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