Skip to content

Posts from the ‘Yazılar / Texts’ Category

Oct 22

It’s off to work we go

Lise Smith

Bearing in mind perhaps William Morris’s notion that “nothing useless can be truly beautiful”, with E.I.O Maria Baroncea, Eduard Gabia and Dragana Bulut have set out to create something practical and with purpose. Half of the audience become participants in the piece by “working” for an hour using objects on the stage; the workers here control not only the means but the mode of production.

On the stage are rolls of fabric, plastic, string and wire, planks of wood, ladders, tables covered with tools and materials. The workers shuffle in, looking a bit bewildered, and each picks up an object to start “work” with. Participants chalk circles on the floor, build structures out of planks and chairs, wind and unwind string, measure out the surfaces. The watching audience have been asked to choose “the best worker” to pay after the event, so the process of labour demands our attention.

Sometimes the actions of one worker defeat the efforts of another. A tall bespectacled gentleman carefully erases from the floor the chalk circles carefully placed there by a woman ten minutes earlier. One worker builds a rather attractive model animal out of bendy rollers; another deconstructs the model and places the rollers rather more prosaically in her hair. Several workers hang out a string of inflated balloons on a line of string; later somebody else pops them one by one.

As the piece progresses, sculptures form all over the space – a pyramid of planks downstage left, a tent upstage and a towering monument built of chairs and ladders at the back. Every available surface is wrapped in string and plastic. The working environment is transformed by some silently agreed process of collectivebricolage.

Towards the end, it’s apparent that many workers have run out of ideas and some look obviously bored. The pace of work slows and those still active tend to add aimlessly to what already exists –another flower or feather atop structures that were built earlier. The workers lack purpose and the work lacks a defined use – and I think maybe Morris was right about uselessness.

Oct 22

Completing the Circle

Nóra Bükki Gálla

An obvious way for self-definition is to reach back in time and compare ourselves to what we find there. Or better yet, set past and present next to each other and let the comparison be done by the observer. This is exactly what Ecuadorian dancer Fabian Barba does; he takes one of the key figures of modern dance, Mary Wigman, and re-invents her figure with enormous care and historic accuracy, so that we have a precise base for comparison and a good excuse to re-think the present.

Perhaps the most peculiar aspect of the performance is the fact that a woman’s role is danced by a man. The series of solos represent a shift of Wigman’s attitude and compositional values from a strictly formulated and clearly genderless motion language to a more dramatic and emotional quality, but the basis remains the same: for Wigman dance is an act of worship, an ethereal experience which the dancer shares with her audience. This explains the lack of dynamic movement and the domination of expressive hand gestures. Circling motion is a representation of a divine perfection while spinning shows ecstasy.

The 5-7 minute pieces are connected by soft piano music from the background, as if Wigman was dancing on behind the stage and each piece is concluded by an authentic bow taken from films and other documentation Barba used to revive Wigman’s work. The same meticulous care is applied to costumes and music – several times we hear scratchy old recordings which add to the feeling of alienation and detachment.

We are not surprised when the applause brings the dancer on stage again only to repeat two of the etudes. Barba is true to the image he worked out for himself and interprets Wigman with extreme submissiveness. His is an analytical remake, not a constructive one. In Barba’s interpretation Wigman doesn’t want to impress – she simply wants to be. And that is what connects her to contemporary dance and contemporary dancers like Fabian Barba. Even though he lacks the charismatic character and does not feel like the powerful and mature performer we would imagine Wigman to be – still he manages to evoke the past and lets us compare I to the present. And that is the first step n the voyage. A good starting point.

Oct 22

Experiences Limited – All Spoilers, No Criticism

Nóra Bükki Gálla

We met in a 5 star hotel’s bar overlooking the city and were told that shortly we will be taken to a high class residential project to be presented as a group of European investors. We didn’t have much time to invent a story of rich aunts and inherited fortunes. As it turned out, we didn’t need one. But just in case.

Gated communities, we were told, are a big issue in Istanbul because they are in the middle of the city, rich folks throwing their richness into poor people’s faces. Barbed wire fences, bulky security guards, cameras everywhere – such places are possible to access. Unless you want to join the club, of course. Our two facilitators, Anat Eisenberg and Mirko Winkel got an appointment for us for two such projects, dividing the group between two high rise buildings both nearly finished.

We spent the next hour listening to marketing slogans, looking at 3D models and trotting in plastic wrapped shoes upon marble floors of apartments with the price tag of several million dollars, gaped at the Bosporus view from the 66th floor. Having asked all the questions we could come up with, we thanked the salesman, took our minibus and off we went.

