sarma

We first met in a café. I had been searching for the possibility to work with people making dance as I was eager to explore further what could be the role of a dramaturge in non-dramatic theatre. Katalina Mella needed a partner who would help her clarify her thoughts about the piece that she was making. That evening in a café she opened her big black notebook and started talking rapidly and passionately about the internal and external perception, presence, time and death and her complex exploration of these notions.

In terms of art making she was dividing her exploration in phases - disciplines as she calls them, organizing each discipline around a strict conceptual diagram of geometric relationships that define both the space of the performance and a possible pattern of movement in it. And while the 'discipline one' of her work has been conceived and performed as a solo, 'discipline two' on which she was working at that moment, involved two other performers, Maria Angela Tinelli and Joa Hug.

PERSISTENCE

As we were talking over the restaurant table, my first feeling was that she was developing highly conceptual work, exploring difficult and abstract material. And yet, from the moment I entered Katalina's process a week later, despite all the geometrical and intellectual articulations, I felt that I actually did not understand her. During the first two weeks I was coming to the rehearsals trying to figure out what exactly she was trying to do. I was searching for her artistic conviction that I could relate to and a method of work that I could recognize. Conviction and method. And while I was searching I was also wondering, what if I don't find it? Can I continue advising her or do I need to confront her with this communication failure?

What was preventing me from resolving this dilemma in an outburst of honesty, had to do with the way the other two performers, Maria Angela an Joa, were relating to Katalina. With total conviction, the two of them were following her through the shifting labyrinth of her ideas and intuitions, trusting her even when they obviously didn't know where that was going to lead them. I felt slightly ashamed about my 'need to know' so I decided to stay silent.

Patience proved fruitful sometime into the third week, when at one of the rehearsals Katalina in the midst of a movement suddenly turned around, asking me: are we persistent enough? Almost immediately my attention was drawn to the word persistence. Although Katalina's blunt question could have been about a particular movement or a sequence of movements that the three of them were trying to articulate, I decided to look at it differently. Katalina's artistic conviction is in Katalina's persistence.  Her mad obsessive persistence to do what she feels she needs to do even when her own high minded explanations of why she is doing it are betraying her. In contradiction she persists. And that's her deepest artistic credo. So when I answered her question by proclaiming emphatically: oh yes, you are persistent enough!, I was not talking about one moment or one movement, I was indirectly confirming to Katalina that I finally understood where she was coming from. What drives her as an artist. That's how I started to appreciate Katalina, Maria Angela and Joa as artists and found my way to relate to them. I perceived that what is used as a measure of clarity in their work on a level of convictions, is not related to how consequently they are following some clever ideological position. Paradoxically, clarity should emerge out of the uncompromising persistence in which everybody involved is following and sharing Katalina's difficult subjective obsession with her work as an artist. This was not a clarity of transparent meaning(s) but a clarity of artistic sovereignty, a last and crucial refuge of the real authorship.

There is a danger that what I am presenting here as a small personal revelation, at first glance could look like a deceptively obvious statement. Of course that the sovereignty of the artist is the core of his / her work. Well, the thing is, I am very much afraid of this 'of course' attitude that is becoming symptomatic of our culture of sophistication. It is an attitude that is taking difficult thing for granted transforming each into an empty figure of speech rather than a proposition that implies an intellectual responsibility for the consequences of what it pronounces.

Because, if we take sovereignty of the artist seriously in an era that proclaims 'the death of the author' we will have to acknowledge separation of a creative action from the production of meaning and consequently accept the fact that artistic sovereignty today is revealing itself most strongly in an obsessive repetition of meaningless actions.

For me persistence is a very good word to signify this situation. Once I made a connection between the word and a person pronouncing it from a stage, I felt that I could finally share Katalina's effort.

So, I abandoned my need to decipher or project meaning(s) upon the piece in the making. Contrary to that, it seemed that my role as a dramaturge was to persistently support persistence of Katalina and her performers against a doubt and tiredness of not knowing where they are going. Their courage of insisting on doing things even when they don't understand it, seemed to be a core of the work, a source of its integrity without which everything else would stay just an empty construction. If I was to give any structural contribution towards building a piece, care for this core element, a foundation of any structure to be built, was my prime responsibility.

This proved to be a paradoxical job for somebody used to playing a role of an 'articulation machine'. Rather than dispelling obscurity by the power of clear explanation, it became obvious that I should use clear explanation as a clever (and cheap) trick to protect this vital stubborn obscurity of the creative process. In other words to persistently support Katalina's persistence in practical terms meant that I should help her in dealing with a darkness of her intuition by offering soothing provisional explanations of what I see on the stage and to do that not for the sake of clarifying the work in some absolute sense, but for articulating and reflecting it back to performers again and again at critical moments when the persistence of everybody got shaken by tiredness and fear of failure. Instead of playing a conventional role of an 'articulation machine' I had to rewire myself and become Katalina's 'inspiration machine'. Once I had done it, I found my proper place in the joined process of work.

