how to express myself??" The complete lack of "forum" today, and its replacement with the internet chat room of lower-common-denominator commentary - reducing dialogue to a competition for authority and dominance - is one of the reason being a critic seems so antiquated, so romantic. We are trained today to gather information by reading a scatter-gun of opinon, and deciding the truth is somewhere in the middle, ignoring the fact that the entire forum might be completely bogus. This absence of reflection is not new - it's instead a kind of app-driven neo-relativism, that flattens everything out into a meaningleess, banal stream. That's convenient to Big Tech, because it generates a cynicism that's politically manipulable, one that lacks any belief beyond those truths that can be tested through short-term reward and punishment.

What we are NOT trained to do is to engage a perspective on a work and to concretely orient ourselves around that - to agree with it, to oppose it, to love or hate it, to establish our principles. In other words: passionate critical thinking, the type that does not unquestioningly accept reality as it is fed to us, and rather interrogates it with energy and points with enthusiasm to things we love. This is what should always be cultivated - it's imperative in the current context, as well as historically, if any social functioning is to be retained. It is itself an act of resistence.

Dance and the "Outsider": Reflections on Tanzschreiber.de

From August 2022 to May 2023, I was a resident author at tanzschreiber.de, a Berlin dance criticism portal run by tanzbüro, a dance agency, also based in Berlin. With two German-writing colleagues, Maria Ladopoulos and Micha Tsouloukidse, we covered most of the major independent and institutional dance works in Berlin over that period, 2 times a month gallavanting across official and unofficial halls, houses, theatres, workshops, and - for me - even a boat.

Having never written extended dance criticism before exactly, this kind of close contact with Berlin's dance scene - especially as an outsider - was eye-opening. First, the sheer number of dance venues that are around - is there really an audience for it? Aren't I seeing the same people at every show, or just a posse that the artist has managed to cultivate through their strategic use of social media? Is there space for the "public" anymore - one that is somewhat randomly selected, curious, independent spectators? Second, with offerings continually championing a sort of brittle affirmation, what was the function of criticism here exactly? What could it do? (Nothing?)

The lack of "outsider" in the audience bothers me, because that person is also the audience for critical writing - at least traditionally. Dance seems particularly vulnerable to algorithmic interference, more so than other performing arts, as it is so heavy on visual spectatorship, so reliant on the body to communicate, and contains such heavy doses of exploitation and precarity for artists. "Robustness" seems to be the perpetual goal, and yet the way it's pursued - through excessive production, identity politics, and over-reliance on concepts such as 'radical care' which place burdens on the already-burdened - seem often counter-productive. Surely the mission is not to create closed bubbles of protection, but rather to bring dance itself to the world? To find new audiences, and to address them with new ways of seeing and being - not ones with which they are already acclimatised? Is it any co-incidence that the number of dance critics is so close to zero?

It's a trending conversation in an age of 'cancel culture', and one which I personally don't have much time for. Both extremes seem equally damaging: create a small community bubble of like-minded individuals, and you will inevitably survive but achieve no broadening of anyone's perspective. Ignore the necessity of 'safe spaces' for nurturing art and ensuring that people have a place to cultivate and thrive away from the violence of public expectation, and you will trade mass engagement for oppression. But finding that sweet spot seems harder and harder: that beautiful moment where exchange between indivudals occurs through culture, where realisations and revelations happen, which are the aspirations of collective spectatorship.

It's something specific to performing arts - a mix of the liveness of the moment, the physical, convivial presence, the gathering of strangers to watch an offer from nominated agent. You will never find that on social media. But such is the dominance of the logic of commodificatoion - is it possible to build a career outside of this today? Can you build an audience without fans?

As I move onto other challenges, I am left with these questions more than ever, together with the knowledge that they are likely to get more - and not less - urgent.

--

My critical writings for Tanzschreiber are available in English and German.

Interested in writing dance criticism? Why not apply for my job at Tanzschreiber here (Until October 22).

I am grateful to those who came to performances with me and built dialogue with me, especially Angela Fegers, Inna Gosha, and Anita Kopylenko, and to my editors Anja Goette and Aslan Aslan.

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. 

