Tanzquartier Wien

The world premiere of Durst, a “performative opera in six movements” by Linda Samaraweerová / Robert Jíša, was scheduled to take place on 27 November 2020 but had to be postponed until 2021 due to the measures to combat the Covid-19 pandemic. Dramaturge Cornelia Offergeld talked to Linda Samaraweerová about the production.

Our emotions are living in a garden in a deep dark forest as powerful demons that dominate us. After dealing with the myth and paradox of the “promise of happiness” in Western culture in her previous piece, Mystery of Happiness, choreographer Linda Samaraweerová now enters this secret garden and tackles our inability to face existential emotions and their negative sides in her current choreography.

In Durst, the audience experiences the fatal manner in which a society handles the dark sides of its affects as well as the associated cognitive compulsions as mechanisms of our time. Simultaneously, the piece is a transdisciplinary artistic experiment, developed by Linda Samaraweerová in close collaboration with the composer Robert Jíša, writer Elke Laznia and artists Violetta Ehnsperg, Karl Karner and Laura Samaraweerová as a performative opera for six vocalists, two performers and an artistic scenography.

Haunting linguistic images emerge from Elke Laznia’s libretto, by means of which the writer gradually feels her way towards the incomprehensibility of emotions, reaching the limits of linguistic space. Elke Laznia explores the rhythm of words, while Robert Jíša, who has been studying the effects of sound frequencies on the human body, the brain and the nervous system for many years, sets the six thematic fragments to music in a cycle whose musical rhetoric transports the baroque “doctrine of affections” into the present.

Linda Samaraweerová’s choreographies are transgressive challenges to collective constraints and norms. With Durst, the choreographer touches on a cultural taboo that allows negative emotions, precisely by denying them, to invade our minds unnoticed in order to ultimately assume control.

Cornelia Offergeld: You develop your performances from an analytical examination of contemporary society. Which considerations were relevant for your current choreography?

Linda Samaraweerová: Serious doubts about an economy that requires ever more intensive stimulation to correspond to the general idea of happiness have created a longing in me for an alternative choreographic model in the scope of which I focus on the motive of healing societal processes and reorganising forces that have been thrown out of balance. It seems vital to me to conceive of the outer world of culture and politics and the inner world of people in a new way.

Durst is about the “dark” emotions or affects which we negate and which, paradoxically, we thereby allow to dominate us…

I follow the teachings of the Tibetan Bon tradition, whose perspective on negative emotions is slightly different from that of Western psychoanalysis. Six primary emotions each evoke their own mental state. The Tibetans use figurative equivalents to illustrate them: hatred turns us into dwellers of hell, greed keeps people trapped in the mentality of hungry spirits, ignorance is the preserve of animals, jealousy that of people, envy corresponds to the demigods, pleasurable diversion to the gods. These are poetic but also useful images that illustrate how negative emotions prevent us from reaching higher forms of consciousness. These Tibetan teachings, which are part of my socialisation, are very important, as they allow me to change perspective.

Other issues I address in the current piece are sleep, dreams and darkness. Here, too, I find the societal dimension interesting: the way these qualities are actualised in our society, the value that is attached to sleep, darkness and dreaming in an achieving society shaped by stress and fear of failure.

How do you transform these considerations into your choreography?

I’m interested in developing choreographies that are aimed directly at the audience’s physical experiences, putting them in an immersive state in which the senses are activated in a different way. The new performance is based on elements, experiences and qualities generated by the piece Mystery of Happiness. However, while visual space was deliberately left behind in the earlier piece, a powerful visual level serving as a narrative is something that appealed to me again in the new project. The performer also takes centre stage again as a protagonist. The performance intends to open spaces of possibility that defy those patterns of thought and behaviour that the all-pervasive logic of monetisation has burned into us.

It’s factors like slowness, darkness, reduction, but also community, intimacy and music that I have worked on with several artists. The elements of deceleration and reduction are extremely important. They are necessary to evoke a deep mind-altering transformation in a natural way. This change helps us to transform the limitations of thought and look at our existence from a different perspective, which cannot be achieved by ordinary thinking. The so-called parasympathetic nervous system is activated in this state, and a “mental-emotional integration” occurs.

In your work, you have tackled philosophical and sociological considerations time and again, and analysed societal flaws and cracks. What were you preoccupied with while creating Durst?

In his book “The Burnout Society”, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han wrote that we have lost our ability of contemplative immersion. On a structural level, I want to set this loss against the radical thinking of Donna J. Haraway. In her book “Staying with the Trouble”, Haraway not only calls to resistance, she also pleads for an attempt at healing. “Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.”