So. Was this a performance? Did it have anything to do with dance and choreography? Can such things be called art at all? Whatever the answer, for me personally this was something to take home to remember. Unsettling, liberating, scary, provocative. I keep thinking about the connection of architecture and prestige and wonder whether we all live such gated lives, limited by our own circumstances, preferences and social status. Or is it preconceptions and sheer snobbishness? Mmm. I mean, the gates should be open, shouldn’t they? Or if not, we should at least know that they exist.

But anyway.

Note to the architect: Beware. People want the price tag, not well designed spaces to live in. Now that is something to elaborate on…

Oct 21

The Good, the Bad and the Happiness

Iulia Popovici

Synopsis: a performance about childhood and how “the good” becomes “the bad” as the history turns around. An ironic history:Will You Ever Be Happy Again? had its world premiere in Belgrade, at the BITEF Festival. While working at this performance (in 2008), Sanja Mitrovic became a Dutch citizen, and she had to give up her Serbian nationality.

Once upon a time there was a happy country called Yugoslavia. Really, it was happy, not because even the trees joyfully spelled the name of the leader Tito but because people were happy, even those pictured on the 100 dinars bill. Then the country stopped being happy – until its citizens (fewer now, since the country had become smaller) gathered again on the bridges of the capital, to save it from bombing. Rewind: the Serbian-born dancer/choreographer/director Sanja Mitrovic and the German Jochen Stechmann star a 75 minutes performance (in both Serbian and German) about how the international perception of national identity marks the personal construction of the self, putting in a mirror their own experiences. The Nazi Ahnenpass (certificate of ancestry) of the Stechmann family and little Sanja’s schoolbook from the ‘80s have an equal weight in the subjective spectacle of memory. The result has nothing to do with another semi-digested story about the tragedies of the war in former Yugoslavia, the “German guilt” or the so much commented “Östalgie”. It’s ironic without being bluntly critical; it’s touching without being sentimental – equilibrium very difficult to reach when talking about the innocent bystanders of recent past.

Staging it as a loose children’s game (on the repeating model of “partisans against Germans” – the local form of an otherwise universal patriotic re-enactment of a more or less imaginary glorious history), Sanja Mitrovic rediscovers in Will you ever…the immense theatricality of objects (from photographs and Tito’s statuette, to passports), of ideologically framed movement (as in the performative reconsideration of the choreography of communist mass gatherings), of music as cultural icon (Serbian pop hits). Jochen Stechmann’s merry appearance and Sanja Mitrovic’s self-contained performance make them remember together, in a sort ofcadavre esquis, what they cannot let go of their past as members of a certain community.

 

Fast-forward: And, of course, famous football matches always become the ideal background for going back to the roots, in a hectic choir of national pride and sense of belonging to a community.

Oct 21

Sanja Mitrovic, Will You Ever Be Happy Again?

Lise Smith

Serbian choreographer Sanja Mitrovic describes duet Will You Ever Be Happy Again? as “a docu-tale for one Serbian, one German performer and two cartoon boxes”. This playful description, indicating both the idea of (problematic) national identity and the materials of theatrical construction neatly sums up Mitrovic’s concept – the exploration of what it means to be Serbian, or German, through the medium of the cardboard box.

The absorbing and provocative performance has performers Mitrovic and Jochen Stechmann narrating – in Serbian and German – their national stories through childhood games and reminiscences. The layered presentation has the two pretending to be children pretending to be “Partisans and Germans”, in a game of cultural stereotypes that reveals early political conditioning: the Serbian word “cockroach”, we are told, translates as “German bug”. Stechmann scuttles bug-like around the floor in illustration; the game, he tells us, does not make him happy.

The layering of playful-unplayfulness continues in the game of “Equal Exchange”, in which Mitrovic and Stechmann comment flatly on the unequalness of exchange after the fall of communism. “I give you something bitter,” says Mitrovic, “and you give me something sweet”. “I’ll give you visas,” counters Stechmann, “and you give me war criminals.” Mitrovic doesn’t want to play any more.

Both performers use artefacts from their upbringing (contained in the cardboard boxes) to narrate both their personal and national stories. Mitrovic shows us the illustrations of war in her Grade 1 schoolbook, describing the scenes matter-of-factly as “the first fire”, “the first bombs”. Stechmann brings out his grandfather’s Ahnenpass, the document which confirms his all-Aryan, non-Jewish identity. Stechmann explains he keeps the document still, because “you never know”.

