The Artist is Busy

This is an account of my experience of 512 Hours by Marina Abramovic, the Serpentine Gallery, London, on Thursday 26 June 2014. Each experience will be individual and therefore different. But if you plan to experience it yourself you may want to read this afterwards.

for Tobi

The Queue

I'm welcomed to the Exhibition. There are some rules. No phones, no sunglasses, no bags allowed - they should be deposited into lockers. A woman behind me changes her mind, turns around and leaves.

My hand is stamped with numbers - the title of the show and today's date.

The Antechamber 

A room with lockers not unlike a changing room in a gym.

The Artist is sitting on a bench chatting with a visitor.

I rush in because I have nothing to deposit, having left everything with the baby and partner outside.

The Central Room

I'm caught in mid-stride as I realise that one enters the Exhibition in medias res.

There is a cross-like platform in the room crossed with a cross-like formation of folding Ikea chairs stemming outwards (four in each row).

People are standing in the centre of the platform their eyes closed.

People are sitting in the chairs with headphones on - their eyes mostly closed.

I'm trying to work out the rules.

Will I have to wait for the Artist to put me into this installation when she finally comes in?

How long have these people been here?

I realise some people are coming and leaving on their own - it's a self sustained mechanism, it does not require the Artist all the way through.

There is a young man in the centre who looks very eager as if he has been there since early morning and intends on staying till closing hours - intends on putting his own durational performance in.

A chair in front of me is vacated, the person gets up and hangs the cordless headphones on the back of the chair.

Is there a queue - I try and ascertain whether someone is waiting to sit down - they are not; a woman behind me goes for it.

I take the next available seat.

I put the headphones on - silence.

I notice some people holding hands in the centre of the platform.

A couple - beaming man, gently smiling woman - come into the centre together; perhaps they are holding hands because it's less scary stepping in on their own.

I look at the kind of people attracted by the work.

Artsy-types, lots of really young hopeful faces, some older people, a woman sitting in a chair meditating, palms facing upwards, eyes closed.

Two women step on holding hands - they look like they could be mother and daughter.

Then I realise the woman who I thought was part of the 'couple' is whispering matter-of-factly into the ear of the man - she is part of the show.

She is dressed in black and she is one of many vigilant figures walking around, taking people by the hand.

She then gives the man a rub down his back and chest and leaves. 

I decide the people in black are 'Curators' - people literally 'taking care' of the space and the people in the space.

I speculate whether the Artist has acted as a Director on this occasion and may not be part of it at all.

The Artist has created an Exhibition consisting of the visitors themselves.

She has taken the notion of Presence as a material for art-making from her MOMA show (The Artist is Present) and extended it to the viewers of art - their Presence too can be moulded; they too can be an artwork; they too can find Art within themselves.

The Artist has issued a challenge to the tradition of a passive viewer of Art, to the hierarchical relationship between Artist (as a specially gifted entity) and Viewer (as somehow inferior to the Artist).

The Artist has issued a challenge to the idea that Art and the Experience of it is an element of material reality.

How will this be appreciated by someone who does not believe that the Invisible exists?

Eyes 

Ears

I catch a glimpse of the Artist - a person in black trousers and a white untucked in shirt, her hair braided into a loose hanging 'pletenica'.

She is talking to a visitor standing by the wall - they both look relaxed though the Artist is also in the flow, purposeful and only pausing briefly here before she moves onto someone else.

I'm aware I'm one of the rare few people actually watching what's going on and straining and moving to the left and to the right trying to see; the others are cantering themselves in silence.

I lift the headphones off and I'm suddenly aware of an onslaught of sounds - mostly just feet moving in the space - I wonder for a moment whether it's actually raining outside. 

Those were good headphones, I conclude.

The Room to the Right

White walls and white blinds and rows of chairs with cordless headphones hanging off them, facing the whiteness.

I bump into the Artist on my way in and we exchange smiles and whispered hellos - she looks busy and happy in her work mode.

Her face is open and generous.

I take a look in, I don't fancy sitting in chairs any more so I turn around to go to the other room.

The Room to the Left

I am asked by a Curator on the door if I want to go in.

I say yes.

I'm given a blindfold and some brief instructions.

I put the blindfold on and wait in the doorway.

Someone grabs my right hand, laces their fingers with mine and takes me into the space.

Could it be the Artist?

A cold dry hand.

Should I peek to see?

What clues are there?

We keep walking.

My companion makes a small sigh - it is a woman.

We stop walking.

Will she leave me now?

Do I have the choice not to let her go?

She seems to want me to turn right.

So I do.

We take a few more steps.

My hand brushes the end of a shirt.

Is it a white shirt?

I'm left on my own with the words 'go' or 'go ahead' or maybe 'go along ' or 'go alone' whispered with an accent so I don't know exactly.

I keep walking.

What happens when I want to stop and leave the room?

I keep walking.

I bump into someone who is just standing there.

I realise I can open my eyes a bit and see the floor.

I see I have actually collided with two other people who are standing there.

What next?

Should I touch them?

We just stand there.

I go on.

I keep walking and I sense I'm coming to a wall.

I stop.

Am I being watched?

Has someone seen the fact that I've peeked?

I close my eyes and walk a bit more towards the wall holding the fingers of my hands slightly out so I don't bump into it.

I turn around.

I keep walking.

Someone's hand brushes against mine.

I sense I'm in a well of light and I stop.

I peek again.

I see someone - a man - making very small geisha-like steps in his trainers going past me on my right.

I wonder whether someone will come and get me, and take me out?

I decide to take my blindfold off.

I take a look at the room.

I'm by the exit.

I leave, handing my blindfold back to a Curator who has her hand stretched out for it anyway.

Back in the Central Room

Looking at the Exhibition from a different perspective.

It is a mandala this cross-like structure the Artist had created here out of wood - all the same colour.

The woman in the chair is still meditating her palms facing upwards, her eyes closed, her ears covered with headphones.

I keep my hands behind me on the wall - is that saying 'No' to the Curators?

Then I notice most of the others have taken up the same stance.

An older Asian woman is standing next to the wall on my left wearing John Lennon sunglasses.

But they said no sunglasses allowed! 

She occupies the space in a commanding, charismatic way.

Dressed mostly in creams and whites with white running shoes on.

I choose not to look at her - she could be someone famous.

One of the Curators - a neat looking boy - is leading a woman by the hand who keeps looking back to her boyfriend who follows behind.

They must have just arrived.

She seems a bit disgruntled to be taken in like that.

Her boyfriend follows obediently.

He leads them to the centre and whispers to both of them.

A female Curator comes to me:

'Do you want to go to the centre?' She asks with an accent.

'Yes'.

'Are you sure?'

'Yes'.

We go in.

'Open your feet a bit more and close your eyes'.

We stand there.

I am thinking.

Does my baby want me?

Is he crying?

I look through my third eye.

How do I record all this?

We stand there holding hands.

Will she let go?

Will she be offended if I leave as soon as she leaves me?

She rubs my chest and my back - she centres me.

She leaves me saying:

'Stay as long as you can'.

Stay as long as you can - is that a challenge or an invitation?

Why not 'stay as long as you *want*'?

I can stay longer than I want but I can't stay that long - I have responsibilities.

Why can't I be allowed to write about this while in here like I would at any other exhibition?

What shall I call my account of this -

'One of Marina's 512 hours?'

I peek.

I notice the man who was standing here at the beginning as if he intended to stay the whole day is no longer here.

I turn around and go.

(I notice artefacts for sale on my way out - the Artist's glass for drinking water, a pencil, an umbrella - all with a price-tag... The instructions for drinking water on her glass remind me this is all about mindfulness, though she may have arrived at it via a different route.)

I emerge with the words:

How long was I in there for?

