REARTIKULACIJA no. 4 - SUMMER 2008
Maja Delak
EXPENSIVE DARLINGS – A REVISION
(A NOTE ON THE CREATIVE PROCESS OF THE PERFORMANCE)
This article documents the creation of the dance performance Drage drage, which was premiered at Ljubljana’s City of Women Festival in October 2007. The article will present the main motivators of the production and the materials used in the process. The article will also expose the main questions examined at the beginning of the process, the stimuli for it, as well as new directions emerging throughout the creation and the application of inputs in the performance as a whole.
The process on the one hand started off with my desire to devise a group project in 2007, and on the other hand with an invitation from Sabina Potočki, the then programme and project manager of the City of Women Festival in Ljubljana, to premiere the piece as part of the event. The suggested theme of the Festival was humour and that presented a great challenge for me as I always believed that my pieces were humorous. However, I must admit that I often found them funnier than most people. At the time, I was also reading Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The book features an essay in which the author interprets the writings of American psychologist Silvan S. Tomkins who devoted his life to exploring affects. Sedgwick’s interpretations inspired me to read Tomkins’ Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, focusing particularly on the negative affects. Tomkins’ example of “a mouth that sucks cannot cry” made me think that I want my piece to talk about the status of contemporary dance in Slovenia. This decision was also connected to my personal history as a choreographer which I will summarize in the following paragraphs.
My first independent choreographic work dates back to 1995. Up until 2005, all my pieces were produced within the EN-KNAP Company. Along with developing my work, I established, initially by myself and later in collaboration with Mala Kline, the educational and publishing activities of the Group. Following changes to the programme scheme of the EN-KNAP Group in 2005, there was no longer enough room for several artists to simultaneously work within the Company. I was thus forced to find a new solution: I took over the existing, inactive Institute, renamed it Emanat Institute, and officially transferred all of my own work to it by means of a contract. Due to the fact that the newly established institute had not been financially supported by the City of Ljubljana for a period of several years, it was not eligible to apply for any funding (this condition was introduced in tenders for the first time last year, and subsequently also featured in the tenders of the Slovenian Ministry of Culture in different areas). This meant that after a 10 year career, I found myself in an unenviable position in terms of production of new work. I encounter problems common to all contemporary dance artists in Slovenia: a chronic shortage of rehearsal space, no affirmation in the national culture scheme, no increase in the amount of funding at disposal for an ever growing number of artists. In addition, even within the field of art, contemporary dance is perceived as being of little value. What is more, the criteria of selection for those who apply for funding allow fewer and fewer changes. In the last few years, we are witness to reproaches that contemporary dancers are a product of western educational institutions and thus are not part of the eastern European tradition. Such reproaches neglect the difference between technique and a personal aesthetic and artistic standpoint. The latter is undoubtedly a part of a tradition. Therefore, not only is the continuity of contemporary dance in Slovenia rendered impossible, but the tradition of contemporary dance is also under attack in an unrealistic desire to conceptualize it in accordance with western European and American dance history, whereby there is no acknowledgment of the revisions which the history of contemporary dance has already experienced. I believe that a consistent record of the history of contemporary dance must come into existence in the light of historical facts and direct sources. With a biased, predetermined approach to historicizing, amounting to rapid conclusions and comparisons, we may face a renewed oppression of the art of dance.
The piece Drage drage was developed at the point of intersection of my career in production, which was as described above, and the invitation from the City of Women Festival to create a new performance on the topic of humour. Bringing these two levels together brought me to the following conclusions:
1. These themes cannot be expressed otherwise than through humour as this is the only way for me to tackle the sad existing state of affairs.
2. I want to take on the role of the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes and state the fact that the “Emperor is naked”.
