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