A View from the Bridge (Young Vic)

It has become customary now for Ivo van Hove's work in London to be receiving standing ovations. If it was hardly a surprise for the Barbican audience to have given such a reception to the marathon Roman Tragedies (2010) or vertiginous Scenes from a Marriage (2013), the overwhelming enthusiasm for his latest work at the Young Vic really seals the deal. But as the audience around me was - deservedly - jumping up to their feet I was trying to fathom what they were actually applauding: The play, the director, or the actors?

And here was I on a rare trip to the theatre - the first one on my own since giving birth in December - thinking of my students. Not specific ones, just students of directing I have taught, and the general preconception they tend to arrive with that a good time in the theatre equals  good acting, and that the main job of the director is to facilitate this. When they direct, many of them approach the task by simply trying to bring out the kind of performances they like to see or that they would instinctively create themselves if they were playing those parts. This is a generalisation - and I must admit that there have been honourable exceptions to this - but it's a tendency that crops up frequently enough in practice not to go unnoticed. And I think it is rooted in the British cultural heritage of a theatre director as an actor manager rather than an author in his own right.

As it happens, Van Hove did bring out first class performances from his British cast (cumulatively far stronger perhaps even than the performances of his own ensemble members previously seen here), but the way he did this seems very different than my students might have expected.

I have already written about the way in which Van Hove's approach to text can be distinguished from that of a British director by reference to an intense interest in dramaturgy (http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/changing-scenes/). In his production of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge, Van Hove demonstrates that this approach does not have to be culture specific. It does not have to be radical in terms of staging or the treatment of text itself. It works even with an American play, British and American actors, and a British audience. (British critics seemingly too, though at the time of writing this response I have deliberately not read any of the reviews yet). This deep dramaturgical reading of a play can also be deployed to serve the text in the same way that British directors tend to do, but in this case, everything coheres around what the director and dramaturg have decided the play is about rather than 'what the author might have intended'. And by being directed with such clarity, the actors are truly liberated to shine. Which they do, to a magnificent extent.

So what did Van Hove specifically do with Miller's text?

The world of the play is literally encapsulated by Jan Versweyveld's set - an empty white box whose walls lift up at the beginning to offer a lateral cross section view of the characters' lives. This could be an imaginary courtyard, an enterior, a prison, a morgue and, towards the end, it even offers a chilling prospect of a metaphorical abatoir.

Even though the play opens with naturalistic physical gestures denoting the characters' interactions, the set is bare and, gradually, dramatic action becomes increasingly spare too. The performance is almost entirely underscored with an atmospheric, solemn score.

When the narrator - lawyer Alfieri - literally enters the story half way through, he takes his shoes off to join the other barefoot characters. The rising tensions between characters are underlined in a scene where they all sit around the edges of the set taking turns in speaking their lines to the beat of a metronome. Thus the diegisis enters the mise en scene, divorcing the action from the text and making way for a theatrical metaphor. This will culminate later in a scene where the immigration authorities arrive to arrest Marco and Rodolpho and which is rendered almost entirely verbally with Alfieri reciting the stage directions as the rest of the cast acquire more of a choric function. The moulding of the ensemble into metaphorical stage imagery will ultimately provide a fittingly epic finale to the piece as a whole too.

Miller's own choice to tell the story as a combination of Greek tragedy and Brechtian episodic narrative as well as van Hove's non-naturalistic directorial approach are both conducive towards an acting idiom which is not rooted in psychological realism. So we are at no point in the show invited to respond sentimentally. And yet, the acting is, as I have mentioned above, the most powerful aspect of the production which does eventually elicit a catharsis of sorts. In this way van Hove reveals another possible conception of dramatic character as bearer of metaphorical value rather than a role model for everyday human behaviour. In any case there is nothing everyday about tragic characters such as these. In other words, Eddie Carbone is not an incestuous uncle modelled on someone from Jerry Springer. Instead he becomes an impersonation of a particular flaw - the inability to let go - which may afflict anyone. Catherine is not an innocent victim; she has the wisdom to know what love is and how her uncle should be loved by a woman, or when she should escape his grip to love another man. These characters are interesting not because they are recognisable but because they are irreducible to a stereotype. They are both right and wrong and it takes some deliberation to view their behaviour in terms of the law of nature, as Alfieri suggests.

And so, as Eddie attempted to defend his overprotectiveness of Catherine by reference to the promise he made to her mother, I suddenly thought that he is no different than the theatre directors who feel their job is to honour the text. Stretching the analogy further I wondered what model of directorial intention the rest of these characters might embody. There is Eddie Carbone's tenacity, Beatrice's didacticism, Rodolpho's unconventional, ethereal, enticing ways. Or there is the route of pragmatic straightforwardness and physical prowess of Marco whose method is most searingly summed up in an act of lifting a chair. Finally there is Catherine who entertains our expectations up to a certain extent until she shows us she knows how to fly. And I would liken van Hove's approach on this occasion to hers. Whether or not this might seem a far fetched proposition, I would certainly recommend this show to any theatre student as a primer in how to read a play.

Direction Ivo van Hove 
Design and Light 
Jan VersweyveldCostumes An D’Huys
Sound Tom Gibbons
Dramaturg Bart Van den Eynde 
UK Casting Julia Horan CDG 
US Casting Jim Carnahan CSA

With
Emun Elliott
Phoebe Fox
Michael Gould
Richard Hansell
Luke Norris
Jonah Russell
Mark Strong
Nicola Walker

A homecoming of sorts

Since December last year I have been travelling with a pram in tow, so this usually means up and down the Jubilee line, and a couple of times, exceptionally, to the British library. As a result I'm also returning more to the notion of reading playscripts rather than watching live performances. And one play I have been particularly looking forward to reading has been Biljana Srbljanovic's Princip (This Grave is Too Small for Me).

***

Commissioned by Vienna's Schauspielhaus to be performed as part of the anniversary of the First World War, Biljana Srbljanovic's Princip (This Grave is Too Small for Me) has already been in performance there since October 2013 and last month it also received a Belgrade premiere under the direction of the Sarajevan director Dino Mustafic. As we speak, another production of the play has just opened at the Berlin Schaubuhne http://www.schaubuehne.de/en/produktionen/dieses-grab-ist-mir-zu-klein.html  , directed by the Iranian director Mina Salehpour.

I was initially intrigued by the play on hearing a radio interview with the playwright on the Belgrade radio station Pescanik in June last year (http://pescanik.net/2013/06/emisija-21-06-2013/). Here the playwright shared her extraordinarily intriguing research which she referred to as 'cinematic' on several occasions, as well as her main overriding thesis that the assassin Gavrilo Princip and his teenage collaborators were first and foremost Yugoslavs, rather than Serbian nationalists as recent history has claimed. These aspiring intellectuals, socialists, anarchists and proto-feminists from Bosnia were, according to Srbljanovic's research, seduced and brutally manipulated by a Serbian nationalist secret society which has in various incarnations survived ideologically up until the present day and can also be held accountable for the assassination of the Serbian democratic pro-western prime minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003. Testimonies from the assassins' court hearings are invoked in which Princip for example claims that he is a Yugoslav, and a Serbo-Croat speaker without religious allegiance. This is coupled with imagery of the historical person being kept in the Terezin prison, with his gangrenous right hand hanging off his arm, tied with wires... He had been spared death penalty as he was under age at the time of the trial so he received a twenty year sentence, but he did not survive the intellectual, physical and mental exhaustion much beyond four years. 

Princip (This Grave is Too Small For Me) is not a documentary or a definitive statement about historical people and events. It is not a dramaturgically flawless piece either. But having now read it I feel an urgency to share this experience, especially as it deals with a topic that concerns us all. Srbljanovic was recently invited to a panel discussion on the First World War at Vienna's Burgtheater alongside one of the descendants of the Habsburg family. Why is this kind of discussion not available to us all? Why is Srbljanovic's play not available in English? Why is it that almost no-one in the UK has heard of her work when in the 1990s Srbljanovic's name was often mentioned alongside Sarah Kane's in Germany?

