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

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