WaterWaltz

It's a sunny Sunday in Pankow, Berlin's dreariest suburb. I fix a salad, fill a bottle with water, and go down to my bike. I stop by a Schrebergarten - one of Germany's famous allotment gardens, which I am lucky enough to share with collagues at the end of my street - and pick up a towel, a lying-cushion, and a panama hat I find lying around. Time to get healthy by the lake!

Coming in to Berlin's Weißer See lake - the largest in Berlin-Weißensee and approximately in the centre of that district - many Berliners seem to have had the same idea. The lake reeks with population, people half naked or more lounging around, the beach cafe (entry 4 EUR) with its Hollywood-parody sign and giant letters looming over the water, giving everything a feeling like it's the 1970s. Not to mention the golden September light, which makes everything look sepia-toned, like it's from an old family polaroid.

I find the area between the Milchhäuschen cafe and the Boat rental, find my place, and sit down on the cushion, waiting for the show to begin.

WaterWaltz is a performative cycle that began in 2022 in Krumme Lanke, a lake in south-west Berlin, and has since moved around many of Berlin's favourite water-holes, including Tegeler See and Müggelsee. These are all popular places for Berlin-style summer recreation, where a motley crew of last night's revellers, families, and weirdos gather to soak up the sun and the sand, in a sort of mildly disappointing version of a beach. Waterwaltz re-appropriates these places as site-specific locations for dance via an innovative invisible floating mat, which makes the dancers look like they are dancing literally on top of the water, carefully steered by invisible ropes as the crowd watches on - or simply integrates the magical dancing figure into their everyday recreational activities.

 Photo: Dusan Sekulovic

The spectacle of seeing a dancer-on-water against a backdrop of passers by does not lose it's magic over the 3-hour duration of WaterWaltz, which repeats it's cycle every hour. It's worth the free entry price just for this: during the performance I saw, a visitor and her dog amusingly entered the stage while talking loudly in Italian on a wireless headset, apparently oblivious to the audience before them.

Kiosk Festival Part 2: A Body Under a Microscope

Waking up at STANICA seems never easy.

This year's Kiosk festival was, unlike last year, not plagued by rain - although it was as much an omnipresent threat as the overpass that dominates the tent-laden field at the back of the cultural centre.

Last night was the usual kick-ass local DJs, led by DJ TRANSmisia who played a stirling set and led revellers through a wide range of re-mastered and almost unrecognisable queer-influenced pop tunes from the 90s, from the Backstreet Boys to Aqua. I wake up still feeling like I haven't recovered from the train ride, (and D'Epog's bulldozing Handsfree certainly didn't help) and wondering if I even will before disappearing back to Berlin tomorrow.

 

Photo: Natália Zajačiková

The final day of Kiosk is a few shows with a quiet resonance to them - the perfect way to end the festival, together with some public discussion with Festival Directors Michaela Pastekova and Martin Krištof. Congratulations on another hearty Kiosk!

Medař

Walking into the stage of Medař - a work from Czech puppetry group FRAS - is walking into a familiar magical world of puppetry. In a world that flattens everything out into the same categorizable screen-surfaces, puppetry is refreshingly 3-dimensional in its approach: we can zoom, slide, transform, and destroy using only our imaginations. The scope for puppetry is limited only by our capacity to give in to its illusions, which are never forced on us, but remain a strong and beautiful invitation to discover once again a love of life.

 

 

Photo: Mariia Hryhorenko

That invitation is dripping with pleasure in Medař - its recycled materials, soft lighting, and painstakingly-decorated red temple proudly framing the action of the microscopic drama. Paper dangles from the structure, as the puppeteers draw from their toolkit of instruments to slowly agitate the world into life - marked by an ingenious use of a map drawn onto an old piece of corregated iron, also used as a type of rusty backgdrop to the play.

The narrative itself follows a Nepalese man Joshi whose sister falls ill, and who has to go and fetch a special medicine from a mountain-top. The gongs and chimes of the atmospheric soundtrack (credited as FRAS) slip shapes and transform as flexibly as the stage itself, moving through a list of imaginative concepts, lovingly-designed to delight. There are various set-pieces - sort of dead-end jokes - that mark the narrative, such as repeated dousing of a candle, or flies leaving only to return, moments which perhaps make up the true diversionary delight of the work.

