More or Less Infinity

CIE 111
More or Less Infinity
Aurleian Bory and Phil Soltanoff

written by Nataša Tepavčević

The hybrid play, the visual spectacle that opened 42Bitef08 in Belgrade, was made by Phil Soltanoff, the MAD DOG theatre troupe director and Aurelieane Bory, the CIE 111 art director. The object of their theatre study is line as the art element, a time line, a line which turns into a body gaining a shape whereas the performance itself is a part of a collaborative project called Space Trilogy which had a common task of exploring the language of gestures and choreography.
In the first part of the performance, a line made of plastic hose, a thread and light effects dances-draws on its own, while in the second part it becomes accompanied by actors-acrobats whose shapes are dematerialized by their stage movements.

The coined phrase more or less infinity stems from two types of discourse. One is taken from mathematics and is based upon the definition that line goes from minus infinity to plus infinity, while the other one speaks by the language of abstract modernist art. The authors of the performance use the logic of creating an abstract painting as a method which is somewhere between dance, circus, theatre…

The performance does not aim at representing some particular situations or events, states or individuals. We are faced with a, so called, universal, non-verbal language of spectacle which offers fun for the eyes, as Schlemmer has put it. Is it the same language used by Bitef as a specific form of social and institutional spectacle? Can we use the visual-theatre spectacle to detect the very qualities Bitef would like to be recognized by? We are aware of the fact that gestures always belong to politics as well as to aesthetics, i.e. that there is no such thing as non-political aesthetics, no matter how much it might be trying to hide its political quality.

What kind of gesture does the performance deal with, anyway? Mechanics of body movement and psycho-motor coordination are structured in accordance to the rules of mathematical constructing or similar to the procedures which are used to create an animated character in digital technology. An image of digital era – as a social era which does not fit within any context or any historical moment – is created by the use of abstract painting. Visual art is introduced into the theatre art by means of minimalism, constructivism and mostly by means of optical art based upon illusionist principles. After we have clearly understood the stylistic fusion, we realize that we can neither feel nor envision the spectacle which is happening in front of us and because of us, no matter how much it is required by the form itself. Actually, the network of instructions, knowledge we possess prevents us from simply enjoying because the joy as such does not exist. What we felt, saw and read is what we had been educated to perceive as important.


Asked to reveal the message of the performance, the authors said: “There isn’t any, just plunge into pure sensation”, to which I would add: Plunge into pure sensation as if it was possible.

Who talks about soul anymore?

Alvis Hermanis, the director of the performance “Sonja” (based on Tatiana Tolstoy’s story) shown on 22nd September at Bitef, thinks that the reality exists only in the real life whereas theatre is an illusion, mimicry. In this performance, he shows the “hoax” by the means of an actor’s explicit transformation in front of the audience. Male actor is in the role of Sonja – a woman. Hermanis already presented his attitude in the performance we saw at Bitef several years ago, “Long life”, also dealing with problem of time, personal development and ageing. The metamorphosis takes place on the very stage where the actors are being masked into their own fathers.
However, giving a female role to a man confirms yet another Hermanis’s belief – that actors are much better in playing a thought, concept of a woman whereas actresses put in too much of the personal and get involved into psychological analyses. The transformation of the man into Sonja, who resembles a sad clown, serves simultaneously as an allusion to the experience that people go through in the course of altering their real identity. Wishing to create something new, they dismantle it to the point of destruction.
The other line of the performance follows the tragicomic tone of the fabulous story. A person who indulges in any kind of sensitivity receives punishment, is exposed to ridicule, and turned into a clown, a tragicomic character. While he is reading the text from a love letter written by an unknown person Sonja is in love with (as a victim of a prank) the other actor is brutally laughing. The permanent contrast between the main character’s sensitivity (albeit clumsy) and the cynical mockery of it, creates an unusual amalgamate which turns tragic – by the means of comic – into a nauseating experience. The hilarious scene itself in which the narrator gets smudged with a cake seems shocking. In that scene, Sonja is stuffing a chicken, putting her hands deep into its inside, taking intestines out; the sight acquires symbolic power: the repugnance of the world in which Sonja is not the only inhabitant.
However, this shock and brutality, at times – where the director uses hyper-realistic details after an ironic severance from the reality as well as the fact that he lures the audience by the space and non-verbal expression – create the astonishment offered to the audience of Bitef as a unique experiment.