But this brings me to a question which I have perpetually returned to for the twenty years of living in the UK - why is there so little interest in or awareness of any theatre work coming from the Balkans in the English-speaking world? Fifteen years ago, as I grappled with this topic as part of my PHD, I arrived at the conclusion that more often than not the work was too parochial, embroiled in its own often difficult to understand context, demanding of too much auxiliary knowledge... But there have been exceptions too. Croatian dramatist Slobodan Snajder as well as Srbljanovic have had a very successful career in Germany. Another Serbian writer Dusan Kovacevic has managed to spark some interest in the United States. My own efforts have facilitated an introduction into the English speaking world of the Serbian  playwright Ugljesa Sajtinac and some advocacy for the performance work/activism of the Croatian troupe Shadow Casters. So it is not impossible for any of this work to communicate beyond its own context. It is just such hard work for it to be heard/seen/ understood in the English-speaking world...

Vesna Goldsworthy in her book Inventing Ruritania: Imperialism of the Imagination (1998) offers a riveting analysis of the ways in which the Balkans have been colonised by the British imagination - starting from Shakespeare's Illyria, via Hope's Ruritania to Stoker's Transylvania - often as a geographically vague, mysterious and violent place. Despite some women travellers' efforts to bestow some dignity on these places - notably Edith Durham's anthropological research in Albania and Rebecca West's travelogues through Yugoslavia in the first half of the 20th century - by the time of the early 1990s' wars in the former Yugoslavia, all of the past stereotypes resurfaced and regained full currency once again. So why should a Serbian writer be asked to comment on the beginning of the First World War when we all know the story... Why complicate things when the public has barely even got their heads around the existing narrative already... I say this with irony but you only need to read the comments under Srecko Hotvat's article on the Guardian.com this week (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/15/first-world-war-gavrilo-princip-terrorist-freedom-fighter-revisionism) to see that the general discussion is not very far from that standpoint.

As it happens, Srbljanovic's play does not make huge demands on its potential audience. She distils the historical events into a five-hander 'in two parts'. The first part is quite naturalistic - the Berlin director Salehpour has even said the characters' relationships remind her of an American sitcom (http://needleberlin.com/2014/04/03/caught-in-the-act-the-franz-ferdinand-assassination-on-stage/). The second part can be read even as a postdramatic attempt at dealing with the aftermath of the assassination. Interestingly the main assassination we witness in this play is an accidental, unwitting, perhaps even clumsy murder of a young female bystander with whom the assassin happens to have been in love - thus generating a metaphor for the naive 'young love' idealism of the Mlada Bosna organisation to which Princip belonged. 

As I mentioned above, although captivating in its conceit and execution this is not a play which warrants translation principally on its dramaturgical merit alone - but it does have the potential to open discussion, and it's a discussion that should be had all over Europe, including the English-speaking parts. So my final question is: who wants to know what happens next?

Dubrovnik Summer Festival 2013: Father Courage by Boris Bakal

If you have ever had the fortune to visit Dubrovnik, the likelihood is that you have probably crossed paths with at least several guided tours crisscrossing the tiny centre of the old city. Perhaps you even took part in one. You might have taken a walk along the city walls and down the polished cobbles of Stradun, or marveled at the Gothic-Renaissance splendour of its main square – the Sponza and the Rector’s palace, the statue of the Knight Orlando standing guard in between them.

If you happened to be in Dubrovnik between 13-17^th August this year, you might have had a chance to cross paths and even embark on a slightly different kind of city tour. Your trip would have started at 9.30pm, from one of the five locations inside the city walls – ranging from the famous Sponza palace to a lesser known playground under the Minčeta tower or even a quite unnoticeable primary school in the heart of the city – and you would have needed a theatre ticket for it. Depending on which of the five actor-guides you chose to follow, you would have heard stories of a house being moved brick by brick along Stradun, the exact locations of the dwelling places of the Evil Witch and the Sleeping Beauty, some cheeky gossip concerning Orlando’s male love interest, and my favourite – the tale of a trainee pilot performing avio-acrobatics above the city walls while throwing love letters for a woman he loved…

For those of us who grew up in Yugoslavia, Dubrovnik has always had a special kind of magic. Though most of us will have at least one or two of the same kind of holiday snapshots in our family albums – feeding the pigeons by the Onofrije’s fountain, posing on one of the staircases towering over Stradun, eating a massive ice cream or strumming a guitar against the backdrop of shiny white stone and crystal clear blue sea – our personal memories of the place would always be invested with a sense of uniqueness and a specific kind of nostalgia. Some have made friends for life, fallen in love or had their heart broken here for the first time – but most have taken away with them some unforgettable memory. The very first time I have ever seen the sea was by the walls of the old city. I was three years old, we had driven from Serbia through Bosnian mountains in a yellow 2CV, my parents in the front, me and Katica (my imaginary friend) at the back. We were received in the old city with maternal warmth and extraordinary house pride by a woman who had been my father’s landlady when he was a student. As we sank into cool white sheets behind the thick walls that night, I remember feeling that it was all indeed nothing short of a fairy-tale, and no other summer holiday thereafter ever came quite close to that.

Many things have however changed radically since then, not least the fact that the city was shelled and heavily traumatized during the cannibalisation of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s – the first time in its centuries-long history that it ever suffered any military damage. And since then worldwide cruisers have found their way into the city too. There is a palpable kind of neurosis you find among the citizens of Dubrovnik nowadays, who seem as though they’ve had enough, riding on overcrowded local buses, wheeling their worn out supermarket bags around idle thrill-seekers, selling trinkets and day trips in mid-day heat on some measly commission, cursing under their breath. According to one statistic, in 1955 there were 15,000 people living inside the city walls. Since the invasion of foreign investors in search for holiday homes in the last 15 years, this number has dwindled to less than 700. In winter time, when the show is over and all the cruisers have departed, Dubrovnik becomes a ghost town.

It is no wonder then that when the new Dubrovnik Summer Festival artistic director Krešimir Dolenčić took over the annual event in its 64^th year of existence, he made it part of his mission to return the soul to the city. This was also the brief that director Boris Bakal (co-founder and leader of the multimedia platform Shadow Casters) received when he was approached to create a piece for this year’s programme. Bakal’s commission was appropriate, though somewhat unusual in a number of ways. Traditionally, much of the theatre, music, dance and film repertoire of the Dubrovnik Summer Festival takes place in outdoors venues so site-specificity has been a major feature of the festival programming since its beginnings in 1950. However, the city’s Renaissance/ Baroque ambient seems to have always predetermined the programming in favour of the classics – Shakespeare, Goldoni, Moliere and Dubrovnik’s own playwright Marin Držić (1508-1567) forming the core of the repertoire. In its six decades of existence international artists have taken part too, including Helene Weigel, Peter Brook and even, more recently, Jan Fabre. Bakal’s own work has been truly international too, especially since the early 1990s when he left Croatia to work in Italy, Belgium and Austria, eventually reaching the US too. However, his output, characterized by an interest in non-building-based performance, has often been closer to artistic activism, even when it is initially inspired by a classic text. Shadow Casters’ trilogy Process_City, for example, created between 2004-2008, was loosely inspired by Kafka’s The Trial, but mostly motivated by a desire to radically challenge the existing critical reading of the text as being about victimhood, in favour of personal agency.[1]

Bakal’s satirical city tour/promenade performance around Dubrovnik – named Father Courage in a paraphrase of the title of Brecht’s famous classic – is, as pointed out by one of the local reviewers, a kind of Shadow Casters’ ‘best of’. In keeping with Bakal’s previous work, this too is a project driven by a desire to wake up and activate the audience in relation to its everyday reality.[2] This tour is consequently aimed predominantly at the locals, inviting them to participate in a creation of new urban myths. Initially declared ‘dead’ at the beginning of our journey, we are equally arbitrarily declared ‘alive’ again at its end. Whether or not anything has fundamentally changed in this process is entirely up to us – and this is perhaps where the theme of courage ultimately resides. According to Bakal, what connects Brecht’s Mother Courage and his own Father Courage is the question of survival. Mother Courage loses everything in order to survive, she is a conformist, a ‘parody of courage’, claims the director. Father Courage is Dubrovnik itself, who must make his own choices.