 

Photo: Mariia Hryhorenko

Kiosk Festival Special Edition: Handsfree by D'Epog

Following last year’s prank for Kiosk – which I wrote about extensively here as an interesting example of anti-theatre that tangentially performed various aspects of local viewing culture – D’Epog returns with the epic Handsfree, an adventure into a character who burned down their own house, and is now at a crossroads of negotiating how to deal with their material existence.

There is too much to write about in Handsfree. It really is a 2.5-hour, exhaustive monologue-installation with some projection interludes, probably just to giver Herculian performer Magdalena Straková a bit of a break. In the meantime, the text touches on a barrage of themes relevant to our contemporary moment: as we follow the performer’s journey through loss of material possessions and her dark, existential contemplation that follows this emptiness, it seems that there is no end to her exploration of exploitation, precarity, and social punishment, and the dark psychological effects of this on the individual. Handsfree is a work that delights in its endless spiral towards death and something like Agamben’s “Bare Life” that happens with the veneer of lies is removed, and the curtain is pulled back.

It does this with both a sense of pleasurable anarchy, and more-than-passing enthusiasm for theatre convention. The show opens with Straková atop a dystopian pile of trash (Set and Costumes: Dominik Styk), a la Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days, sporting a grotesque mask, grim reaper cloak and black shopping bags. She begins to talk about her possessions, occasionally crescendoing into an absurd squak of “Mam, Mam”, like a nightmare or perpetual panic attack. The section ends with her pointing the finger and flailing, her voice distorted as the Doors Classic Light My Fire starts up, and the story of her accidentally setting fire to her house – on which Handsfree is based – begins.

 

Photo: Marek Jančúch

What follows is a rollicking ride through the protagonist Magda’s exposure to the hell of living her contemporary materialist existence. We meet Magda’s cat Mila via a dragged-around cat house on wheels (a la Brecht’s Mother Courage) and hear about his needs, and then Straková reads a distorted fairy tale of the Princess and the Pea, with a re-animated version of the Disney tower collapsing in the background. She tells a story of setting gamified challenges for herself, puts her material belongings on a bus, and lay on a park bench with all her possessions, washing her clothes in public. She speculates that maybe she could buy a car park and set up her life there. Amusingly, the audience is led out of the Žilina's Museum of Art to an actual car loaded with belongings, marvels at Straková throwing clothes out of the first-floor window and onto the public square below (subsequently interacting with passers-by) and watches a short part of the 90s TV show Alf – before Straková picks up the projector and smashes it on the floor.

 Photo: Marek Jančúch

Kiosk Festival Part 1: For a Sign of Authentic Life

 

Žilina's station. It's memory lanes strolled. Tent popped-up - legs tired, but still walking.

Off to see some performances at this year's Kiosk Festival 2023, where, sadly, your correspondent – due to a mix of bad planning and stress – only managed to catch a handful of shows over the final two festival days. I'm told the other two days were fantastic, and there's at least a hint of the usual Kiosk buzz around STANICA and Žilina's New Synogogue, where a majority of festival events normally take place.

Although this year's festival theme "bez elektriny" (translating to "No Power") is aimed more in an environmental direction, I can't help but think about digital cultures as I stare out the window on my 10 hour train ride from Berlin. The cultural logic of digital life has emerged as the dominant metaphor since the pandemic took away 90% of income for performing artists in Europe, completely transforming previously fundamental dramaturgies, narratives, and understandings of life. As we build our digital double-lives, one of the most aggressive cultural shifts in Western history has taken place with barely a whimper, its direction serving the interests of power (including big tech and resource-extraction) too well to be meaningfully challenged. 

Was this really what we wanted? Is there realities, or "selves", to be found outside the surfaces of our controllable, manipulable digital identities?

As I dissect the programme over a coffee in the morning light streaming through the windows at STANICA, it seems to me that "Bez elektriny" can also remove the screen, and see what's left afterwards. 