Ana Isaković

The Second Act Giovanni: Leporello, Leporello!... Signore? (recitative secco)

The Second Act Giovanni: Leporello, Leporello!... Signore? (recitative secco)
Don Giovanni is thinking up new conquests. He exchanges clothes with Leporello and they venture a new action.


Bojana Cvejić directed and showed Mozart’s Don Giovanni at this year’s Bitef and, calling it a composition of body, sound, light and movement, she intentionally made a distance from opera – the classical product of bourgeoisie. As if she used the very definition to point out to the contents which were neglected by the old opera in favour of voice spectacle yet which are recognized by the new opera as the crucial way to make its concept relevant in the contemporary society. Despite the opera being present all along, it lightly moved around the Belgrade fair hall. It was as seductive as Don Giovanni. It toyed with our expectations, it made us chase it, search for it and recognize it in the most varied modes of its existence.

But why did we want it so much? If we could dissect the desire/opera we could obtain information about its new body. We would see the opera flowing through the vein of the audience and revitalizing it; we would see the light impulses change the perception of the space it moves through… we would see its architected structure made possible due to the specific space treatment. We would detect its parasite dependence on the elements of the reality. Furthermore, we would notice a gap existence, a scare of a subject, of the other, shown through orchestra division and the very scenes. We would see that the opera speaks a false language but that, during the process of interpreting, it visually shows ideological influences subconsciously brought in by opera. Actually, we would notice many mechanisms disturbing and transforming the old body of an opera into a new age product. But we would still not discover what is it that it contains that we can never get enough of…

In the course of XX century, many authors were systematically trying to ‘kill’ opera but never managed. Unlike those, Bojana Cvejić gave it a new figure which she put into new clothes, shaped it with demanding physical practices and left it somewhere between reality and fiction. Thus she opened new possibilities of interpreting it and offered an unforgettable opera experience to the audience. She let them get under the skin of the opera and discover the making of unyielding life forms out of the well-fit mechanisms for meanings’ creation.

Jovana Dukić

Hansel: Maybe eternal, but more or less forever

This year, Bitef danced at the very beginning. It was clumsy, as if done by a beginner or maybe it was just an impression caused by the fact that it was at the very beginning. Both dancing performances left an impression of inexperience. Does it mean that the only criterion regarding selection of the performances for the main programme is how spectacular they are? Is it really enough to use nothing more than well-made optical illusions, superficially used new technologies or great names from the world of choreography?
Maybe forever may be based on a tangible topic – unlike the attractive performance we saw at the beginning – but it does leave a gap filled with unanswered questions. The questions are various – form those concerning Love as a topic and possibility to present it by the means of contemporary dance, to those dealing with types of links between the two approaches to dancing. Eventually, it all comes down to one or two questions – what is the point of this performance and why is it at Bitef? In order to promote a young artist on non-European markets? Is it the very coming of Meg Stuart to Belgrade? Okay, but, couldn’t she have come with some other performance?
Another omission was made regarding the announced time spent on preparation of the performance. It said, five days. The audience was barely reassured by Meg Stuart herself. And I am sure I am not the only one who thinks that Maybe forever was being created yesterday, spontaneously, during the performance. Anyhow, whether it was made for five days, two months or it was completely improvised (which I would cheerfully support), Maybe forever will be remembered by Niko Hafkenscheid's music and the fact that Meg Stuart came to Belgrade.
In the end, Bitef wouldn't be what it is if there hadn't been any mistakes on the part of the organisation. What ever has happened, you wonder? Nothing much. Some of you will probably not even understand the remark. But, isn’t it unusual that there was no translation during the performance? I am aware that the (post)modern society imposes computer literacy and knowledge of English but wasn’t that gesture a sign for the so-called less educated that Bitef is not for them? Mr. Bitef, is that how you imagine emancipation?