With simple images, narrated memories and readings from letters, Mitrovic sketches out a complex mesh of hopes, dreams and frustrations. The simplicity is key to the work’s sensitivity – small, personal details allow the audience to grasp the horror of the past and fears for the future far more effectively than a dry exposition of history would. At the heart of this work is a self-determined gesture towards the truth – always inadequate, but always vital.

Oct 21

Will you ever be happy again

Dean Damjanovski

While the audience enters the hall it listens to audio recording in Serbian of the legendary football match on the Belgrade stadium “Marakana” between home team Red Star and Bayern from Munich in the semi-finals of the Championship League in 1991 when the “red-whites” (Red Star), in the 90th minute evened the score to 2:2 and reserved their place in the finale. After the audience is seated the young performer and author explains in Serbian language (with subtitles) about the game she used to play when she was a little girl. The game is called “partisans and Germans” (a Balkan variant of “cowboys and Indians”) in which the Germans were always represented as negatives. She then invites her playmate – German performer Jochen Stechmann – to come to the stage.

This is the introduction to the theatre performance “Will you ever be happy again” by the Serbian theatre author, director and performer Sanja Mitrovic who lives and works in the Netherlands. This powerful “tale for one Serbian and one German performer” is a documentary and personal piece performed in Serbian and German language of two young people, members of different nations, which in different historical periods take on the same path – that of nationalism, violence and war. Intertwining details from personal documents and national iconography the author creates a complex structure of signs, which in some moments are complementary and in others oppose each other, in order to present us the process of transformation of personal identities. The scene at the end where both of the performers simultaneously sing nationalistic songs, each of them in his/hers own language, rhythm, melody and energy is a very precisely found opposition to the beginning of the performance pointing that every evil starts as innocent as a game. The performance is filled with local and national references, which, when it comes to Serbian (that are dominant) are not always readable for wider audience. That’s why there are moments where one gets the impression that the author is using nationalistic German iconography to “universalize” elements of her local context. Accusing the whole world for their faith and pointing out the irony of it has been the trade-mark of the Balkan post-war theatre and this performance is no exception of that model (like the scene where she asks the German soldier to bomb the bridge while she is standing on it and in the other second the situation turns into a typical Balkan “bacchanalia” under the sounds of Serbian pop-folk music). But the author makes a very wise use of those clichés and stereotypes and goes beyond them. For she doesn’t stop at the questions like who is right or wrong or who fired the first bullet because it is no longer relevant. The question that she emphasizes so strongly and not without a sense of doubt is the question whether we can be happy again – the villains, the victims, the bystanders… ?

By Dean Damjanovski

Oct 21

Friends and enemies

Theresa Steininger

A young Serbian woman carrying a young German from the battle field, mutual singing of soccer-songs, mixed with patriot songs. Tito in children´s drawings and a certificate of ancestry. What do Serbs and Germans have in common after fighting against each other in several wars? In her performance „Will you ever be happy again?“, Sanja Mitrovic brings light to this question in various ways. Together with the German performer Jochen Stechmann, she has put together a piece with a very thought-out dramaturgy, many historical documents and a strong impact. She has already won the prestigeous Dutch BNG Young Theater maker Prize 2010 for it.

If it is through children´s games, their drawings (Mitrovic shows her 1st-grade-exercise-book with drawings like the first partisans, the first bombs, the first snow and a drawing of trees forming the name of Tito in the sky) or their songs – the audience can experience intensly how the fighting for the own country, patriotism and hate of the so called enemy infiltrated even the smallest. This is very strong, but the performers, who speak both their mother tongue, do not contend themselves to that interesting part. They switch from giving the pioneer-oath to bombing one another with paper bullets, Mitrovic presenting her body provocatively. Also she is bringing up a very delicate topic, when she asks if the audience loves her more with the Dutch passport than with the Serbian one.

Mitrovic and Stechmann need very little to present such a strong work. They present their documents of the past, which they draw from cardboard boxes, in front of a camera, the image is then projected to the back wall of the stage.

They present the horrors of the Nazi Regime in Germany through a certificate of ancestry, the inflation of money in Serbia with banknotes of 5 billion Dinar. The fall of the wall is brought in through live quotations from this time, the difficult life of Serbs trying to come out of their country through a photo and letters by a friend who managed to escape. By this, the performance is both very personal and generally valid. The individual case speaks for a whole people.

Mutually sang soccer songs finally unite the former enemies, but still, the peace seems limited. When Mitrovic and Stechmann at the end recieved lots of applause, the light went out. Planned to show again a war situation after the final reconcilation? Actually electricity went down in the whole district of the garajistanbul, where the performance took place. But still, the impression of only limited freedom and peace remains.

Theresa Steininger

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »