Tormented, but beautiful
Attention, catchphrases: “Dark and light, the conscious and the unconscious […] a poetic world of light and movement” – the programme texts of various venues and, by default, of TQW, describe in plain language what spectators are to expect from Meg Stuart’s first collaboration with Indonesian visual artist Jompet Kuswidananto.
“A poetic trip, charged with emotions and full of associations […]”? This might perhaps also attract the audience of MQ musical programmes. In reality, Celestial Sorrow turns out to be more austere, if very sensual: Javanese women’s songs in the foyer. In the hall, hundreds of dimmed light bulbs hanging from a low suspended ceiling, adjusting Jompet Kuswidananto’s space to a human-scale height and at the same time creating an open effect: a good starting point for the spectators looking for places all around to sit and resultant lines of sight to follow an open-ended experiment.
Electronically amplified breathing, whispering, murmuring, wailing, soft laughter by the three protagonists (Jule Flierl, Gaëtan Rusquet and Claire Vivianne Sobottke): “You make me feel like […]”, “hear me […]”, “what is real […]”, “tormented, but beautiful […]”. They seem to have just landed after a long journey, beamed onto a playing field, in the face of which they first have to (re)orient themselves. Three spectators are quickly led across the playing field with their eyes closed, and placed quite randomly somewhere else. Meditative (yet nervous) stillness, guided or accompanied by altering degrees of brightness and music (live: Mieko Suzuki, Ikbai Simamora Lubys) that is heavily rhythmical even in rest periods, turns into combat-ready tension(s). If a cinematic criterion were to be applied to tonight’s performance and the play of bodies, it would be that of a dissolve. More accurately: a multiple exposure, in which one image is superimposed on another like a strange, often friendly disruption by way of recollection. In the past, this technique was used to make ghosts drift through the world, staging spiritualistic séances and the like.
This choreography of simultaneity is most evident, in spite of a linear sequence, during a complete blackout (including the emergency light) sometime around the middle of the performance. Old family photos, pasts are talked about: a wedding, two men, father and grandfather, a cloud in the sky on a winter’s day, a cat, an arid mountain landscape from a bird’s-eye view … Even though they are summoned by individual voices, the images/memories do not remain standing alone for long, they cut into each other, fall on top of one another in a larger yet still narrow frame that is restricted by a few words, and that, a little later, all the screams and whispers in Jule Flierl’s infinitely modulatable voice cannot blow to pieces. Wealth despite restriction, constraint despite innumerable possibilities, of which at least one or two wish to be fixed and should not die away in darkness or a void: soon after, this is also the subject of the funniest scene, in which an artist, or rather, a crying mess, who will never ever be presented with a Nestroy Award for a performance at TQW, begs for love. Real, but like a friendly-hysterical ghost.
Are ghosts sad because they no longer count among the living? One can only speculate about this, as well as whether they even know that they are dead. It may be assumed with some certainty that, like all of us, they are sometimes vengeful, in need of love and often markedly obsessive in their reactions. Sometimes even desperate, like artists touring from city to city or collecting and processing impressions – on Java – that they later hope will not come across as mere tourist finds. Such as, for example, Meg Stuart, this time absent from the stage, but omnipresent as a kind of principal ghost, speaking and dancing through the performers or imposing time corsets for improvised interludes on them by way of stage directions.
“Our bodies are constantly shuttling between objects, sounds, lights, voices and unprocessed events from the past”, she said in an interview, in which she also spoke up for obsessively battling against a lurking sadness: “If you’re sad because of a situation that you know you cannot change, or if you long for something you can’t have, at the precise moment when you dive into that feeling, sadness isn’t constructive. There’s no construction in disappointment. It doesn’t make things better. Of course, for the human soul, sadness creates a connection, it’s a step towards compassion and understanding and sympathy. Sadness is unproductive but essential. And it’s always around the corner.”[1]
With this in mind, Celestial Sorrow could be read as a permanent sequence of looks around the corner, like a travel journal, a diary, a collection of notes combining debilitating facts and saving fictions. Which, for what would certainly make for a very instructive thematic focus at TQW, leaves the question: Can one really dance notebooks?
Claus Philipp, born in Wels in 1966, was the editor of the daily newspaper der Standard’s arts section until 2008 and managing director of Stadtkino Wien until 2017. He has published several books including on Christoph Schlingensief, Alexander Kluge and Ulrich Seidl. Most recently, he was responsible for conception, dramaturgy and artistic collaboration on the film and performance project The Children of the Dead as part of steirischer herbst 2017.
[1] http://www.damagedgoods.be/EN/about/interviews/2018/to-be-as-visible-as
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