 Festival worker Anna Kováčová, Photo: Natália Zajačiková

Vystaviť sa telu 2: Ne-činnosť (ENG: Expose yourself to the body 2: Inaction)

Among the low-fi selections of the morning is Yuri Korec & Co's choreographic investigation of the body in a gallery (and non-gallery) environment. The audience arrives in the rear of Zilina's Museum of Art, greeted by a crumbling structure in a delapidated car park. The destroyed structure is decorated with the body of performer Anja Naňová lying in the rubble, front covered in tape, skin blending with the bricks and mortar. The performer slowly rises, enacting a kind of "twitch" movement while exploring the space. 

A Change in Power - Preview of Kiosk Festival 2023, Slovakia

Change is one of life's unchanging rules. 

But one of the differences today is the intensity at which our environments evolve and shift around us, leaving us in various states of constant disorientation, clinging for any sense of normal. A feature of the contemporary capitalism layed out for us its its promise to resolve this apparent dissonance - to give narrative to an exponential, disorienting acceleration, that encourages us to deny our grounding human qualities of love, community, and togetherness as something outdated and estranged, and to replace it with something more distant, less intimate, and colder. That story comes in many facets - in a recent lecture in Bratislava, I called it a "smoothening" of human experience - a type of surface-level or superficialising of modes of engagement. It creates a sense of aspiration to performing boredom. Simply "fitting in" to categories is the goal, to the extent that it's performed by many of today's influencers, as a antidote to the anxieties and stresses of displacement from categories. 

 Cultural Centre STANICA preparing for DJ Laura Plis in 2022 

- Photo: Martin Krištof

But people never fit categories - we are in a constant state of change and development, and, like the seasons, it's always been this way. The way to combat this ideology of "smoothness" is not new - materialist intervention has always been a useful counter to the violent abstraction of capitalism from its daily consequences. Today, the trade wars over energy production are a key flashpoint of a wider struggle: seen as both a key factor of production and important human right, the production of energy has its own politics, its own momentum. From divisions between the third and first worlds, to its use as a bargaining chip in negotiations over invading forces, energy production and its politics sit at the heart of various biopolitical and economic violences, while itself being in flux under the oft-mooted "energy transition" (as it's called in German, Energiewende, or turning point), with mega-companies such as Slovakia's Slovnaft, SPP, Západoslovenské elektrárne or Mochovce positioning themselves firmly in the centre, as both problem and solution.

Energy production is also a historically-prevalent tool of theatre - hence, perhaps, Kiosk 2023 has chosen "No Power" ("bez elektriny") as its theme. As well as the increasing tension and unhealthy marriages between the inherent Humanism of the western stage and the umbrella of environmental missions that attempt to point out the folly of human supremancy, the theme promises any numer of crackpot approaches to theatrical production: from bike-powered lighting systems, to more primal ritualistic performance, to performative promenades, to anti-theatre gestures. Set free of the burden of electricity, what can theatre become?

The program promises a lot, with some familiar faces returning. Brno-based D'Epog follow their super-offensive NIC-MOC with the monodrama Handsfree around an accidental fire, and the performative lecture from Adam Dragun Čo robiť (What to do?) and Last time my Parents were in the Komuna Warsaw partners the artist with Olga Ciężkowska, and Milo Juráni partners with Katarína Marková for Walking for ruins on ruins with ruins. A daily tour takes viewers to Unkulunkulu's escapescapescape in nearby Višňové, while Jakob Jautz choreographs a performative walk through the forest in Traces. There's the usual high compliment of dance works, such as Bente Bulens and Beata Rekemová's Attracted by Repulsion or Juraj Korec's Vystaviť sa telu 2: Ne-činnosť (Expose yourself to the body 2: Inaction), and complimenting the multi-disciplinary approach is a dose of poetry, such as Duo Kyseli Krastafci’s melodramatic poem SHOW ROBOŠOV - Umelci k lopatám! (Art is work) meaning something like WORKER SHOW - GET YOUR SHOVELS (Art is work).

 

"There is something in the air", by T.I.T.S. – (Nela H. Kornetová, Jaro Viňarský, Matthew Rogers, Jan Husták & Björn Hansson)

It's a healthy program, as usual complimented by an equally-healthy line-up of local DJs frequenting the converted cultural centre/train station STANICA and other locations nightly. Like last year's theme After Human, the program (again compiled by the evergreen Michaela Pašteková and Martin Krištof) that's sure to hit a certain zeitgeist of performance, and like that program, talks indirectly and strategically about the atrocities committed by forces invading Ukraine, a point reinforced by the inclusion of Language Barrier Equal by 'Students for Ukraine', a collaboration between Czech theatre institutions and students from Lviv University, Karpenko-Kary University in Kyiv among others. As usual, the oddball location of Žilina - Slovakia's 3rd-largest city yet somehow still a broken mystery to the world - plays host to the unfolding drama.

At a time of significant cynicism, Kiosk promises ways to use the medium of performance to re-negotiate and rebuild our trust in reality.

 Let's go?

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Kiosk Festival 2023

July 27-30

Various locations in Žilina, Slovakia

Full program here (Mostly Slovak) 

or pick your Google Translate language here.

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.

On the Phenomenal ‘Cultural Workers Studio’

At some point during 2022, my life became infiltrated by a series of powerful, superhuman Ukrainian women. This was not a surprise – I cultivated it, because colleagues remaining in Ukraine were outside my sphere of influence, and anyway wrapped up defending a large-scale invasion. What I didn’t expect was the powerful effect that these humans would have on me, and how this would somehow enter into all facets of my life: from washing dishes, to my daily routines, to my politics, to my social interactions.

 

 The Krekhno sisters (left and right), with Piliuhina (centre).

Photo: Richard Pettifer

Cultural Workers Studio is a shared studio space in Flutgraben e.V., which began as an activist intervention following a series of ‘refugees welcome’ emergency meetings in early 2022. The studio was initially donated to us by Flutgraben e.V., and conceived as a co-working space for people fleeing the war in Ukraine. In that first week, there were just 2 users: me – critic, director, and decorated cultural theorist – and the teen-genius Ann Krekhno. Anya sat across from me on a small wooden desk, staring at me with a “don’t fuck with me” stare that she had perfected during interactions with older men in the refugee camps. That first week of Anya aggressively defending herself – me clowning in a response that I hoped read as “harmless idiot” – sticks in my mind as my first negotiation with the group, a first of many experiences of self-definition against and with this powerful, angry, displaced force, one which would come to largely define my next 12 months.

Against the Grain (tanzschreiber.de)

Over at tanzschreiber.de - my latest article about the series of short dance works "Against the Grain", an interesting night of inclusive dance performance. 

 https://tanzschreiber.de/en/against-the-grain/ 

Theaterstück: Celebrating 50,000 hits?

I started this writing platform almost exactly 10 years ago, when I first arrived in Berlin. Back then, the idea was to write about theatre here, as a way of coming to know it, and at the same time to develop myself into a "critic". The reason I wanted to do that is because I identified that criticism is a worthwhile activity: it's the difference between really knowing something, to go deep into life, and simply experiencing it and letting it wash over you as you strategically pick your way through different available privelages. Historically, it's been the difference between fascism and democracy, at least according to a scholar like Hannah Arendt, who wrote extensively (and critically) about the ideologies of Nazism and other totalitarian regimes in the 20th century. 

Furthermore, today, it's dying. 

In today's cultures that are driven by profit and fame - what good is there in reflection? All the competitive mechanisms teach us to move faster, more streamlined, more efficient. To pause and think is calamatous, and it's the same for actually paying attention, which can stop you from seizing opportunities. As a cultural worker in a world rewarding surfaces, reflection is often seen as a luxury - you need to endlessly and aggressively self-promote, even at the expense of your colleagues, just to survive.

The screenshot of the moment the dream came true.

 

No wonder then, that over the years many have been a bit arrested when I have confronted them with critique, and are all the more confused so when that critique is also reflected upon myself. "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones", is the idiom - and so, at this moment of pausing to reflect on attracting 50,000 or something readers over a 10-year period, it's a good moment to stop and take stock.

First, 50,000 is not a big number, and I did an awful lot of work to achieve what others can do with a single, entertaining cat video. I write on approximately 25 shows a year on this platform, over 10 years it's about 250 pieces of long-form criticism. On average, this is about 200 readers per article. Take out the bots and random internet traffic, and the real readership is probably much lower than this. Remove people who don't actaully pay attention to the words or wider argument, and I'm probably only writing for a handful of people each time.

Yet, there is every chance this is more than enough. As criticism is such a loathed and poorly-understood practice, you're only trying to reach a few people anyway, who can act as agents for it in different ways. Popularity is not the goal (although sometimes I think a more widespread respect for the practice would help me to write). Rather, we are trying to build culture, and that normally takes time, patience, and care - resources that are in scant supply today. Making and re-making different arguments in relation to this in critical writing is an important part of that development.

50,000 is not a big number. Still, I celebrate it, purely because I understand that what this writing platform tries to achieve may not be possible. While this alone doesn't make its existence worth fighting for, from my experience, anything that is worth achieving in culture was hard in the beginning (sometimes very hard). The rewards come in the end - often too late for the instigator, but not too late for their successors.

Thanks to people who have read over the years, especially those who have entered into dialogue with me - it has made me richer.

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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. 

A Little Catching Up To Do

 

A couple of exhbitions, a concert, a festival of short films, and a cinematography club later, and your correspondant is feeling a little worse for wear. Those familiar with burnout will recognise the signs: when small things become unmanagable and impossible, when the body and mind begin to account for a period of sustained deference, during which urgent tasks dwarf their potential undertaker, with "not urgent but important" ones relegated to an expectant, ever-growing pile.

Post-intense period, the demands of life tend to come flooding back, and that is what is happening to me at the moment. Although the urgencies of the most recent invasion of Ukraine seem incomporable with my own relatively light psychological suffering, it is nevertheless always funny to observe the body and mind, and how they remind you of your own humanity and limitations, which are real even if these seem comparably trivial.

The last weeks were filled with incredible experiences as part of the Exhibition and Event Series of Ukrainian Culture, and I am proud and happy to be able to work in support of these events, which were unanimously moving and powerful interventions in Berlin's cultural landscape, led by my colleagues at Cultural Workers Studio.

Although I continually failed in the last period, somehow, I was able to keep a skeleton critical practice going on tanzschreiber - albeit without my usual attention to detail (or ability to meet deadlines).

Here are those texts:

https://tanzschreiber.de/en/a-committed-sense-of-rhythm/

Juan Domínguez's oddball piece Rhythm Is The Place certinaly left many in the audience scratching their heads - nevertheless, an important albeit esoteric experiment in tempo.

https://tanzschreiber.de/en/still-bursts-frills-and-a-mating-call/

La Cage's work Oiseau was such a gentle, slight experience - I really appreciated its production ethic and focus on simplicity, although judging by the collaboration's published texts, we have some differences about non-human agency.

https://tanzschreiber.de/en/splitting-roles/

Time Out of Joint was among my trickier tasks for tanzschreiber so far - I saw it on International Women's Day, and was confident that I would be able to be unfailingly enthusiastic. Instead I was met with a complex, conflict-ridden work, and this made writing about it not easy, as I had an uncomfortable encounter with my own unrealistic expectations of female uniformity in solidarity.

https://tanzschreiber.de/en/the-cool-deep-maths-of-the-body/

I write a sort of clowny introduction here - but I often feel out of place in the more ecstatic, performative introversions of Berlin, which make almost no sense to me. This piece Deepspace from visiting choreographer James Batchelor seems like it has sort of aged since its premiere in 2016, and a perhaps once-radical approach now seems almost classical - I nevertheless found a lot to appreciate in its euclidian trimmings.

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For me, now, the doctor in my head (the one I can afford) prescribes it's a bit of rest and time in the garden. I will return with more writing soon, including the last of my Tanzschreiber articles and some interviews I was working on in the last period.

In the meantime, to quote the poet and activist Lesya Ukrianka:

 

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?

 

Introduction to the exhibition 'life: war edition' @Somos Arts, Neukölln

In January, I was offered the opportunity to introduce the exhibition of my colleagues Natalie Krekhno and Anna Mudra at the opening of the exhibition 'life: war edition' at SomoS Arts, Neukölln.