Dušan Milojević

More or less

42Bitef08 began in a more or less usual way – the grand opening in Centre Sava in front of, give or take, 3000 guests and, naturally, with a dancing performance which, more or less, have been coming to Bitef from France. It is, more or less, a spectacle similar to those performed in Berlin by Blue man Group which is, more or less, the most popular product of German pop culture.
The opening itself was, more or less, not a pompous one. Milena Marković opened the festival in a, more or less, nervous fashion, sharing an anecdote concerning her visiting Bitef as a student and the change of fate – from the times when she jumped over a wall to see a performance till the present day role and, more or lass, a honour to announce the festival opened.
The performance was, more or less, ok. Several rounds of applause during the performance given to, more or less, virtuous dance of the performers, were the only ‘incidents’. More or less, the authors achieved what they had intended. It turned out that this kind of performance can satisfy, more or less, the entire audience. All of us, more or less, came because of the more or less spectacular announcement of the more or less spectacular performance. The audience was well-dressed, more or less. More or less without tracksuits. I guess they’d had time to go home after work and dress up for the occasion.

The audience was, more or less, filled with famous people – artists, bankers, politicians. All of them were, more or less, smiling – both while entering and while leaving the performance. The rounds of applause during the performance were more or less insignificant anyway. We are more or less used to them. Those moments might more or less represent the division within the society. The difference between educated audience and the one which is considered uneducated is, more or less, characterized by the spontaneous reaction. While the ‘uneducated’ more or less enjoy the performance, the more or less educated are appalled. We could, more or less, pose a question of different expectations. While some see this as a, more or less, ideal opportunity to be seen with a new hairstyle or in a new piece of clothing, the others expect to see some, more or less, new theatre tendencies. The question which, more or less, arises is – how long are we going to have such divisions? More or less infinitely?

Dušan Milojević

Corporative correct

After he had shown us his performance To Whom it may concern, some ten years ago, in which he attempted to explain that corporations have life to them, that they are likeable and pretty because, hey, they are people too, so we should rather admire them than let ourselves be turned into diligent and perfectly trained machines, Phil Soltanoff is now taking us several steps further in the process of the corporative super-system pushing human beings even deeper into the abstract.

Where does the parallel with corporations come from? Entering the performance, one passes under a huge Société Générale bank banner and at the performance which is, believe it or not, from France as well as the bank, one watches dancers dressed in the same grey suits the employees of the bank wear. I am not going to mention the name of the bank. The one mention should be considered a free advertisement. I might sound paranoid but if we remember Catherine Bigelow’s film Strange Days, and days of Bitef are always strange days in Belgrade, we cannot but remember the main villain line: “It’s not about whether you’re paranoid but are you paranoid enough!” that is how it goes in the world of big corporations and capitalism and high technology.

Though not musically educated, I have noticed traces of song “Old McDonald had a farm” and “United States of Europe” corporation anthem in the fanfare intonation announcing the beginning of Bitef. Speaking of the anthem, Schiller’s words which were left out are: “Milions of people, embrace!” The performers in More or less Infinity embraced bars and lines but never each other.

People and things are both well organized and at a disposal. The audience showers the same points with rounds of applause as it does at the Olympics or a circus. Implants and braces run away from people (or people run way from them) but the grey suits bring everything back to its place and everything resumes its perfect state. Thus the performance constitutes the ideological plane which tells us that perfection, aim and sense are blending in the mechanism of depersonalized people and bits in computerized corporative game – or can those creatures be called people at all? And, let’s not forget the meaning of the word profit: it is the unpaid work!