3. I want to work with artists who are interested in the same topic and want to explore it.
In the remainder of this review I will focus on the texts which were used in the creation of the performance Drage drage. Before mentioning them, I would like to emphasize that the texts served different functions: they provided the terminology for the emerging processes, and some of them were an inspiration through their articulation of certain notions, and therefore also certain fields of research that interested us, but were part of a different medium. Some texts also supported the structure in terms of content and meaning of the piece itself. I understand the term FIELD as a mental space confined by various texts and other motivators in which the process of creating a performance takes place. We consciously avoided dealing with and over-examining the viewpoints of authors, as we commented on them in a different language – the language of the stage. I would like to start by mentioning here the contribution by Katja Praznik to the publication Sodobne scenske umetnosti (2006), where she made an interesting assertion that the Slovenian contemporary dance scene is mainly populated by female authors and thus the position of contemporary dance in the country is comparable to the position of women in a patriarchal society. Another text that thoroughly inspired me was Baudrillard’s The Ecliptic of Sex, the precise articulations of which I tailored into themes that interested me within contemporary dance. By making use of Baudrillard’s terminology as if conducting a scientific experiment, I acquired definitions of the artistic field of dance and the state it was in, in our country. Two examples of this diversion are:
- The trap of contemporary dance in Slovenia (instead of: “The trap of the sexual revolution” (Baudrillard, 1990: 130) for women…) “is that it [is being confined] to this sole structure (and I add: of a non-governmental organisation) condemning it to a negative discrimination when the structure is strong, or a derisory triumph in a weakened structure” (Ibid.).
- What does contemporary dance (instead of: “women”) “contest in [its] opposition to the phallocratic structure? An autonomy, a difference, a specificity of desire and pleasure, another use of the body, a speech, a writing – but never seduction. [The creators of contemporary dance] are ashamed of seduction as an artificial staging of their bodies, as a destiny of bondage and prostitution.” (Ibid.). I was also interested in the terminology occurring in Baudrillard’s The Ecliptic of Sex: “play, challenge, dual [duelles] relations, strategy of appearances” (Ibid.).
I asked Katja Praznik to work on the piece as dramaturg and, on the basis of the above suppositions, I began to establish with her the key topics that we wanted to tackle as early as spring 2007. These included: space (the thematisation of the actual performance space – the performance and rehearsal space of the Ljubljana Dance Theatre – PTL), history (a conscious production of the history of one’s own field), hierarchies of creativity (within the creative process of individual performances as well as within contemporary dance in general), questions to do with funding, marketing, touring the piece, pleasure in dance/movement (linked to Tomkins’ articulation of the continuum shame – joy), the body in contemporary dance (what kind of a body should this be?), education and forms of dance. These suppositions lead to me to invite to the project only those artists who mainly work in Slovenia (Nataša Živkovič, Urška Vohar, Barbara Kranjc, Jelena Rusjan, Vlasta Veselko). I always like to work with artists who I have had the opportunity to collaborate with in the past as we share a common experience, personal histories, and the experience of the cultural space. I started off the process by devising three levels:
- the methodological level which may be accurately defined with the following quote by Josef and Anni Albers: “Art is concerned with HOW and not with WHAT, not with literal content, but with the performance of the factual content. The performance – how it is done – that is the content of the art” (Josef and Anni Albers). - the level of content, where I initially focused on Tomkins’ writings on SHAME. He claims that shame is the affect of offence, humiliation, insult, defeat, transgression, violation and alienation, and adds that terror speaks of death and life and that distress makes the world a valley of tears. The terror and the distress are caused from the outside and make their way into a person’s ego. That is why shame has a deep effect on a person and thus becomes inner torture, the disease of the soul. Regardless of the manner of humiliation, the humiliated feels naked, defeated, alienated and also feels a lack of dignity and value. In physicality this is manifested by lowering the head, the eyes, the upper part of the body, by covering the face and also by being ashamed of one’s own body and consequently covering the body from other people. Another of Tomkins’ assertions can be added: shame functions only when pleasure and joy have been established, and shame acts upon them as an inhibitor.
- the level of form: the question of form developed through the process: the assumption was that the structure of the piece would be based on a solo. As there were seven performers involved, Katja Praznik and I decided for a co-existence of seven solos which would be so expressive that they could also exist on their own. However, we tried to find ways in which their co-existence side by side would be possible. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick proposed: “BESIDE is an interesting proposition also because there is nothing dualistic about it; a number of elements may lie alongside one another, though not an infinity of them. […] Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivalling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, warping, and other relations” (Sedgwick, 2003: 8).
After a good three weeks of researching a way of staging the content, we generated much acting as well as movement material. We developed new and interesting procedures of structuring individual material as scenes, imprint/print, a system of feedback, combining tactics, manipulations of the seen. At the same time Katja as the dramaturg also interviewed performers on all the above-mentioned topics. Each performer had to define her own knowledge of the history of contemporary dance, their place as artist in this space and this medium, the choices they make in their work and thereby establish themselves as an individual operating within their own personal and socially accepted values and norms. This process provided a good deal of material which was not directly linked to my previous choreographic work. I consciously avoided any methods I had developed beforehand and when I did not know how to proceed, I never covered up my doubts by using proven solutions, but opened myself up to this reality by naming it ignorance. This was very laborious. The only knowledge I could still use was managing and co-ordinating group dynamics.
After generating excellent material as well in collaboration with scenographer Marko Peljhan and musicians Gipo Gurrado and Attila Faravelli, I realized that if I started to assemble parallel material, I would very quickly fall into my usual choreographic methods and potentially come to a halt at the “hermetic nature of contemporary dance.” The question that haunted me was how to articulate the themes more clearly and how to incorporate the text which, here and there, was explicitly and directly related to action and movement on stage. After another re-examination of how to show the marginal status of contemporary dance and female dancers, I came across a remark about the lesbian performing arts by Tatjana Grief. She asserts that the viewpoint of lesbian art is the viewpoint from the edge of society. Grief recognizes a series of identities, aesthetics and genres, which were of use to us in the further development of the piece. The characters and genres that performers chose – Vampirella, femme fatale, drag king, the bride, cabaret, the fairy, Barbarella, the bullfighter… were explored in the continuation of the process. Each of the chosen characters was filtered through the decision of individual performers, as all of them chose the character they could most easily relate to. In the next phase we applied our own material, as well as texts that emerged from interviews and were upgraded through improvisation, onto the construction of the character. Each of the characters displayed a development which was believable in its existence and desire, yet impossible and thus tragicomical. The juxtaposition of the seven individual solos (translator Katja Kosi also performs in the piece) confirmed the initial assumption that taking into consideration the axioms of BESIDE enables a structure which allows for their co-existence as they are consistent and stable to the extent that they can also subsist on their own. And this was how the piece was performed. Each of the seven artists performed without musical accompaniment and with minimal requirements for costumes and props. Looking at each individual’s material took almost seven hours (the performance lasts 55 minutes) and all characters maintained a performative charge in all constituent components (duration, concentration, the execution of active and passive passages). Peljhan’s idea of installing a system of monitoring cameras throughout the whole space created the concept for the performance space, as it also became a space expressing the impossible state of affairs for contemporary dance. The stage is home to a colourful life surrounded by the relentless gaze of the camera which produces a flat black and white image of the situation. As such, it is a powerful metaphor for the system that does not support you but only controls you.
References:
Josef Albers, “The Origin of Art,” in Réalités Nouvelles, Beaux Arts Magazine, Pariz 1952.
Jean Baudrillard, The Ecliptic of Sex , Pluto Press, London 1990, p. 130.
Tatjana Greif, “Queer kulturne delavke”, in Maska, no. 1-2 (60-61), Ljubljana 2000.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Duke University Press, Durham 2003, p. 8.
Katja Praznik, “Jaz sem v gibu s teboj. Slovenski sodobni ples med gibom in telesom”, in Sodobne Scenske umetnosti, edited by Bojana Kunst and Petra Pogorevc, Maska, Ljubljana 2006.
Silvan S. Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, Volume II, The Negative Affect, Springer Publishing Company, Inc, New York 1963.
Translated from Slovenian by Jernej Možic.
Translated from English by Laura Hollósi.