If there were a wind…
If there were a wind
I could put up a sail.
If there were no sail
I’d make one of sticks and canvas.
(Bertolt Brecht, Buckow Elegies, 1953)
The three performers have thrown me quite off balance, coming towards us from the dark on a stage that’s only half-lit in Hall G.[1] Dressed in black, in something like work clothes, they now stand on the edge of the stage, telling us very charmingly, or rather, casually about a “ball” they needed for this performance. It had to be huge, and it soon became clear: they could only afford something like that from China.
So we are right in the middle of the hardship that is the world economy; but our art workers don’t seem to mind too much. They cheerfully describe the journey that this ball (I still don’t know exactly what they are talking about – is it inflatable, a spherical object or an actual ball?), this thing has taken from ordering to manufacture in distant China and then travelling by ship (yes, Madagascar!), until it finally lands at a Dutch customs office. The ensemble seem to be running out of time for rehearsals or whatever it is that the three people who have emerged from the darkness of the stage are planning to do with it.
They are talking to us as if we were friends, or strangers visiting. And maybe that’s why it’s so engaging: because there’s no doubt that we’re all here and this probably means that we want something. “How pleasant”, I think, “an arrangement – of the theatre, of performing and watching; they are doing something down there, and us up here, sitting in rising tiers, anticipate something”. It remains dark for the most part down there, but we trust the rules of the game, “something is bound to happen”. More light, more show, an illusion. And yes, I enjoy the accessibility, the simplicity plus the assurance expanding around me that “nothing bad is going to happen” to me here.
But what is this feeling that creeps into the friendliness suggesting that nothing here is harmless? I am struck by the idea that it may, in part, have to do with the performers, down to their accents (Russian, Spanish) that contain world, empires, war, decline, exile, resistance.
Do. Set sail.
Measuring the space, things.
(They down there, us sitting in tiered rows.)
Movements begin, possibly dancing, a play with articulations – the arms, the legs, the body angles, the lines of sight – putting geometry to the test. Two act together, one alone, at precisely set distances on the almost-square of the stage. These are the limits of what can be achieved, even though the light does its best to show, to feel, to transform the distances, the spaces differently. I move with them in this hole that starts to move and is the stage. As if my eyes were stuck, clinging to things and people, skin to skin, surface to surface. Or, Kleist comes to mind, looking at a painting (Seelandschaft) by Caspar David Friedrich: “as if one’s eyelids had been cut away”.
So frame and primer seem to be themes here as well, the construction of the image, the form. And guess what? “We still believe in art”, Oleg Soulimenko and Daria Nosik say, and I rejoice inside (I’m currently reading Reiner Stach’s three-volume biography of Kafka) and think: “Yes.”
The modernists, Kafka, Kandinsky, a picture description of the moving kind of this copper-coloured square, i.e. wood board. The board is touched, checked, stroked. It instantly mutates into a moving body and simulates an agency that hides and reveals people, displaying its and their weight as it is being leant against and carried around. Etc. “Good old object theatre”, I think, shrouding myself in its charm, in its form (limit), in its order. It is with the fact that this order does not hold, never has and never will anyway, that the performers (Daria, Dafne, Oleg, Light, Sound, Stage, Time, Fabric, Board) play, when it’s time for the next cue for something like language, at any rate…
Mumbling, grumbling, Dafne Moreno dances and wrestles with things like the roll of fabric that is uncovered and unfurled. Keywords, motifs appear … “Where does the river end and the sea begin? … Few escape to a better place … We all strive to be young and rich …” And: something utopian. What sounds like the rudiments (sediments) of a song (never-ending), draws a trail of “reality”, and so a roll of fabric becomes a shackle, becomes clothing, becomes a shell, becomes a balloon, becomes beauty. Later on, the performers run back and forth with the fabric. The roll becomes huge, flutters all the way up to the ceiling (If there were a wind…), and the only thing left in reaction to the already wonderful sound by Peter Plos is to be enraptured. Carried away by the wind that blows up to where I sit.
“I’m floating off in my head”[2], it says in my barely legible notes from the performance – while the hole on stage widens and (of course!) the Ball appears in the background. A frog-green inflatable monstrosity, something like an oversized monster virus, and it has a hole that Daria eventually crawls inside through. She is pumped upwards and, like a fly caught in a ball of cobweb, she screams: “Can you help me, please!” A scene in true slapstick fashion, where the tragic, the invocation, the forlornness and the limit of art all make an appearance (I am not going to help her). They down there, me up here in the stalls, while the Ball, the monster, the toy from China lifts the performer all the way up to the ceiling.
A beautiful final image verging on kitsch emerges, I forget what.
Recollections of a piece. An attempt to write them down. What sounds like action, one thing after the other, was, in fact, a place for rest. A place for time, too, to let the eyes cling to the bodies and the things; to feel your own body moving (along) and let the mind wander. Because I am constantly entangled in ontological matters. A game, perhaps a conflict, perhaps a dialectic, between subject and object positions; between work as a means to change the object (and itself), between intention (will, design) and the “spite of objects” – hence between “old” materialism from the Romantic era (yes, even Marx) through to modernism (Kandinsky, Kafka) and the “new” one that thinks in terms of agency, life-non-life, human-non-human, in assemblages, in undisbandable and non-divided vitalities. Vibrant matters…interspersed with poetic bodily actions between geometry, measuring, directions, their geopolitical power relations and acting in and out of entanglement, immersion, interdependence, intra-action, response-ability (language, murmuring, grumbling, speaking).
We can neither escape this conflict nor the violence of context.
I still believe in art.
[1] And not just them: Sound, Stage, Light. Fabric, Ball, Square, Colours. Dramaturgy, Text, Production.
[2] A jumbled mix of “floating away” and “taking off”.
Chris Standfest – (ex-)performer, dramaturg, curator, studied literary studies, linguistics, gender and cultural studies, among other things, at Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Lancashire, in parallel with political activism and collective work in various artistic and social fields. She is the dramaturg and curator of ImPulsTanz – Vienna International Dance Festival.