Yes yes

Yes yes light
make it light seemingly insignificant (which makes it significant precisely because you add the seemingliness) make it a combination of insignificants of knee-jerk intellectual reactions
Yes yes make it a structure a game we play a play we game a thing is a thing is a think
Yes yes perform it make it outdo itself
See it grow as if spontaneously (if possible, try to avoid as ifs)
Yes be precise about your incoherent professional skills
Make every move count
Indecently attractive
Have a conversation pretend to have a conversation pretend your words pretend your words
Show
Be arrogant dress down move down speak down
Be understandable practice clarity
Yes practice lightness

trailer "to allege" from cie public in private- on Vimeo.

Really real

Writing about performances one has seen is like telling stories of travels - it is not about a shared experience, all we can do is create a new experience. The experience of "I heard about a show where...". This is not always easy to accept, on either side.

The last edition of the Warszawa Centralna festival ended by two shows that deal with the dead-end of civilization as we know it, the fall of paradigms and the attempts to overcome entropy.
Two shows - one is Christoph Marthaler's +-0, the other, Christoph Schlingesief's Via Intoleranza II, ridiculed our attempts to try and do something, and both of them tried doing something, while not managing, but trying, and maybe doing, but not really, but really...
Marthaler's is a beautiful and desperate lamentation after a culture which cannot go beyond itself, which fits nowhere and makes nothing. It still is godly, but useless... For all its beauty, I found it proving its point too well - this high culture does nothing, here. It is a mixture of a deep-rooted feeling of superiority and of despair when this superiority does not help, build or bind. It is a hopelessness I am not ready to accept - or contemplate.
Schlingesief's work (not just this piece) is all about refusing to accept this status quo.
What does Via Intoleranza II do? If you see the trailer, you might get the impression that it's a lively multi-culti show with quantities of fairly classic stage-action and a humanist message. Which, of course, it refuses to be. And which it is, after all.


Let's begin with this: when watching the show, I can't stop imagining Schlingesief-the-director tired of the absolute spectacle with no performative transferrence. Tired of the isolation of art, and, on the other hand, of the happy solutions that are neither happy nor solutions.
And, of course, tired of being sick, of having his sickness define what and who he is (Schlingensief died of cancer short after the premiere).
So he makes one last show. A show where stage is a constant reminder that there is a reality outside. An uncomfortable reminder, one which is to make us feel how ridiculous this place, here, is, and that its one hope is making us feel the need to use it for something very different, really real, really real.
The problem is - unless you leave your culture of distance, pathos and irony, it contaminates everything. But how would you leave this culture? And what tools would you have left?
Please let me out.
How do I get out.
I would love to get out, but can I keep some of the toys? Can I still make it a performance? Can I tell them what I really think, and still keep it a show, and make it unbearable for them to the extent where they themselves will want to leave and act?

Of course, the tools are the tools at hand. The show tools. The contemporary theater tools. The German critical art tools. With a little help from this or that culture or art. It is difficult not to see the presence of the different artistic styles (from traditional Burkinabe music and dance to French-language hip-hop) as a postmodern collage. A playful fairy-tale.
But the question is not: whether, or how, can the real be built on fiction. The question is: what sort of real can we build with fiction?
But first: what sort of fiction can we build with the fiction of being smarter-than-all-this and more-provocative-than-all-this?
Well, in the case of Via Intoleranza II, fiction starts off by looking ridiculous.
Not again - the happy bourgeois laughing at their own pitiful culture. Not again - the spectators suffering joyfully, as it will all be gone soon, so what do I care, if this is real or not.

The first reaction is frustration: I didn't give you my trust and allow you to leave the space (mental space) of theater, so you can come back into theater and make the same sarcastic, self-flagelating stage jokes I know from so many  other contemporary theater artists.
Why are you doing this to me. Why are you taking us back into easy bitterness, when your bitterness was difficult and wild, when it was unbearable and over-the-top crazy and it was doing things. Why are you making it seem like it's just a show, after all?
The difference, here, happens, when you know it's real. If you know that there is an actual opera/school being built in Burkina Faso, if you know Schlingensief really was sick and did die, and really did give his social projects everything he had. Finally, if you know these people have something in there - that something is at stake, then it becomes something else.
It's a paradoxical situation: the show can only be performative (which is its explicit aim) if you know it corresponds to something real (in the outside world) already.
Whatever comes out of it, needs us to be prepared, and in a way, needs us to have lived it already. Is this a failure of art-as-intervention?
Maybe. Or maybe we misjudge theater. We still wishfully dream of the play making the King confess his crimes, out of nothing, out of thin air, and making the anonymous spectator become actor, agent, become activist, become action, become real.
This may make for some shallow theatrical provocations. Doesn't the spectator know he is more real than the stage? Because he comes from the outside? What is real, in this show, has already happened, and not onstage. It is the outside world that is working. And I'm not sure if the stage helps its existence in any way, if it provides it with the fictional energy, or if it is just an excuse.