From the moment that I was invited - and of course accepted - I understood that I would fail in this task, because there was no option available to me that worked to satisfy my own criteria for an introduction in this context.

Here is how I failed: 

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“Trust in Hell”

Delivered 14.02.2023

for the opening of life: war edition – SomoS Arts, Berlin

Richard Pettifer, critic and theorist of Cultural Workers Studio (support worker)

Thank you very much, I am deeply honoured and humbled to welcome everyone to this exhibition life: war edition from my two colleagues who I will introduce properly in a moment, Natalie Krekhno and Anna Mudra, and their collaborators. Tonight I will offer some short contextual remarks about the works, some background of their origins and objectives, and finally a couple of acknowledgements to the condition in which we find ourselves, upon the mounting of this exhibition.

In 1991, 30 years ago, theorist Jean Baudrillard writes his series of provocations, together retrospectively titled “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place”. The first essay written before the war was called The Gulf War Will Not Take Place, the second written during the war and called The Gulf War is Not Really Taking Place, and the third after the war called The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. The essays causing significant scandal from both victims of that conflict who accused him of devaluing their experience through his position of war as a spectacle, and Western elites who took offence at his attacks on traditions of supposedly enlightened “European” thought in conceiving and understanding the institutional violence of war. For Baudrillard, those traditions manifested best in media systems designed to distance the spectator from the philosophical horrors of war, to cushion also its violent gesture through the process of its mediation, and to create comfort and profit in a spectator experience that causally watches on as things play out on screens and in text. That Baudrillard bothers to – albeit sarcastically – challenge this condition speaks of his own philosophical discomfort with the passive sideshow of violence: how long can we watch on without intervention? How dare we turn our backs, in a sociological sense, on the deeply troubling split in reality which occurs through the impossibility of conceiving atrocity? For his body of theory, this condition necessitates the creation of a “virtual” space – filled with political figures as unreal puppets, hopeless contradictions between the reality we know to exist and reality as it is narrated to us, and how streams of media narrative polish and smooth over the grim reality of fighting for the determination of your own existence.

 

with Natalie Krekhno and Anna Mudra, photo: Anita Kopylenko

Exhbition and Event Series of Ukrainian Cultures (Feb-March 2023) with Cultural Workers Studio

This February marks the anniversary of the latest invasion of Ukraine. This is an invasion by a foreign force into areas highly populated by civilians, and was coupled with attacks on civilian infrastructure, massacres of civilians, and other war crimes still being investigated. The invasion has little to no willing support from any significant population, either inside or outside of Ukraine.

Our studio, Cultural Workers Studio, has organised an event and exhibition series around this date to focus on celebrating and commemorating the endurance of Ukrainian cultures, against attempts to erase them.

As the only member of our studio not from Ukraine, I am proud to support the voices of my colleagues and to create structures and processes together with them over the month. 

Quick guide:

Every Wednesday // Cultural Workers Learns Ukrainian @ Space Meduza

14-18^th February // life: war edition @ SomoS Arts

22^nd-25^th February // The Bug-Out Bag @ alpha nova & galarie future

3^rd March // Stefaniia Brodska concert + listening party @ Public in Private, Flutgraben

4^th-5^th March // Charity Screenings of Ukrainian Short Filmmakers @ Multi-Function Space, Flutgraben

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The full program can be found on the website of our mother organisation Flutgraben e.V.: https://flutgraben.org/en/entry/2122/

All events are supported by Goethe Institute and the NGO Artists at Risk. Full notices can be found on the website.

Drama (for tanzschreiber.de)

 My first time back at the Volksbühne since the events of 2017, saw me ironically writing about the work Drama, the latest dance work from choreographer/director Constanza Macras.

The visit opened some specific tensions, not the least that it was a dance work titled "Drama" which attempted to discuss a crisis of precarity, of which Dance's incorporation into the Volksbühne programming in 2017 was very much a part.