Naturally, none of it would work out if everything wasn’t so excellent, perfect, beautiful, extraordinary, fascinating, just like a TV commercial… and that’s as it should be when corporation’s money is invested.

The level of fascination depends on the ticket price and on the position of the seat. The mathematics in the performance serves to fascinate not to teach. “Line as a form and line as a metaphor” shows various uses of a line in diagrams until the people turn into lines as well.

Idea of More or Less Infinity is meager (unless it is a well hidden evil which is more than my paranoia), neither tragic, nor comic nor tragicomic, but it does show a huge tragedy of our times. We witness a financial ritual as art becomes fascination, as a mirage is the only aim of the author who boasts using illusionist principles developed in optical art, saying that “object of research is a literal and metaphorical juggling with the possibilities”. What does it tell us about the ethics of the author, of the financier and of the Bitef festival?”

Ivan Pravdić

Bodies without souls

Everything being both retro and modern - was proved once more to be the paradigm of postmodern theatre. Theatre poetics of Bertolt Brecht, which states that the underlying principles of art in the modern society are to be socially engaged and well thought through, is still a fertile ground for establishing art practices aiming at provoking audience to think and critically analyze its position within the society. It is not by coincidence that Andraš Urban’s choice is Brecht’s Buckow Elegies, a selection of poetry with the main topic to position the human in times of repressive political systems, critical situations, national uprisings and wars. Urban uses a hardcore approach in reading Brecht’s critique of “swallowing a subject” by systems of state political apparatuses, turning it thus into a contemporary critique of reducing a person to a body by the means of biopolicy as a particularly transparent practice during the II World War and the concentration camps. The reference is well established by the actors wearing military uniforms. Dressed in such a fashion, the performers do not present themselves as actors who lend their bodies to a purpose of staging certain content or a play but as the masters of both their bodies and of the bodies of other actors. It led to a perception of there not being four characters but four bodies on stage. The narration is destroyed by deducting a verbal or bodily expression, so the only effect it had on the audience included body work. That is the reason Urban defines his theatre as a physical one. The physical bodies are those which burn from the inside yet do not speak; those which make monstrous gestures, go on rampage on stage and torture each other. “They are machines”, the audience started whispering at one point, hardcore machines, individuals reduced to bodies without souls. Such bodies do not make contacts or form connection but they do not contradict each other either. Urban takes Brecht’s text which, from time to time, refers to the writer’s adherence to Marxist ideas and the unity of contradiction as the main law of nature, society and thought, putting it into binary “structure” of human entity, into union between body and soul. However, stressing out that the body is what is left of human beings, the hardcore machines point out at a missing item in the dialectical unity. Therefore, if certain performances provoked universal, mythical questions about interpersonal relationships, Urban’s concept seems to probe much deeper into issues of human existence; the question of being human today. Does it still have a soul or is it reduced to body? Or is it actually a soul trapped within a body? “Except if…?” – a question arises during the performance. Except if - what? If we accept the art nowadays as socially engaged practice and we demand it to be so, then each of us has an obligation to find the answer to this question. Within this Bitef’s programme, Urban’s performance presented itself as one of the most remarkable ones which does not merely show the tragedies of our times but makes us aware of them too.

