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.

Street Fabrik (tanzschreiber.de)

My last review for my short residency over at tanzschreiber.de here:

 https://tanzschreiber.de/en/street-fabrik/

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.