Critism here : https://tanzschreiber.de/en/drama-without-drama/

My writing about the Volksbühne in 2017, and presenting alongside the former Artistic Director at an event in London, here: http://theaterstuck.blogspot.com/2019/01/theatre-and-power-in-europe-or-whatever.html

Lounge - Opening of Tanztage 2023 (for tanzschreiber.de)

It's been a while since I attended any kind of festival opening with any prestige - and as I queued with desperate people, and a guy shoved his way in front of me, I remembered why I don't like it. The competition, the desperation, the networking... and then occasionally, some performance...

Cynicism aside, the festival's opening night produced two memorable performances. The first was Bang Bang Bodies, written about by my colleague Corey Tamler here - https://tanzschreiber.de/en/centripetal-performance/

And I was charged with a premiere, Lounge, which was a playful and instinct-driven look at the function of relaxation in sex. Insert jokes about my prudishness... 

More after the jump:

https://tanzschreiber.de/en/ahhhhhhhh/

 

 

 

What happened in 2022?

Sitting at my little wooden desk by the window in the weird 14-degree Berlin weather, sick with the flu and rejecting any possibility of celebration, I have finally had the chance to "take stock".

2022 began for me with a long bus ride to Portugal, a type of 'holiday' to visit friends and colleagues, which was punctuated by different forms of trauma over events of the last years. By the time I got back - February 16th - I had a week in Berlin to look around at what was happening, before things would change completely again.

The period after that week is something of a blur. 3 weeks on the cold streets with people from Ukraine, desperately trying to find some sense of orientation together, were followed by a year in which my work completely changed, and the entry of many new influences who would become good friends and colleagues. The first emergency "Cultural Workers Cafe" events initiated by Inga Zimprich, Viktoria Lyakh and Sönke Hallman at Flutgraben were created to support incoming cultural workers to meet each other and engage in mutual support. These were followed by the development of Cultural Workers Studio, a shared space which became both my home base at Flutgraben by Berlin's River Spree, and a kind of utopian cultural project you can only find in Berlin. Through supporting the studio as it's only member not from Ukraine, I co-moderated a film festival, supported a livestream concert, modeled on the catwalk, and learned how to cook various Ukrainian specialties, as well as convivially supporting my colleagues in finding some sense of stability in the new (often very bureaucratic) environment.

monstrous

Among the post-COVID phenomena in Performing Arts - which initiated an almost-complete devastation outside centralised institutions and stages (for example, performing artists losing, *gasp*, 90% of revenue Europe-wide) - there has been a noticeable surge in interesting independent production. This is partly a result of public funding (particularly the Neustart Kultur funding program) addressing the need to financially prop up a sector almost completely destroyed, and unable to practice due to social regulations. These productions do little to make up for the loss of convivial traditions, connections, and practices that occurred in 2020 and 2021. But they are interesting phenomena by themselves, and various performing artists have found ways to use the given circumstances to make visible things that would otherwise have stayed in the dusty lockers of drafts and sketches.

monstrous is an unfashionable offering from long-time theatre practitioner and environmental biotechnologist Daniela Marcozzi and dramaturg/novelist Francesca Sarah Toich, in that it pays unusual attention to theatre tradition, and bothers to involve itself in the creation of a deep and multi-layered dramatic text. The show begins with an abstract presentation of questions that will be answered later: a masked figure undertakes a carefully choreographed dance, followed by a white-masked, bird-like figure, and two pink-robed guardians. The images seem to swim and hover over the air, in a call-and-response formula that will be repeated, making propositions in the abstract that will be answered as the dystopian reality slowly unfolds.

Photo: Turlach O'Broin

Some questions are answered with the entry of (masked, of course) doctor and nurse figures, who begin to proclaim medical phenomena in direct address to the audience, although in an abrupt and absurd articulation. "I think you will be very delighted with the womb 4849, doctor!" exclaims the over-energised nurse, as the white-masked figure spreads its legs downstage in the Lithotomy position. "Where were you consummated?" asks the doctor. "Prenzlauer Berg", replies the patient. A story of giving birth to a rabbit ensues, before the patient is told that they are privileged to be giving birth to a very endangered species - the White Rhinoceros - and helpfully supplied with a description of its unique biological characteristics. This occurs among occasional pointed references to life "before the regime", and sarcastic gratitude to women for "making their wombs available for the re-population of endangered species".

Photo: Turlach O'Broin