Sanela Radisavljević

BRECHT – HARDCORE MACHINE

The Andraš Urban’s performance Brecht – the hardcore machine is his third one at this year’s 42Bitef08. This time, the actors concentrate on the physical; they discard the last grain of intellectual thought from their bodies and from their brains. This process creates the essence of distance characteristic for Brecht’s theatre.
The bodies that are moving or marching sometimes, perfectly function as parts of a mechanism. They get transformed into a fabricated marching that creates an atmosphere of war decay, a decomposed social system, and those are the things Brecht was obsessed with right after the First World War. They achieve the lowest instinctive expression through voice mutations. A body tortured in several images eventually gets branded like cattle. Labeling, uniformity – nowadays, those are the common words. Repression over body can be seen not only as an inevitable means of military manipulation, which is present nowadays as well as at Brecht’s time, but as a means of modern industry too. Having a perfect and healthy body is just an approach of fashion industry. Human body is a tool for destruction in the military regime. It gets tortured and after a while it disappears. In the fashion industry, the body is exposed to hunger and it gets destructed in order to survive. It seems that destruction is the only way of survival.
Andraš Urban offers a range of interpretations. Historical reminiscence (opposing Stalinism) becomes universal. Using Brecht’s Buckow Elegies, Urban seems to revive Brecht’s last thoughts, endowing the performance with irony. A combination of certain images and words enhances the irony. Brecht wrote them at the end of his life and this performance has a certain quality of presenting his whole life and work. Despite his typical approach, Andraš Urban creates a play significantly different from his earlier opus and shows a wide range of his artistic sentiment.
At the round table, the excellent actors and the director could not precisely explain the process of creating the performance. The director did not show inclination towards philosophical interpretations and the actors have tried to use some abstract notions to describe their approach to Brecht, which made it quite clear that they could not entirely interpret the theatre vortex they were thrown into. As if they had encountered a moment of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt. This temporary handicap of the participants proves the rich theatre meaning and experience of the performance.

Ana Isakovic

This is my first and my last bomb!

Belgrade Drama Theatre. Woman-bomb. The performance begins at 10pm. Despite the late schedule, there are more people than the audience seats. I try to get myself in by saying I have to write the critique. Eventually, everyone turned out to have entered. The stage is deconstructed. It doesn’t exist. Or, better yet, the whole space is turned into a stage. The seats are where the stage used to be. I see an actress standing in a corner. She starts whispering. The audience screams: “Speak up!” She seems to be reluctant. Then, a voice. Where is it coming from? From the audience. Then another one. I cannot locate them. I start fidgeting trying to recognize actresses in the audience. Slowly, the voices start coming from all around but the faces are nowhere to be seen. One of these sitting next to me might start talking? I feel squeamish. Tick-tick-tick… this is my first and my last bomb! And then, a soft light starts discovering the actresses. All of them are women! Unknown actresses, in fact! Actually, I recognize some of them. I have seen them on other performances. But I have never seen them on stage. Interesting. Are marketing and mainstream powerful enough to bring popularity to some yet not to the others? Even when those others are more talented? The tension rises. We get information about women kamikazes. Assassination of Benazir Bhutto. The statistics. The photo materials. Revealing the manipulation and recruitment systems. There is only 12 minutes and 36 seconds left! What do these women do in such a short time? I see disbelief on some faces in the audience. Faces of older people. Some of them are holding small flags. The actresses ask them to stand up and wave the flags while someone is saying a text. How rude! Isn’t audience someone who watches a performance? Women. Human rights. Feminism. It all comes up. It breaks out. It breaks the chains. There is air of uneasiness in the audience. And a few satisfied smiles. Why don’t they focus on woman-bomb? Is it necessary for them to demolish the whole system of our beliefs and convictions in order to describe the phenomenon? Not all the women are potential bombs. Right? Please, tell me they are not!!
Oh, no! The one next to me starts talking! I knew I was in danger! She takes out a burglar mask and puts it on her head. There is a stewardess, too. We are on a plane. No, we are in a waiting room and the stewardess is there for some peculiar reason. Will she explode, when will she explode?! She falls into my lap which, despite the softness of her hair, gives me creeps. She stays there, motionless, for a few moments. Then, she gets up, resumes talking and puts a paper plane into my hand. I throw the plane into the audience… I become an accomplice! I release some of the tension, but it all comes back to me! They start the countdown! 20, 19, 18, 17… Everything is over! Over on the other side, Ružica Sokić seems ready for the explosion! She has put on her glasses and covered her ears! Shall I follow her example? Will it help me? The countdown is over. The lights go off. There is a silent Ka-boom… Someone has already taken up the responsibility for the explosion.
We are safe after all. We leave talking about the direction, the acting, the stage. Isn’t it a good way to avoid all the unpleasant questions Ivana Sajko asks in this extraordinary performance? This seems to be just the first and the last bomb in our lethargic reality. But, how do we manage to explode more than once?

