"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.