After all, what we see is not what we get. We get everything it is part of. We are free to dive in and out of it, using it as a ficitonal or real weapon of our choice. Too abstract? Let's make it concrete then: the crazy stories about the opera being built exist also once you leave the space. You can help build the place. The child actor pretending to be an adult, is actually an adult actor who has the health condition of physically looking like a child. He says it, but why would we believe him? Because we know it already. Or we suspect it, knowing how the layers of fiction and reality abuse each other constantly.
Which makes it an insider's theater. Moving for those who had been moved even before, out there.
And extremely frustrating, because it makes it safe, after all, to treat this as a trick, a big, truth-filled trick. No matter how many operas you build and how sad the real death is, they remain outside. The show is so precisely full of itself, it is so spectacle-like, that I'm okay. Just when I hoped I wouldn't be.
That's my problem? I'm afraid Schlingensief's heritage makes it clear - it's ours.

About What I Heard About The World

"What I Heard About The World" is a theatre performance and an installation, both devised by the joined forces of Third Angel and Mala Voadora.
This text is about the performance. You can actually see it streaming live two hours from when I'm writing these words, at 4.30PM GMT on this pretty site. (If you're in Edinburgh right now, today is your last chance to see it live at St.Stephen's).
If you've missed it, there is a good review here which describes it quite well. (Total spoiler). I won't. Once you've seen it/read it...

Here is a trip outside of the comfortable framework of a finished universe. Sure, we've heard some of the stories before. Like the donkey in the Gaza zoo which is painted in stripes so it looks like a zebra. (okay, should have had a spoiler alert there).We might know some even crazier anecdotes. But we have some sort of control of them. Actually, a big part of what these last years have been evolving towards is a better control over what we see of the world. Does Facebook really open up our horizons? Or does it narrow down our spectrum to the channels we know? Sure, something can go viral. But most things don't. They remain little bits of the world, completely alien to us, and paradoxically enough, they seem more inaccessible to us then ever. They are not on the customized map. Ergo, they don't exist. The whole process of customizing our experience, which may seem to be enriching it, is making it easier to cope with the excess of information, with a world that is too vast and too diverse - turning it into something we can feel close to.

Well, this, here, is going back to the outrageous presence of everything that is not me.
The title is quite revealing: What I Heard About the World.
I didn't read about it.
I didn't see it as a Facebook status or Twitter link.
I heard it.
Hear-say. One person says something to another person. Remember that? That old analogic thinking? Analogic, as in: palpable. Analogic, as in: coming from analogies, attempts at comparisons. Try to compare what is happening somewhere else on the planet to what is happening to you. Go for the analogy. The donkey in the Gaza zoo represents... How does it compare to anything? What sort of analogy can you make of it? How does your mind cope with difference?

What the performance brings us, is chaos. A world which is not as we would expect. Not as comfortable, easy to empathize with - or easy to judge. It really is a world beyond our comprehension, and that leaves me thinking - how much of my worldview is just about making it easy on myself?
What makes it so poignant is that it's a live performance. These people, there, represent other people. They are unavoidable, they will not disappear, they will not stop shooting until they've finished all the red paint. The liveness means each of these stories becomes a real thing once again. A different thing, a represented thing, but once again - palpable. It gains a human scale. A scale not quite as comfortable as a status update. Not quite as easy to digest. But, in this case, much more fun.

How It Works

You do things.
You try it, this way, that way. You stray, you flop and then you flip again, and something, some things come out of it.

You do them and please, please, you think, do not ask me what I'm doing, what my political take on this, for the moment now I just have a political in-take, the out is not political to my best knowledge. Fortunately, your knowledge is not best. You see, you do things.
And although most of them, you can honestly say, you know little about, the matter speaks for you. (Which, of course, does not mean you do not try to talk with it, for it, explain it, relate it and convey it, extrapolate it, and prove where it, the matter, stands).
Some of the works you work, frankly, are worthy of the highest criticism. They are, yes it has been said before, the flops. Or worse, they have the wrong ideas, wrong media, wrong impressions and plenty-wrong outcomes.

Yet within these plenty-wrong outcomes, things are born. And these things might just make connections, little roots holding on to little pieces of earth. Not that roots hold on to any particular piece, but this metaphor just decided to go its own way, and we at New Art listen to metaphors, so yes, there might be no palpable piece of anything that the roots hold to, yet the work (by now it is work) is starting to appear as if it were actually something, about something, into something, for something. It gains weight.

