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

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