Classical Indian philosophy provides me with central thought-provoking stimuli. What I find fascinating about the Eastern approach is that theory and practice are always closely linked. The old, handed-down psychophysical practices help to experience and understand the written philosophical texts directly. These techniques serve as deep sources of inspiration for me. On the one hand, they help me to get into the creative flow, on the other, they open up questions and new perspectives on contemporary societal processes.

In the current project, I examine the Tibetan teachings on affects and dream practice. In his book “The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep”, the Lama Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche describes techniques that lead from ordinary sleep to lucid dreaming on to inducing a higher state of consciousness in us. We allude to this practice in Durst: Elke Laznia in the libretto, Robert Jíša in the music and I in the choreography.

And I’m delighted to be able to put this world of ideas into practice with the great performer Ondine Cloez from Belgium and the wonderful Czech chamber orchestra Musica Florea. This was the first time for me as a choreographer to be working so intensively with musicians and vocalists, and I consider myself very lucky to have met these young, talented singers from practically all over the world in the scope of this project. Like our experiments and thoughts, the theory has only come to life thanks to the sensitivity, willpower and ability of interpretation of André Angenendt, Liia Krasilovskaia, Jean-Max Lattemann, Maria Mysachenko, Denise Seyhan and Johanna Zachhuber.

This leads me to my next question: In your pieces you work with visual artists in a transdisciplinary and, above all, process-oriented manner in an attempt to expand the artistic and conceptual scope in collaboration with them. In your current work, music has been added to the picture. What is its significance in the piece?

I have already created several joint projects with the visual artist Karl Karner. Together with Violetta Ehnsperg, he has designed costumes that develop a life of their own – like fantasy worlds. Karl Karner’s drawings, laying bare an inner, often disturbing world, are attached all over soft, hand-dyed fabrics. This corresponds with Violetta Ehnsperg’s incredibly sensitive design vocabulary in the scenography – a dense forest of suspended chains, with all kinds of objects stuck to them that are tied to our identity.

In a video installation, my sister Laura Samaraweerová piles surreal dream worlds and nightmare worlds on top of one another, aiming to trigger our ability of more subtle perception. The parallel worlds that lie on top of each other, mingling, concealing and at the same time exposing one another, are both beautiful and frightening. Judith Stehlik has documented the opera’s development with her camera. I worked with her on several projects in the past as well, which were shown at steirischer herbst and at Donaufestival, among others. With her precise yet poetic eye for the essential, she has captured the individual stages in the development process very vividly over the two years.

The combination of language, music, singing, dance, performance and artistic scenography is of vital importance in this project. The central source of energy is music in the form of a modern opera. I have been researching the interaction between musical frequencies and specific body parts in collaboration with the composer Robert Jíša since 2014. Jíša combined this research with the baroque “doctrine of affections” in the composition. And at the same time, he set Elke Laznia’s libretto to music step by step.

The beginning of the musical composition is very simple. It’s based exclusively on percussion instruments and text, with the performers’ and vocalists’ bodies serving as the main percussion instruments. The music is structurally similar to that of tribal dances, inspired by calls of the text, a kind of “haka” of the Maori, the dance of anger, hopelessness, energy and straightforwardness. This is the beginning and the end of our journey. The finale has been conceived purely musically, culminating in a kind of symbolic song. In this final climax and in the transformation of dimensions, the point is to reach a state in which we no longer differentiate between words, languages and cultural constructs. 

In your earlier work, language was a focus primarily on a structural level. In your previous piece, the lyrical aspects of language played a major role for the first time. For Durst, the writer Elke Laznia has written a libretto with a hauntingly suggestive imagery that shapes the piece.

That’s correct, but I’ve always been fascinated by the lyrical and associative potential of language. So far, I’ve mostly collaborated in this area with Bruno Batinic, who has created very powerful worlds of language that touch me and the audience deeply every time. For the opera, I ventured a new collaboration – with Elke Laznia – which turned out to be extremely inspiring for both of us. Elke Laznia is rightly called an “absolutist of emotions” in the literary world, and it was a great honour to work with her. Her libretto is the central nervous system that creates its own rhythm beyond the imagery, it is the starting point and the end point of everything. Through the use of language, she manages to lay bare a fragility that leads to a dimension outside of this world, beyond linguisticality. Fear, loss, parting, separation as well as greed, envy, insatiability, death and rebirth, loss of homeland, the loss of one’s own language are interwoven into all-pervasive linguistic images that are at the same time characterised by a tremendous light-heartedness. In this respect, they are very close to the music itself.

Cornelia Offergeld is a curator and art scholar. Several engagements e.g. at the Free Academy of Art in Moscow, followed by curation of various projects including “Zeit und Raum sind gestern gestorben”, a neo-Futurist opera, and development of formats like “7 Days” (performances in public space in Vienna) – in the spirit of Augusto Boal’s “invisible theatre”. The focus of her academic work is on manifestations of collective memory and linguistic aspects of art.