And then, at some ungiven points, not necessarily at the end or at any sort of finale, the Holy-Flip happens. It could be a form, it could be filled with air or helium, it could be pretty far away from you, but still yours, still stemming from this surprizing head. You might say "things came into place", but you have no clue what you are saying, you don't have the perspective, you just enjoy it, the fact that now it seems clear, there is a connection, things are being said which you knew you wanted to say or wanted someone to say, some other head maybe.
And you know what? When it works, it's so simple.

* * *

All the works above are by Marina Decaro. The first and last image are from a work called "4 ojos" ("4 Eyes"), 2007.

Disclaimer: Marina De Caro was not consulted before writing the above text, and it is not meant to portray the development of her career. The above text is fiction and any resemblance to real art life stories, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
(via)

Sharing the Sensible (In a Rich Man's World)

The thing is: I'm very excited about performance moving forward. And I love how it invades all sorts of territories. I do it, watch it, write about it. It's my cup of tea. That is precisely why I don't want to leave it with an "interesting experiment" tag. Experiments have their consequences, results, and it seems crucial not to stop at the freshman enthusiasm for everything about everything that is anything new. What I like most about the experiment I will criticize below is that it dared to go far, to talk to people, to uncover hidden layers in unexpected places. And yet, it troubled me.

In Gerardo Naumann's "Factory" performance during the Warsaw edition of the inspiring Ciudades Paralelas festival - we are taken on a guided tour of a functioning factory (in Warsaw it was an enormous steel factory). However, this is not your average tour. Here, we get the possibility of witnessing private stories of workers, to hear who they are, both within the company context and outside of it. The tour is at times poetic, at times simply human and direct. Every presentation mixes the description of a person's job with more personal matters. Our first guide is the factory's technical director, then we go all the way down the (wage) hierarchy to the gardiner, who also has his stories, telling us of his love for 60's music (Deep Purple et al.) and even making us listen to some of it. A truly human experience in an unexpected context.
So what is it that makes me uncomfortable about it?
It is an unwilling, yet uncritical, PR event for a huge, powerful and hardly uncontroversial business.

The project seems to follow closely the teachings of French philosopher Jacques Rancière - for several years now he has been advocating a change of paradigm in the way we look at others. Teaching something, or learning, should mean, above all, realizing how the way other people see the world is just as valid as ours - it is a structure that is already a "complete" structure, they are also "teachers" and we - students. To put it in other words - everyone is competent. It might just be a question of acquiring the possibility to further develop this competence.

Rancière gives this example: workers in a factory can also be seen as art aficcionados, as they have their (art, or aesthetic) specialities, their passions, their expertise. Tapping into this is, according to Rancière, a crucial step towards going beyond the simplistic emancipatory claim of passing on the "correct" sensibility.
The "Factory" project follows Rancière's ideas closely. And yet, all the while achieving an arguably closer relation with the subjects/performers, and while making us feel a bond with many of them, while amazing us with the aesthetic aspects of a factory, its dynamics and dramaturgy, it fails in an important aspect: it underestimates the power of the structure it works in.

"Just" showing the lives of the workers is never just showing their lives. It necessarily functions within the context. And this context, here, wins. The tour/performance becomes a scarily effective way of implementing propaganda. We are still given stories about how magnificent it is to work here, how everyone is happy, safe, friendly, how everyone who worked in the factory during communist times participated in strikes, and how the only mentioned case of someone getting fired... got immediately offered another job. And because a skillful theater director does it, we hardly feel manipulated. On the contrary, the "genuine" feeling prevails. We leave happy that things are as they are. We love the stories, the people, the parallel city, the way it works, the world it works in. It is difficult to imagine a better publicity.
But wait - could all this be true? Maybe it is a good company? Maybe it is happy and safe and the best of possible industry worlds? Well, it's enough to make a quick news check - there was a fire in the factory just a few months ago, and just recently the company just layed off many of their executive personnel (apparently they were transferred to another company for "effectivity reasons" and were subsequently fired). I dig a little deeper. ArcelorMittal - that is the name of the company, is owned by the 6th richest person in the world (with a personal wealth of $38.1 billion - link). The company made 10 billion dollars profit last year alone. On the other hand, since the company started taking over Polish factories, it diminished its staff by some 3000 workers in Poland (ca. 25%).

This type of criticism could be contested. Should this matter? Should the work of art take this into account?
Can it? How?
Can we play with the system, within the system? Can we work our works so as not to become victims of the same propaganda we would usually receive - or worse, not just victims, but advocates?
Or can we ignore this and consider that not all works of art need to be political, or not necessarily in that sense, that it can also be about the people who work there, that they too have the right to be important subjects, and not just the megarich owner of their company?
But if we just move in and focus on them, while remaining on the factory ground, if we call it a Parallel City (Ciudades Paralelas means Parallel Cities), aren't we playing the status quo game? Aren't we the perfect PR people, giving the company - and the world which it co-creates - our seal of approval, a "positivist" acceptance? (A disturbing trait of the performance is that the workers/performers come and go - without too much of an introduction, and with no goodbye whatsoever, so while we are kept entertained, they have nearly no chance of receiving our recognition, or of establishing a human contact beyond the script. The beginning and the end is clear - it is the Ciudade Parallela, the company, not the people). Doesn't the critical art, so cherished by Rancière, become uncritical because of the very same (human) aproach he proposes?