Dušan Milojević

BABY DRAMA

The ethical importance of such projects can hardly be sufficiently emphasized in a country in which neither public petitions nor church initiative have made the rulers abolish the taxes on the products for children. The performance is so priceless that it could be thought a compulsory experience both for parents and for children, but every obligation brings us to the problem of imposing and, eventually, to issuing a license to have and bring up children. The performance does not contain any of that but it does include a strong, deeply intimate invitation for elevated alertness and responsibility towards children. What does the performance for children aged 6-12 months deal with?
Since we have specialized TV programmes, commercials and TV channels for that age why wouldn’t we have theatre performances as well?
The authors were meticulous in their research into pedagogy, developmental psychology, neurolinguistics and other possible things related to that age group but they haven’t ignored their parental experience either. Nor have they neglected bringing children to the rehearsals!
Actually, the whole performance is based on giving experience both to parents and to children.
The most important method – equally necessary element of spectacles for other age groups – is individualizing the audience! Gradual testing and permanent following every reaction of the visitors. Socialization which is built in the atmosphere of individuality especially when, in the presence of children, we have to pay more attention to their fun than to our social histrionics – that socialization shows precious frankness, peace and contentment that was thoroughly kept on our faces. Choosing a proper narrative for such an applicative performance is both difficult and not. From your wish/need/choice to be born, all the way to the first birthday candle, through the spectacle in which all is clear – from the redness of placenta through the whiteness of the maternity ward to all the situations children go through. The performance does not use up the pompously announced new genre as much as it invites us to discover new ways of communication by theatrical means. And to wonder why were we born at all?

Ivan Pravdić

Gretel: Forever, nothing spectacular

Meg Stuart (USA) & Philipp Gehmacher (Austria) MOŽDA ZAUVEK/ MAYBE FOREVER Production: Damaged Goods & Mumbling Fish Globalization, deconstruction, shipwreck, individualization… What about love? Where does it fit in? Could there be a place for it in the world of alienation, racing with time, online communication? Could it exist and could it be expressed through art? Through dance? The examination took place within Meg Stuarts’s and Philipp Gehmacher’s eighty-minute-long performance. Using a range of choreographic images in a quick rotation, the couple reminds the audience of failed attempts in finding a common language with other beings who were not there (or maybe they were, on other side of audience?) watching the performance. The announcement (wrongly) stated that the performance is as result of a five-day-long cooperation between one of the most important USA choreographers and a rising Austrian dancer. Many have, undoubtedly, found the confirmation in the frail, interrupted dance of the couple with very different sensibilities. However, it took two months of intensive work to create the dance which is seemingly so simple even looks amateurish at times. But, isn’t love exactly that? Is there room on stage for a closely controlled dance we saw at the opening? Two principles, two unique, incompatible yet harmonious approaches to dance presented some of the questions on the stage. Complementing each other – sometimes even with conflicting movements – Stuart and Gehmacher showed us well-known aspects of love – everyday struggle, wrestling, bitterness, passion, small things that make us happy, continuous attempts. I am sure there were people in the audience who wondered if love can be a topic of contemporary dance. And if it can, how is dance supposed to deal with it? Likewise, it could be said that it would have been better if Niko Hafkenscheid had played throughout the play creating the background to Meg Stuart’s dance who should have individually examined the importance of love in modern society and the possibility of its staging. But, dear ladies and gentlemen, love is not Sleeping Beauty. It is not a spectacle. And it most definitely is not perfect! It is deprived of anything spectacular, there are neither audio nor visual effects and it does not require a complicated and pretentious stage performance. The main postulates of the performance are a naïve dancing of two people, erasing importance of gender gap and contemplating the potential of their merging into one perfection. The two of them – the one constantly splitting apart, trying to teach communication to the other half. They are learning by the means of imitation, trying to build a common vocabulary which would help them unite and become eternal. Maybe forever! Forever as ideal, ultimate aim, the only aspiration. Dušan Milojević

