There are some times when being at Kiosk Festival feels like a bit of a throwback. Somehow the coming together of people in this place – mostly Žilina’s New Synagogue and the converted train station STANICA – lacks the cynical edge you find around most theatre institutions, driven increasingly by a calculated and meticulous approach to audience. Here, people can hang out in a free way and watch great performance together, and it’s easy to forget that this is a very cool thing.
This year’s theme is “Invasion”, a no-bullshit direct reference to the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Whereas it was possible in the previous two editions of Kiosk to skirt around this subject - for example, "After Human" (2022) was only ever indirectly related, and "No Power" (2023) may relate to the targeting of electricity systems but not necessarily - this year’s edition asks more directly about this human tendency to take the space of the other through aggression, abuse, and trauma. Although these things are universal, the presence of people from Ukraine here, as well as its close proximity to borders of russia’s 2022 attack, ensures that there is little room for interpretation as artists still attempt to deal with the philosophical and cultural fallout of this single disastrous decision by the russian state.
Day 2 of Kiosk Festival saw a couple of shows that were fantastic in different ways. Trying to do them justice is a little difficult – apologies to the morning’s Adam Dragun: ALEX and Blízke stretnutia, respectively a presentation of a work-in-progress about blurring categories in crisis, and a short peaceful interlude into the tradition of Camera Obscura. The meaty program saw the afternoon’s activities include a puppet-theatre work, a promenade performance in nearby Rosina, a fascinating piece of war composition played by a string quartet at a petrol station, finally retuning to the New Synagogue for a deconstruction of masculinity in the form of “the cowboy” and then some outdoor silent discos and DJs at Stanica. Overall, hard not to enjoy it, as you walk around catching up with friends from previous editions, exploring new facets of the valueless diamond that is the concrete city of Žilina.
Your correspondent has fallen a little bit ill, so I’ll do
something a bit irregular as I’ve missed Day 3 of the festival. Instead, I’ll
split day 2 into 2 parts. First up, it’s Sonic
Highway Motorest and Nemiesta, and save the other two for tomorrow.
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Sonic Highway Motorest
Sonic Highway Motorest is a collaboration between members of the group MFK Bochum in Germany and locals to Slovakia, from Žilina and Bratislava. As such, it’s the type of vision that Kiosk Festival excels at – a site-specific, international and pan-European work, blending different experimental forms around a theme of environmental protection and citizen rights. In this case, we are treated to a bus ride, a 4km walk along an abandoned highway, and a strange, choreographed happening on a hill at the sunset.
The series of fortunate events begins with the bus ride, with local expert Marián Gogola (Mulica) guiding us through the history of the Žilina bypass road’s and tunnel construction (it was supposed to be finished in 2010, and supposedly “at least one direction” of it will be open in the next years). We get off the bus in an urban dystopia of concrete and dilapidated industry – the kind where you might dump a body – and walk around the corner to find a small DJ set from Marlene Ruther, played from a loosely set-up decks on the back of a broken car. Some “easter eggs” are already lighting our path: for example, someone in beach clothes casually strolls through holding a giant umbrella. We are led by another collaborator, the camo-dressed Adam Samuel Marko, and given instructions that we participate at our own risk, and amusingly (I think?), that there are no toilets available for the next 2 hours, but the assistants have plastic bags. This section is left with the motto of the National Highway Association: “Who wants searches for a way – who doesn’t want, searches for a reason”.