The five chosen locations are populated with the total of 14 performers (including the show’s designer Leo Vukelić) who have collecively devised the content of the piece. Five of them – Goran Bogdan, Ivana Krizmanić, Jelena Lopatić, Zrinka Kušetić and Silvio Vovk – are the ‘guides’ while the others remain in each location as the ‘place keepers’. Lasting for over three hours, the five simultaneous stories snake up and down the stairs and through the narrow passageways of the city knitting together intimate confessions, facts, fictions and occasional jokes. Theoretically the audience could choose to follow one of the guides or to stay for the duration of the performance in a single location, thus being given at least 10 potential narrative journeys through the piece (although the latter option would inevitably result in some repetitiveness and perhaps fatigue with the seemingly trivial nature of some of the protagonists’ conflicts). I managed three different journeys between the dress rehearsal and the final night, thus witnessing different strategies the guides had taken in tackling the format and the thematic content of the piece. Eye-candy and TV star Goran Bogdan had chosen to fuse the story of his lost love Cvijeta of Dubrovnik, with the story of a historical figure, a Dubrovnik poetess and salonniere Cvijeta Zuzorić (1552-1648), within a format of a guided city tour. Elfish and thoroughly enticing Jelena Lopatić, on the other hand, takes the concept of our shared experience of being dead for the duration of the show as her departure point and turns her journey into a series of joyous and touching farewells with her beloved family members, played by the audience as unsuspecting stand ins. Though it was not unusual for some uninitiated sleep-deprived residents to heckle the performers through their open windows on account of the ‘accuracy’ of their utterances, Lopatić’s routine also had a nice touch of generosity towards them – such as collecting some cigarettes from the audience members into an envelope and posting them en route through the letterbox of an impoverished local resident called Koke, who she had got to know in the course of her research. While Bogdan’s journey was probably the most entertaining, Lopatić’s was simply the most moving in its humanity. However, it was Ivana Krizmanić’s tale that I found narratively the most satisfying. Originating from the book Curiosities of Dubrovnik, the story revolves around the 1936 real life event of a tragic death of two trainee pilots from the Mostar academy – Slovenian Vaclav J. Helmih and Serbian Svetozar Pantović Panta – as their plane hit the Minčeta tower and then crashed. Krizmanić’s reimagining of this incident focuses on the love story between Helmih and an unknown Dubrovnik girl who she names Marija Miletić and casts as a local primary school teacher. Skillfully and convincingly, Krizmanić weaves all five of the show’s locations as well as the itinerary between them into her historical detective romance, giving us the hope that love may prevail in the end, no matter how painful the losses and how deep the wounds.

Ultimately though, for those who see it, the show has the capacity to adorn the city with a whole new collection of mental snapshots and lyrical imagery: a glimpse of the starry summer sky as you lie on a camp-bed in Sponza, some white laundry air-drying gently in your view, a dance in the square, a marriage proposal by the statue of a peeing lady, a lovers’ bed under the palm leaves in the Jesuits’ church courtyard, a chance to leave your own love message to the city on a mortar wall discovered by this show… It’s a kind of experience that makes you see differently, or a kind that, by taking you off the beaten track, perhaps just makes you see – through your own eyes, like a child again, the simple unspoiled beauties of a place.

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[1] More detail about Shadow Casters’ work is available in two of my recently published books The ContemporaryEnsemble and Theatre-Making.

[2] The show was also programmed into an AHRC-funded Network project entitled ‘Porous Dramaturgy’ and formed a basis for a two-day discussion between the core members of the team: PI Cathy Turner (University of Exeter), Co-I Duška Radosavljević (University of Kent), Hanna Slattne (Tinderbox Theatre, Belfast), Boris Bakal and Katarina Pejović (Shadow Casters) as well as network members Lena Šimić (HOPE University Liverpool) and Synne Behrndt (University of Winchester).

Prague, 31.01.-03.02.2013

Teaching is on my mind a lot these days. After a year and a half of focusing solely on research, well heeled with new ideas and knowledge, one nevertheless comes back to teaching feeling a bit out of touch. It came as a huge shock therefore that a new guideline had been introduced in our institution whereby if a module scores below 4/5 in student satisfaction it is in danger of being pulled. I only discovered this when one of the modules I taught last term came in mid-January with the score of 3,7 – and not without repercussions. One could never take these things too seriously in the past, but as of this year, what the university authorities actually seem to want is to harness positive student scores in order to be able to sell their degrees in a competitive market place. They don’t care how, but high scores must be had. And so, we lowly university lecturers increasingly find ourselves between the pressure from the rock above and the dissatisfaction from the hard place below. How does one teach an arts subject in a place like that?

I must say I was very happy to escape these questions for a few days, taking my group of fourth year students of Directing and a few MAs to Prague.

***

So here we are on the last evening of January, sitting in a small actors’ studio miles away from home, listening to the American theatre-maker Howard Lotker talk about Ivan Vyskočil, a Czech actor, director, writer, psychologist and a one time friend of Vaclav Havel. Born in 1929, Vyskočil dedicated most of his life to theatre and pedagogy although he also studied and taught philosophy and psychology, and in 1957 coined the term ‘text-appeal’ to refer to a genre of literature that he was creating and promoting at the Reduta jazz club/theatre in Prague, before he embarked on a period of ‘non-theatre’ in the 1960s. In the latter decades of the 20^th century Vyskočil taught Authorial Acting and Interaction with the Inner Partner at the DAMU academy, a practice which can be seen as analogous to Devising and Performance Art perhaps, although entirely autochthonous to its own context.

Having studied with Vyskočil, Lotker now teaches the discipline himself, and before he begins one of the basic exercises for Interacting with the Inner Partner with the University of Kent Drama students, he explains the rules. The point is for each student to come out into the space one by one and engage in a spoken dialogue with their inner partner – it is a practice that we should all be familiar with because we have all at some point talked to ourselves. We may have a number of different inner partners and the point is to discover them and summon them to our aid when we might need them to solve a problem of some kind. So we talk to our inner partner for about 2 minutes, but this is timed by the teacher rather than by the student, so to ensure that one keeps going at those times when one would ordinarily want to stop because they hit a crisis point. The idea is to recognize and follow one’s verbal and bodily impulses – in a psychophysical way – to go with them, maybe even exaggerate them. On the other hand, the audience is to pay active attention, in a Stanislavskian way, to the actor’s ‘public solitude’.  Finally, the actor is not allowed to interact with the audience or with any potential props in the room, they should be entirely focused on themselves. Needless to say, one should not plan their behaviour before going up on stage.

At first this is nerve-wracking, but gradually, one by one, the students go up and find their calm within the space, within themselves. It is an exercise which may expose one’s stream of consciousness, one’s playfulness, the wonders of one’s imagination – eventually perhaps one’s own voice as an artist. Howard’s students do this twice each session, two or three times a week, for about a year or 18 months. I wonder whether this could sometimes lead to excessive solipsism or over-indulgence, but Howard reminds us that this is not so much a theatre training technique as a technique for working on the self.

The DAMU students work on themselves in a variety of ways. The following day we witness a dance class presentation of Jiri Havelka’s second year students in Acting for Alternative Theatre and Puppetry. Havelka is also our contact person here and someone who opened the doors to us on this winter showcase of the DAMU students’ work.  The first half of the presentation is a contemporary dance/ physical theatre showcase featuring a variety of etudes ranging from parody, ballet and fighting to some more meditative, more dramatic numbers. The second half of the presentation is a showcase of mazurkas and ballroom dancing routines. This is all taking place in a massive room with a wedding cake ceiling and stained glass windows, which may well have been a genuine ballroom once. Several generations of teachers are present, but the oldest one, who was here since the 1960s doesn’t even know what this room was before it was annexed by the DAMU School (which by the way looks not unlike a Habsburg version of a Tardis – small on the outside, genuinely endless on the inside). One of the younger teachers is there with her toddler, who can hardly resist keeping still to the beat of the music. The toddler is comfortable with the students and all the audience present – even us foreigners – and she keeps giving us pieces of paper to read in between her dancing and snacking breaks. There is a definite sense of community and homeliness here – and certainly no Health and Safety considerations – as most of us are seated on the floor, informally huddled together for the performance.

This is the second day of our stay and following the dancing showcase, Jiri gives us a couple of hours of his own time. He takes us to his palatial office where we can leave our coats to facilitate free movement around the building. We chat about differences between our courses, what we do and within what kind of conditions (limited resources and excessive restrictions on the UK side being a major theme). Being Drama School students, the DAMU actors clearly get a lot more technique classes and this shows.

Jiri then takes us around some of the teaching spaces they use – a scenography room, where we can see a recent exhibition, and eventually his own acting studio where he works with his students. He calls it an ‘atelier’ – a term which I associate with painters, but rarely, until now, with actors. And indeed these rooms are like real artists’ studios with scratches on the floors, peeling walls, cuttings of texts, pictures, interesting quotes or interesting drawings on the walls. There are even a couple of coffee cups with cigarette ends lying around…

I ask Jiri what is the first thing he teaches a group of students when they arrive to him. He sends one student outside the room, asks him to take a walk and come back. When he comes back, the student is asked to repeat exactly what he did when he was outside. This raises issues of observation and the difference between reality and theatre performance, and very quickly we arrive at Brook and his idea that all we need for an act of performance is one person walking across an empty space and one person watching… Jiri then asks people to walk around the space, becoming aware of and exaggerating their own idiosyncrasies; followed by some concentration and movement exercises, and eventually by an exercise where students take it in turns to build a sequence of non-verbal actions by creating a chain of memorized units to which each person adds something and therefore the gestures are repeated/ copied but not the inner meaning of each gesture. This sort of sequencing can occur on a number of parallel lines simultaneously, thus building potential narratives. The most thrilling is the final exercise, where students are paired up to represent a car and a driver – one pair’s aim is to hit the others, whereas the others are to avoid getting hit. This is unusually entertaining to watch too!

The following couple of days are filled with more student presentations and us being squeezed (or not managing to be squeezed) into rooms of very small proportions where we often find ourselves sitting on the floor, well within the performers’ own space. They deal with this beautifully, accommodating and accepting our presence, even interacting with us in the course of the performance. Their etudes range from non-verbal renditions of what looks like unsuccessful nights out, to whimsical fantasies involving picture frames and cake ingredients being spilled all over the floor, to a parody of Stanislavskian acting itself. They have also worked with a Slovakian choreographer Jaro Vinarsky (http://vimeo.com/30961113) and one of their showcases is an improvisation based on his specific combination of the visceral, the dynamic and the meditative.

There are two counts of full frontal male nudity across the two days, numerous counts of haphazard refocusing of lights by climbing on each other’s shoulders in between scenes, opening up and closing of windows to let the air in. This is a working atmosphere, and as one of the British students observed – you can tell that they real ‘own the space’. They respect it too and they also respect each other profoundly. The way in which the students work with each other testifies to a kind of collegial closeness rarely seen in any other contexts. They are comfortable with their own and each other’s bodies – one of the guys adjusting his colleague’s penis as the latter plays a dead body – and there is no discomfort or awkwardness when playing erotic moments with each other. Everything is technically accomplished, professional, honest. Perhaps the biggest giveaway of the secret of their success is a motto hanging on the wall behind the audience’s backs which reads ‘too much EGO will KILL your TALENT’. The process of letting go of one’s ego is a lifetime’s work, of course, but the foundations for it are apparently very well laid in here.

And talking of secrets, there is the whole alchemy-side of Prague as a city worth bringing into this discussion for a moment too. In the wake of the European Renaissance, in the late 1500s, the Habsburg emperor Rudolf II apparently created an alchemists’ hub in Prague, which also occasionally included the Britons John Dee and Edward Kelly and – according to the Alchemy Museum – William Shakespeare too, who supposedly visited Prague as a spy in the company of Kelly and Dee. Later the myth of the Golem of Prague – a creature brought to life from inanimate matter by a 16^th century Prague rabbi becomes part of the local folklore of the occult. Much of the Czech culture is therefore co-opted into this narrative and so is Kafka’s observation, for example, that Prague has claws which make it impossible to leave as well as a lot of Karel Čapek’s work. An example of this is Krakatit, a novel he wrote in 1922, which concerns a scientist who invents a bomb in his laboratory and enters a state of delirium. This was made into a film in 1947 and duly interpreted as a story about the nuclear bomb at the time. In the rendition of a present day MA student at DAMU – which we also saw as part of our programme – the story becomes a sassy James Bond spin off.

It was not until we reached the airport that I was reminded again of the dreaded evaluation forms – a bunch of which I was given on my departure for my fellow travelers to fill in. What did they get out of the trip? What I witnessed was an image of a group of young adults being curious, being open, enthusiastically responding to their surroundings, asking questions and having fun. What the form-filling exercise forced out of them was, sadly, a group of consumers whose experience is measured by numbers from 1-5. No offence to my students but: what kind of alchemy does it take to make consumers into artists? This is a question my Inner Partner must find an answer to.

Zagreb - Festival novog cirkusa 7-11 November 2012

Circus as the Time and Space for Thinking

The Thinking Time

It is a Saturday morning. Thirty-year old Finnish magician Kalle Hakkarainen is sitting at a part baroque/part mdf table covered with fruit and sweets at the office of the New Circus Festival in Zagreb, Croatia, surrounded by an international group of journalists. In a flash of inspiration, they want to know whether he is nostalgic or not?

The night before Hakkarainen had presented a technologically elaborate performance about a tiredness-induced car crash under the title Nopeussokeus (Speed Blindness/Motion Blindness) to a relatively underwhelmed, though sufficiently hypnotized, audience. The hypnotic effect was largely the work of the music and sound designer Samuli Kosminen in combination with Hakkarainen’s own visual projections conjuring up the onset of sleep at the wheel of a moving car. In just under thirty minutes, the piece had set out to explore the moment of fatal impact from different points of view, though the moment at times seemed to stretch into infinity or fold back into itself in a dream-like way, leaving the artist’s intention generally unclear and the critics generally indifferent.

It all begins to make a lot more sense when in this impromptu press conference Hakkarainen reveals his departure points. Largely disillusioned by contemporary magic, the Finnish wiz kid often resorts to history books for his inspiration. It was the claim that drama and magic cannot be successfully combined, made by the English magician David Devant about a century ago, that prompted Hakkarainen to attempt such a feat. A newspaper article about a woman in a car crash provided a dramaturgical framework for the reinvention of an old trick in which a rope can be seen to penetrate the body of the performer. And a poem about car ‘motion blindness’ by Harry Salmenniemi provided additional semantic content for Hakkarainen’s projections.

‘I like to create a time and space for people to think’, Hakkarainen declares. It might have been some sleight of hand that made me miss what he said in response to the question of nostalgia, but it certainly prompted me to think about it too, in more ways than one.

There is the dimension provided by the history and the form of circus itself. Only two nights before we had seen Le Cirque Invisible – the third edition of a repertoire, created (in 1990) by Jean-Baptiste Thierrée and Victoria Chaplin who had in fact been working together since 1969. Threaded through this show is a sense of homeliness and enchantment, which could easily cast any audience member into his or her five-year old self. Whether it’s Thierrée’s Christmas Day-style close up magic or Chaplin’s spells which turn common household items into mythical creatures and elaborate wearable musical instruments – this is the kind of spectacle that thrives on poeticizing the mundane in a simple, child-like way. An inherent emphasis on eccentric playfulness and mesmerizing inventiveness rather than sheer technical prowess, despite the fact that its acts are decades old, results in a show which is timeless rather than dated and therefore nostalgic in its form more so than its content. I felt the way a five year old might feel at any point in time, rather than the way I felt when I was actually five years old watching a dancing elephant in a big top and waiting impatiently for the clowns or the trapeze lady in sequins to come back again.

So then there is also the personal dimension. I am a domiciled Brit, at this moment in time on a visit to Croatia – a country which was once part of what I considered home. Incidentally, on my flight here I was reading a book which informed me that nostalgia was in fact a term invented by a seventeenth century Swiss doctor to designate a malady of extreme longing (algia) for a return home (nostos). Even though in the twenty-first century the phenomenon of nostalgia, with its intrinsic tendency to sentimentalize the past, has acquired connotations that can be seen as politically problematic, it is nevertheless a condition that must also be somehow validated. Not least because, traditionally, members of the circus – whether personally nostalgic or not – are very often displaced persons themselves, and so are, increasingly, a lot of the rest of us. Rather helpfully though, writer Svetlana Boym attempts to redefine nostalgia not as a conservative longing for a particular place in the past, but as a desire to escape the given time-space continuum ‘sideways’ – as ‘a strategy for [the displaced persons’] survival, a way of making sense of the impossibility of homecoming’ (http://www.iasc-culture.org/eNews/2007_10/9.2CBoym.pdf, p.9). This understanding of nostalgia makes it possible to make sense of much more than that. But more of that – later.

The Thinking Place - context

This time and space for thinking, it is worth noting perhaps, was taking place on day three of the ‘middle part’ of the Zagreb New Circus Festival 2012. Taking the form of the classic circus act of a lady being sawn into three parts, the eighth edition of the international festival which had began spontaneously thanks to the endeavours and personal savings of the former journalist Ivan Kralj in 2005, was on this occasion programmed in three distinct sections some weeks apart. As in most previous years, there was an element of making virtue out of necessity in coming up with the three part programming concept, as Kralj wished to include a number of artists with availabilities very far apart. Out of this also emerged the theme of ‘new magic’ for this year’s festival, and the festival brochure is suitably arranged to function as a magic trick. Due to limited means and a lack of support, in previous years, the festival has taken the form of a ‘one day festival’, or a mock election campaign in the year when it coincided with general elections. As a result the festival has acquired a considerable audience following even though it also maintains a certain underground mystique. In the absence of adequate local support, Kralj has struggled to bring it to a close, and has programmed the last festival event for this year to take place on the much publicized doomsday of 21.12.12.

The delegation of ten international journalists to which I belonged on this visit to Zagreb featured representatives from France, Belgium, Romania, Germany, Finland, Spain and the UK, and we were privileged to also have a programme of talks and discussions framing our experience of the work we saw. Forming part of an EU-funded initiative designed to increase critical understanding of the genre of circus, the scheme named Unpack the Arts, run by Yohann Floch, is a two-year programme of 12 residencies which will have taken place at 12 different circus festivals around Europe. The Zagreb residency is the third in the first series.

Following day one of the residency which created a space for general introductions of the hosts and the guests, and day two which provided a useful overview of the ‘traditional’, ‘new’, ‘contemporary’ and several other proliferating circus trends, much of the day three therefore provided the time and space for thinking.

Unfortunately, Hakkarainen’s piece did not do this for me on its own terms without the artist revealing his cards, and therefore it might be seen to have failed in one of its key intentions. But then again, how many people would really expect this kind of a proposition from a circus piece? Thus, what this piece drew attention to was also a deliberate blurring of the boundaries of the genre to which it purportedly belonged. Hakkarainen confessed that he premiered this piece in an art gallery but has also performed it at theatre and dance festivals allowing it to be framed by the inherent viewing conventions of those genres as well.

On the night of its performance Nopeussokeus (Speed Blindness/Motion Blindness) was, interestingly, presented as the second part of a double bill with a seven-minute extract from a piece called Vibrations by the French ‘magie nouvelle’ company La Cie 14:20, which, in contrast, claimed ‘kinaesthetic empathy’ as the desired element of their relationship with the audience. Performed by a former Robert Wilson collaborator François Chat, and costumed by Jean-Paul Gaultier, the extract named Gravitation was a rather anti-climactic etude featuring a gravity-defying stick. The characteristic slowing down of the motion of the piece was intended to change the perception of time and affect the breathing pattern of the audience apparently resorting to some of the principles of traditional magic which seek to manipulate the observer’s perception. Whether or not this would have worked for the piece as a whole was hard to tell from this short extract. However, what was clear was that both La Cie and Hakkarainen’ areas of motivation were a far cry from the simple childlike enchantment engineered by the likes of Le Cirque Invisible, or the appreciation of human virtuosity that may have marked more traditional circus forms. What do they all have in common then as circus companies, if anything at all?

Circus as a Thinking Space

In the afternoon of the third day of the residency, French critic Anne Quentin proposed that a distinguishing characteristic between circus and other performing arts is its conception of performance space as a three-dimensional quantity. Circus artists, in her view, defy gravity in a different way from dancers for example. In circus, the horizontal plane of the stage is conceptually replaced by the notion of space as ‘volume’. This is filtered through the three main aspects of circus: madness, balance and confinement. I wondered to what extent the word ‘madness’ was a suitable translation in this context of the more broad-ranging French ‘folie’ (until I subsequently read that Jean-Baptiste Thierrée attributes the origins of his work to his collaboration with Felix Guattari in the Clinique de la Borde). But bearing in mind the notion of ‘folie’ as a broad psychological malady, it could be argued that these three are the challenges encountered by a displaced person too: the threat of a loss of sanity (as found by the seventeenth century Swiss doctors), the necessity to maintain a balance between cultures, and the desire to escape the given time-space continuum ‘sideways’. In her book, Boym further noted that nostalgia was a diagnosis of the age of a ‘poetic science’, made at a time when the two disciplines were still intertwined and when the mind and the body were treated together. But as we enter a post-Cartesian age, it is no wonder that nowadays, having displaced itself from the big top into a black box, circus itself aims to be both the realm of the mind and the body – of mental activity and kinaesthetic empathy. That same afternoon, the Croatian critic Nataša Govedić emphasized the inherent ability of circus ‘to change the appearance of reality’. Could its current form of authorship be seen as ‘a strategy for survival, a way of making sense of the impossibility of homecoming’?

It was the final performance of our residency that effectively brought into focus the potential of circus to integrate the cerebral and the kinaesthetic, the poetic and the philosophical, the ridiculous and the sublime. Performed by the Belgian-based Italian Claudio Stellato, this act with a man, two pieces of furniture and a red carpet, performed in complete silence, managed to achieve much more than some of its more elaborate, flashy, hi tech predecessors in this festival did. Taking another basic trick from the history book, the piece exploits the potential for slapstick humour contained within the relationship between a man and a seemingly self-willed object. At the other end of the scale this show contains a Beckettian suggestion that our whole life is an obsessive rehearsal of an escapism act – initially from the cradle, eventually from the coffin. Following a fifty-minute struggle, the closure arrives as our hero glides – magically – into thin air, elevated above his earthly concerns. The title of the piece, L’Autre, alludes to the dual – conscious and unconscious – nature of our endeavours, but also more literally to its technical dependence on another human behind the scenes, rather than on technology per se. So after all, what makes circus interesting is the wonder of being a human being – now, that’s something to think about, over and over again. 