Certainly forever

It turned out that Oedipus Rex and The Persians are not the only performances on this year’s Bitef which are based on interpreting myths and eternal problems of human civilization. Maybe forever – and it is on purpose that I name only title and not the genre of the performance – deals with an eternal problem too. All the stage discourses – dance of Meg Stuart and Philipp Gehmacher, evergreen performances accompanied by electric guitar, soundscape recording about the past, a huge black-and-white photo of a withered dandelion – communicate an eternally relevant phenomenon of inability of understanding and transience of human relationships. She – trying to catch him and He – always evading. Seemingly, present since forever. However, it is not so much about male-female relationships as it is about an inability of a body to reach harmony with itself, its own inabilities, wishes and unconscious traces of the past. Throughout the performance, the dance keeps repeating the same syntax of two bodies moving in their attempt to find and keep each other. The bodies do not manage to establish harmony and unity even when the back curtain opens and they exit the established, and publicly overlooked stage area. Hands we use to shake, caress, grab, hold, dominate the body expression. Body is here used as a means of communication, and the dance is used as a form of body expression. Understood as a place where inner conditions of a person express themselves, body uses dance as a symbolic manifestation of language which it uses trying to establish communication. Body is no longer space for enjoyment but a place of shaping up the things which evade meeting of me and the other one whom I want but who eludes me. The point is not showing two bodies to the audience but their finding each other. Even when they use verbal text as a means of expression, the performers do not talk to the audience but to themselves. Instead of narration, the audience is presented with two bodies searching only for the moment in which their wishes and needs will be realized, and the moment keeps being postponed. What dance tells us, other modes of stage language confirm – love has gone, we long for the transient, we could not understand each other, we speak and sing again and again. The statement is clear but what did we see? A dance? A theatre performance? A concert? This performance fits within the motto “new theatre tendencies” shaping itself not within various art disciplines but worlds of art as well: dance, theatre, reciting, pop concert. Correlating these art discourses has created a performance with a reference used more to pose a question about status of performers’ bodies than about status of the world surrounding theatre. For that reason, the question where-they-go? keeps echoing if art on stage resembles pure statement and the audience is expected to conclude what it already knows. Sanela Radisavljević

Maybe and Forever

I take it back… …kcab ti ekat I



Emotions are a complicated, delusive issue. When we are completely overwhelmed by them we are unable to perceive how naïve and harmless it all seems to people around us. Love which was brought to us by Meg Stuart and Philipp Gehmacher to the stage of Atelje 212 brought along some pain, suffering, misunderstanding, nice moments, failure… as many other loves do. A faded photo, discarded shoes, the only material proof that the love had existed. But its fragments stay within bodies, thoughts, popular melodies and they keep reminding us while they are having a conversation with the past.

Based on stand-up (tragi)comedy, Stuart links her confessions with rewind movements. This trick, present in dancing, also appears in music in which real-time voice and recorded melodies colide. Niko Hafkenscheid’s mini concert and sounds of electric guitar give the colour to the atmosphere of melancholy dominant not only on the stage but on the old photo as well. Simultaneously, the music does not follow the dance – it stands on its own, placed in present moment (which we are reminded by the musician’s comments which he gave to the audience in Serbian) reviving thus the memory of the broken love.

Is this story of love enough and/or relevant in contemporary society? This project, a mostly personal one, made by representatives of Damaged Goods & Mumbling Fish troupes, seems to push their complex dancing bodies in the background. The compromise that is created on stage between them annulated something of each dancer and created a feeling of betrayed expectation. The Belgrade audience maybe expected more from the author but also from the performance which lasted forever. The question remains how it would have looked like if they had taken it back…


Jovana Dukić