So how are we to make - and look at - art in all those parallel cities that are more and more often taken over, or at least manipulated by, the powers that be, be they economic, or more directly political?
The fight here is indeed a fight over the sharing of the sensible - how do we value what we see? How can we reevaluate it? What sort of sharing is this? What do we want out of this situation? How can we, as artists, but also as viewers (viewers are artists, but artists are viewers too, to many people's surprize), find a common ground without becoming the agent of some powerful megastructure? Should we worry about it?
Banning the word "Facebook" on TV might seem like a silly idea, but I know some theater companies who do not use any brands in their shows. And for them, it's not about having the power to change the world. It's about enjoying the possibility.

----

Curiously enough, I was told that when Naumann made an analogous performance in Buenos Aires, the factory was a small and badly run one, and some commentators thought he was too rough on it, making it look very bad. One possible answer is: this format simply gives you the possibility to take a peek inside - and whatever you find there has been there already. But another possible explanation is: it may not be enough to implement a "personal guided tour" formula if we want to move beyond the small industry into the big guys' terrain, where they know how to charm us, seduce us, and make it appear like it's all immaculate. Then, it seems, it would need to be a whole new ball game.

---

I have a vague recollection of reading about a performance by the great Brazilian visual artist and performer Hélio Oiticica (I couldn't find the reference now). I believe it took place in the 70's. Oiticica walked around the public space, pointing at different objects. The spectators which followed him understood (were told?) that through the gesture, the objects acquired the status of works of art.
Oiticica's enchantment with the world seems clear. This is what the world is like, he seems to be saying. Look at this piece of art! I couldn't have done this better. The only thing I can do is to point it to you.
What would happen if Oiticica did the same thing in the factory? Would the objects he pointed at stop becoming art? Certainly not. The factory would gain the status of an aesthetic object - it would become the same marvel as any of the trees, benches, stones, clouds. Look at this piece of art! I couldn't have done this better.
Could we not?

Allan Kaprow on installation and performance

Now, I think those two words, installation and performance, mark accurately the shift in attitude toward a rejection or sense of abandonment of an experimental, modernist, position which had prevailed up to about, lets be generous, up to about 1968-1969, and began gradually becoming less and less energized. So, I think what you’re getting there is the flavor of modernist exhaustion and incidently a return to earlier prototypes, or models, of what constitutes art. And it’s no accident that the majority of most performance nowadays, there’s not much installation anymore, by the way, the majority of those performances tend to be of an entertainment, show biz, song and dance, in which the focus is on the individual as skilled presenter of something that tends to have a kind of self-aggrandizing, or at least self-focusing, purpose. It is artist as performer, much like somebody is an entertainer in a nightclub. And they’re interesting. Some of them are very good. I think Laurie Anderson is very good. She’s got all the skills that are needed in theater, which is what this is. Many others who jump on the bandwagon, coming from the visual arts, have no theatrical skills, and know zilch about the timing, about the voic about positioning, about transitions, about juxtapositions, those moment by moment occurrences in theater that would make it work. But it’s another animal, whether good or bad, from what we were doing, and I think, in general, even the good ones are a conservatizing movement.

- Allan Kaprow, 1988 (full interview is here)

What you like is to look

What you like is to look.
You like to suck it up in your gaze, you like to smear your innocent mind with the flesh of sight.
What you like is to become dependent. To let go of the constructions and make them make you.
This is the universe of the aesthetic. It is where you can always find a haven. Where you can let go of your constrained negotiations with what surrounds you, and be indulged, and be spoiled, and be challenged just safely enough to get back home.
What you like is when necessity becomes an ice-cream cone. Be it vanilla-flavored or razor-edged.
What you like is the place which is a place but requires no consequences. Of you.
Where the fish sing gentle songs and have human heads and human breasts, so you can see this is not real, and you can join the part of it that is real enough to be like you.
And you can be like you. Only less conspicuous. Or less conspicuously limited to what you believe you are.
What you like is to look, to admire, to appreciate, what you like is to jump in, when you were keeping yourself outside for some absurd reason. What you like is to overcome the feeling of absurdity through the feeling of empathy. You like to believe the thing there brings you closer to the thing here. And when you're back - well, when you are back, you leave.

(The video features work by Harrisson and Wood)