Kotor Festival of Children's Theatre 1-10 July 2012

Although images of Montenegro have recently been flooding the travel sections of mainstream media, there are still a few well-kept secrets about this part of the world you will only discover if you actually set foot in this marvelous landscape of mountain peaks mirrored in the clear blue waters of the Adriatic sea. Montenegro is one of the smallest states of the former Yugoslavia, with only just over 650, 000 inhabitants and some of the most impressive natural beauty in Europe. Having just attended a children’s theatre festival in the historic walled city of Kotor, I would also say that this is where you will find one of the best tourist packages for young families. Not least because McDonald’s has actually not yet reached this newly independent country.

Taking place over the ten days just before the official start of the holiday season on 10 July, the Kotor Festival of Children’s Theatre has become a regular fixture in the city since its inception in 1993. The festival opens and closes with a ceremonial exchange of the city keys entrusted by the city mayor with a children’s representative for the duration of ten days. Meanwhile, the fully pedestrianised city itself is adorned with public art created for and by children themselves. Founded in the midst of the Yugoslav war, the festival has represented an investment in hope and a better future, and is certainly coming of age beautifully. Its current director, Petar Pejaković, took the reins three years ago, placing a greater emphasis on a rejuvenation of the festival structure, and putting the children at the centre of it. The awards jury traditionally consisting of experts and elders has almost entirely been replaced by a jury of children, aged 8 to 13, who meet every day to discuss what they had seen, and their impressions are eventually summed up to give out prizes. Children are also heavily involved as volunteers in the running of the festival and in numerous accompanying workshops and activities taking place throughout the day.

The 20^th Festival has this year had the most ambitious programme yet, with over 70 scheduled events. The main performance programme has featured guests from Italy, Greece, Russia and Zimbabwe (in amongst others), with the genres ranging from classical theatre to puppetry, dance and street performance. The workshops on offer, delivered by artists from Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Montenegro, have involved word-play, animation, stained glass window-making, acting, boat painting, film-making and dance for children with learning difficulties. Events have ranged in suitability from those aimed at age ‘4+’ to those targeting teenagers.

Although just a few days before the start of the festival Montenegro received a date for the negotiations regarding its entry into the EU, the place is as yet unencumbered by the tyranny of health and safety, political correctness and the neo-liberal capitalism’s tendency to turn us all from citizens into consumers. Most of the events are completely free and the ticket prices for the main festival shows are sold at 2 Euro, ensuring impressive attendance even in the late hours of the hot Mediterranean evenings. The pedestrianised city ensures free and safe movement of children between various festival events, often unaccompanied by any adults, and the local sponsor Jugopetrol has made it possible for each child to be given a free ice cream after the shows. The Kotor Festival of Children’s Theatre is therefore one of the last examples of a cultural event where children are able to seize an opportunity to act as autonomous, responsible and integrated members of a community. Jury member Marija Todorović told us that her favourite thing about the stunning city of Kotor is that she knows every man and woman who lives there, while one night we witnessed how some kids who decided to sit on top of the backs of their seats received a fillip on the head each from a stranger sitting behind them and struggling to see the stage.

The most striking feature we observed of the local junior population is their maturity, curiosity and articulacy. A local girl, Lana, who we met in an animation workshop let slip that she runs a highly popular Youtube channel herself called Splashkittyartist, which regularly receives fan art from other users. But probably the most convincing testament to the taste and wisdom of this year’s children’s jury was their ultimate decision in awarding this year’s festival grand prix. Despite worries of the local adults that the Merlin Puppet Theatre’s dark satire Clown’s Houses would be inappropriate in content for pre-teen audiences, the show did in fact provoke a lively and interesting discussion between the artists and the 8-13 year olds constituting the jury. Hailing from Athens, the show in question, named after and framed by an Edith Sitwell poem, consists of five stories about anxieties of modern life – including loneliness, greed and despair – which often culminate in some form of a violent ending. Without much prompting, the jury understood that the show offered hope in the form of engendering the responsibility for a better life with the audience.

Being in between its 18^th and 21^st birthday, the Kotor Festival for Children’s Theatre is quite aptly a fine mixture of untainted enthusiasm and youthful maturity, and it should certainly be added to your theatre tourism itinerary before the McDonald’s gets there.

Festival Director Petar Pejaković and his daughter Marta. Photo: Suzanne Worthington

Behind the scenes of Hungarian puppetry show Knight Laszlo, taking place on one of the public squares, underneath a festival-related art installation. Photo: Duška Radosavljević

Member of the Festival organizational team Tomislav Žegura talks about the Kotor Festival of Children’s Theatre; Video: Suzanne Worthington.

Member of the Festival organizational team Jelena Krstić-Djonović introduces a wordplay workshop for 6-year-olds. Video: Suzanne Worthington.

Tuscany/Rome 22 March -29 March 2012 (THE FENCE 16)

What a week! Probably worth two or three weeks rolled into one - and that's only on the food front...

Facts first: I am here with the Fence - an 'international network of playwrights and people who make playwriting happen'. The network exists largely thanks to the enthusiasm and generosity of its members who find ways to keep it going by facilitating meetings around interesting occasions. The Fence 16 is facilitated by Claudia Della Setta, an actress and theatre director based in Rome and Tel Aviv and a founder member of Afrodita Compagnia. The Fence 16 consists of two phases - 1) a retreat in Claudia's house in Tuscany and 2) a residency with Afrodita Compagnia at Teatro Valle - or more precisely Teatro Velle Occupato - in Rome. Since its occupation began in June 2011, in protest against planned privatisation of the theatre, theatre workers who inhabit the building have made opportunities available for companies to take artistic directorship of the theatre on a week by week basis. Afrodita Compagnia's week is 26th March - 2 April. Afrodita have chosen a theme for their week: 'Masculine, Feminine, Love, Resistance'. A play called Non written in English and French by two Fence members Sara Clifford and Denis Baronnett will be translated by Claudia into Italian and read as part of the residency. There will also be a presentation from the Arab-Hebrew Theatre of Jaffa.



Phase 1: Tuscany




Beautiful sunny mornings. The smell of freshly brewed coffee. Distant horizons lined by Italian Umbrella Pine trees. Claudia's family holiday home is a proper Italian family home anticipating several generations of the same family around dinner tables and under the same roof. Around a dozen of us are comfortably accommodated here, and several are staying in an agriturismo up the road. The talk of theatre and playwriting is interlaced with occasional table-football playing, sunbathing and cooking - a single internet dongle doing the rounds between individual computers. Because The World Theatre Day is due on 27th March, Fence member Doug Howe is making a film which will also be screened at Teatro Valle. He splits up John Malkovich's official message for that day and asks us to deliver individual lines one by one in our own languages - in addition to English, French, Spanish and Italian, we also have Swedish, Bulgarian, Serbian and Hebrew in the mix. Doug picks interesting locations for us in and around the house - I end up squinting into the sun, my incidental anxiety-generated spikiness underlined by massive cacti behind me. Our Spaniard Beatriz Cabur, meanwhile, gets to compete with a smouldering flame in her frame.

Sarah G. and I had been tasked with making sure the work part of the meeting gets done - so we at first try to subtly keep things on track, make sure everyone gets a go at speaking about themselves and their work, schedule in some works in progress among members and allow space and time for Claudia, Sara C., Denis, Hilary and Sofia to work towards their presentation of Non. Very few of the people present have actually met each other before, even though the work on Non is a continuation of two previous Fence meetings. Sara C. is only able to join us two days after we have arrived, so she has to be brought up to date with what the group has been up to. At times it is very hard keeping things the British side of chaotic. Both Sarah G. and I do our best, though at times I realise the only option I have is to play the bad cop...