CONTEXTUALIZATIONS

Yet, when on the 3rd of December I went to Gasthuis to see the premiere of 'I Will Die You Will Die (Stopping Comparison)', I was already dealing with another dilemma that working with Katalina, Maria Angela and Joa confronted me with. While watching the piece, witnessing a difficulty in which its inner obsession in communicating with the outside observers in the audience it became obvious to me that there was something unfinished about what we were attempting to do.

Even if we consider that persistence of an artist constitutes an essence and a structural basis of his/her work, can we expect that this quality of artistic sovereignty based on the obsessive repetition of meaningless actions is actually enough for 'the work' to be presented to the audience?

I remember the intense discussion that would erupt between Katalina and me every time we would touch upon a subject of what I like to call contextualization. For me, it was obvious that however personal and irrational, what she is doing is already embedded into a certain very particular social and cultural context. Awareness of that context and all the implications of it on a process of production and the public presentation, was a necessary extension to the issue of the artistic sovereignty at the core of the work. And yet, for Katalina, context was something she was fighting with or rejecting altogether.

In most cases, feeling comfortable with the social context is a sign of opportunism, while clashing with it is pointing towards an attempt to re-think why and for whom an artist is making art. And yet, it is naïve to believe that rejecting the context will free an artist from it. He/she will still have to communicate his/her rebellion to those who are most of them oblivious to the urgency of it. And that's where the problem starts. Because, persistence of the artist is a proof of his freedom from any external expectations, the need to exhibit himself to the external eye bringing him back, face to face with these same expectations. The crucial question remains: what are those expectations that an artist really needs to fulfil in his communication with an audience? Does (s)he need to provide readable meaning(s) or should (s)he offer circumstances for a visceral encounter that goes beyond any production of meaning?.

My answer is straightforward. If the sovereignty of an artist is expressed through his irrational persistence in performing certain actions I would like to consider intense presence of this sovereignty and not the actions and their meaning as a real content of the artistic work to be evaluated. Looking from this angle, awareness of a context has nothing to do with a creation of public circumstances for a transmission of any particular meaning. It is rather the other way around. Artists should be alert to a social and cultural context so as to be able to interrupt production of meaning that is standing in between him/her and an audience and preventing direct existential (rather than a semantic) encounter.

POSTSCRIPTUM

For a very long time, the relationship between the artist, the theatre critic/dramaturge and the audience was defined in a particular fixed manner that is replicating the logic of the representative political and social system we are living in. Accordingly, the artist is hoping that the critical narrative about his/her work should function as an affirmative, authorative interpretation by an expert that would define the way an audience is understanding the work (s)he is doing. The dramaturge, in this constellation, is the privileged representative of both the author and the audience, supposedly linking them through his interpretation. Actually, by assuming the position of power between them, the interpreter is doing exactly the opposite - he is controlling the situation, keeping two sides separate by not allowing observer and observed to really come together in an attempt towards immediate communication. In this sense, the conventional role of a dramaturge is a reactionary one and in my work I tend to reject.

Still, with a certain sense of apprehension, I am imagining Katalina, Maria Angela and Joa, reading these reflections of their dramaturge. They could easily be disappointed. In my text I am not interpreting content of their/our work in any conventional sense. I am not drawing the attention of the public to the strong rejection of postmodernism being a main reference to Katalina's sensibility. I am not complicating her intuitive inclination toward the bright and definite world of platonic ideas with the actual obscurity of her thought processes. I am not invoking complex interplay between the cerebral idealism of the Bauhaus and the visceral desperation of the theatre of the absurd as a key for understanding the geometry and dark humor of her piece. I am not saying anything about persistently fashionable quasi-minimalism of the north European non-dramatic theatre and its influence on the strategies in which movement material is treated by performers in the piece.

I have a feeling that if I would start doing all this, I would cover up the persistent passionate blindness of Katalina's procedures. And, in my opinion, this persistent passionate volatile blindness is making her into a true artist. That's what the audience should look for in apiece and that's what they should be able to appreciate. Furthermore, although I did not talk about Bauhaus, postmodernism or minimalism, in this text I did present a story that I consider much more important in grasping, in descriptive terms, what this work is all about.

In standing, together with Maria Angela and Joa, at the edge of what she knows about her art, Katalina was actually making a work that is about this same edge of knowledge. Going across the edge, three performers were staging their own death. And, as they were not dying FOR us but WITH us, there was nothing narrative or meaningful about this act. If we, as a audience, were not capable of following them, we should at least partially take a responsibility for this failure. Because, we should have taken our reading glasses off and allow a blurred vision of the human movement in front of us to take us beyond the point of no return.