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

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