We get two readings out on Saturday afternoon: 1) An extract from Hotel Project which was written and directed by Beatriz and Doug in New York as an interactive performance and is now being re-written as a musical. They test it on us as they try and decide on the form of the piece and its revised ending. 2) Sarah G.'s monologue Red Shoes was originally presented last month at Theatre 503 as part of an Agent 160 showcase. Sarah is on the lookout for other fairytales to adapt and suggestions come in thick and fast especially since everyone is bowled over by the monologue (featuring a South London single mother caught up in the whirlwind of consumerist desire as it erupted rather violently last summer during the London riots and led her to a fatal pair of red Louboutin shoes).

Every evening we manage to also get in some heated discussions on our set topics of love, resistance and gender politics (though these are often quite spontaneous), and also on cultural difference - as this is quite a prominent feature of our group. But we also end up cooking some fantastic food for each other. Kazem's Iranian potato galettes (with whisky) prompted Beatriz to add a recipe section to a library she has been building during our Tuscany meeting so that all the references we invoked in our discussions could be subsequently accessed at our leisure.

On the morning of the last day we finally hear the complete reading of Non - a rare privilege as the Roman audience will only get extracts. The play concerns a fifty year old working class English woman N. who is about to commit suicide at the beginning of the play, but is interrupted in the act by the ghost of Sid Vicious who draws her attention to a TV ad which is playing a number N. had written with her French punk band in the 1970s. This prompts her to make a journey back to France and down the memory lane... There are moments of great wit and fantastic writing in the play, and the whole thing is all the more impressive being done as a joint project between two writers whose knowledge of each other's languages is limited.

We briefly vote for our favourite scenes and then disperse on our individual last minute missions. Doug, Beatriz, Sarah G., and I are taken to the beach by Fred, who then drives back for Mia and Sara C. Fred is our hero in every respect! Sarah G. and I do a beach version of her Ashtanga routine - which my body is extremely grateful for for a few days to come. Doug and Beatriz disappear in a long walk. Mia eventually disappears to Sienna (thanks to Fred who drives her to the station) and six of us are neatly packed into Sofia's four-seater car and taken back just in time before she has to drive back to Rome.

And then it rains.



Phase 2: Rome

'Che casino!' - I believe is the right phrase in Italian for how our day started on Monday morning. The bus driver who is taking us ten minutes down the road to the local train station at 15 Euro a head is too early - not everyone's even arrived from their agriturismo bedrooms, let alone had coffee or breakfast. There's commotion about some male abuse of female toiletries. And then, when we are all finally together, our luggage on the bus and our bums on the seats, Fred and Denis are frantically climbing over the gates back into the house to retrieve Denis's computer he had left behind.

At the station, Sarah G. has her credit card stuck in a ticket vending machine, Beatriz has her money swallowed up and some of our travellers don't even manage to get a ticket at all. Once on the train, the conductor has to spend so much time with us solving our individual ticket issues he eventually lets Denis travel without one. As we draw nearer to Rome, conversations about gelato ensue.

Rome is hot, summery almost. Sarah G. takes us expertly around the streets of Rome, walks us all the way from Termini station to our destination Teatro Valle Occupato. Almost immediately, Fred procures and supplies us with the theatre wi fi password. We are back in the civilisation. Claudia and Sofia turn up and take us for lunch to a local restaurant which has a deal with the occupiers. After lunch, I have my very first coffee of this year! We are in a cafe which does the best coffee in Rome - and I can now vouch that this is indeed the case.

In Rome we are joined by Saskia from Holland and later in the evening by Jonathan Meth.

In the days that follow we try and work out exactly what is going on in Teatro Valle on the level of pragmatic detail. This is the story I manage to infer from all the information I have gathered:

In June 2011, theatre workers at Teatro Valle staged a three day protest against the decision to make the previously state owned theatre a private enterprise of the city of Rome. Built in 1727, this was a theatre with a rich history - its current occupiers characterise it as a 'house of revolution': this was the first theatre where women performed on stage in Italy, political prisoners were hiding here during the Second World War, a fight broke out around the premiere of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author here and - 'most importantly' as they say jokingly - this was the theatre where Mozart fucked in the boxes! The boxes are a distinct feature of the theatre whose auditorium consists entirely of boxed up spaces accommodating four chairs each. There are three tiers of boxes with 27 boxes in each tier, and a fourth additional one with 54 individual seats (without divisions between them). These became our red velvet bedrooms during our stay - just big enough for a single blow up mattress, a book and a bottle of water.

The occupation of the theatre has continued since June last year till the present day. Though the occupiers look tired - big black bags under there eyes - they keep going and are tireless in their attempts to explain to us what they are doing and make us feel comfortable in their midst. So, 'occupare', they tell us, has two meanings in Italian - 'to occupy' and 'to take care'. For them the notion of 'taking care' is a defining principle of their occupation, and interestingly the occupiers have predominantly been women. There is apparently a Valle Occupato baby on the way too... Politically, they are keen to develop a model of governance that is entirely from the bottom up rather than top down. This means that they do not vote in order to make decisions, they discuss issues until they all reach a consensus on what to do. This is taking time but they seem comfortable with the idea. Currently they are writing their Statute, although they have defined five principles which they all feel passionate about: Agora (forum), Training, Vocation, Common Good and Eco-Sustainability. They have had messages of support from Ostermeier and Mnouchkine, and they have also included major Italian figures in their workshops and forum discussions. One of their first invited speakers was the Italian philosopher Federica Giardini and the playwright Fausto Paravidino. Currently, the occupiers have one clear aim - to raise the 250,000 Euro they need in order to become a foundation and therefore acquire a legal status. So far, they have collected 80,000.

As some of the Fence members sit around in the foyer on our last day together informally reading Trevor Griffiths's play The Party chosen by Jonathan Meth as our present to the Valle, the occupiers spontaneously gather around us. They tell us that they wish to foreground playwriting and to change the system by which the Italian playwrights have had their work commissioned up until now through contests, judged by independent panels. We were told of an informal survey which highlighted that, among 122 playwrights, the only thing they had in common was the experience of solitude - clearly a far cry from the kind of work being done in the UK and elsewhere to integrate the playwright into the rehearsal process, or indeed even from the Fence whose raison d'être is networking between writers... Another one of their concerns, inspired by Giardini, is to address the notion of language and its decolonisation from recent history. Terms such as 'meritocracy', 'populo', 'liberta', they tell us, have been completely contaminated by Berlusconi's government...

It is interesting that my journey through Europe started with the conference in Ghent where I spoke about the power of theatre to create a community - and to resurrect and rehabilitate that term after its post-communist demise. At the end of my trip I was confronted with three more models of community-building and reinvention of governance models:

1) There's Valle Occupato, genuinely doing things differently. Reinventing ways of relating with each other, with their culture, with their audience. Allowing things to grow organically. Believing in the possibility of genuine consensus - whatever it takes.

2) There is the Arab-Hebrew Theatre of Jaffa. 'An island of sanity' as they call themselves. A group of artists braving some serious storms in order to bring together the communities otherwise divided by history and politics. They introduced themselves to us as people who sometimes violently disagree with each other but who still love and respect each other. They agree to disagree, and they believe in the importance of being together.

3) And then there's the Fencee, which Beatriz, on her first encounter with it, summarised as an 'elephant'. Its constituent parts are different, it looks different from different angles, its members don't even all have a language in common, and yet it is an entity.

All three would suggest that we are moving towards a modus operandi which is closer to an improvisation than a tightly directed show. Or in the words of Jean-Luc Nancy, we are moving towards 'being together' rather than essentialised 'togetherness'.