(Interview was published in abridged version.)

What was the reason to make the seven deadly sins the subject of a theatrical search for the past seven years?

Our notion is that anger, gluttony, greed, lust, sloth, envy and pride are core aspects of every individual’s identity. Each of these “negative drives” opens up a conflict which is built into the subjective self of each individual: on one hand, one builds mechanisms and strategies of defense from these negative drives to conform to society’s demands; on the other, one develops various forms of release, because one cannot stand the pressure of one’s own subjectivity. Seven deadly sins seemed to be a good subject to open up the “classical theatre” theme about fight between public and private. And we, theatre makers, are in the same position: a stage is a position between private and public. In this way the seven deadly sins’ subject is common ground for all present in the theatre, audience and artists, and we’ve decided to play this theatrical game quite open and basically. At first sight it looks like an old fashion theme but in fact “negativity” is still a main force under surface of contemporary society. Negativity makes main headlines in the news. But in fact, surface is more interesting than what is beneath. I mean, the most interesting are strategies how to conceal the negativity or how to outrun media with public confession. Hiding and revealing of negativity is one of the main games of civilization.

How was your theatre company founded exactly and what is its mission statement? (what sort of theatre – in form and contence – you want to bring and what do you hope to achieve towards your public?)

First of all Via Negativa is not a theatre company, it’s a performing arts project – meaning that we are not bound by a set-ensemble logic of a fixed number of constant members. VN is an open type project. We organize annual workshops which offer performers to discover their creative potential in our way of thinking and working and give them a chance to take part in our productions. We consider a theatre performance to be a relationship between a spectator and an actor in real space and time. We deal with this relationship as a complex flow of points of views, expectations, judgments, conclusions, recognitions, stereotypes, prejudices, tolerance or intolerance, knowledge or lack thereof; all these trigger various emotional, rational or irrational responses. We are on stage in order to trigger this relationship, to make it run. Theatre (or performing arts in general) is an artistic medium of communication: each story or situation in front of a spectator is there in order to communicate something, to make a statement, to make a person (spectator) you’re talking to recognize and feel something. That’s why I see theatre, above all, as a sphere of communication, not as a medium of aestheticisation; exchange of points of views before the crafts and skills. We feel we are most real when we touch upon something that can no longer be rationalized, when we no longer have to pretend to understand something we do not. Our aim is simple: to give the audience and ourselves a chance to be alive in this artificial situation.

With ‘Via Negativa’ you want to undo theatre of its frills. Do you see to much of that kind of theatre? Is in that way a sort of reactionary theatre? Do you still remember what play you saw that made you think: I want to make something totally different?

I could say that Via Negativa is an attempt against mystification of the art in general not only theatre. For me to be an artist is a privilege to expose myself, to be personal, to communicate myself, to share my personal opinions, understandings, feelings, anger, fears etc. In this way Via Negativa is definitely a turn backwards, back to the basic sense, meaning and reasons for theatre’s existence today. With this turn backwards we are fighting for the right to be on the stage, we are exposing ourselves because that’s why we are in front of the people. Theatre gives us a privilege to show what we are forced to hide in our conventional lives, and we’ve decided not to abuse this privilege. We’ve stripped theatre of all frills to the level of naked relation with viewer, which we believe is the core of all kinds of performing arts. No more hiding behind the curtains. Via Negativa is not a fight against any existing form of contemporary or traditional artistic practice – it’s fight to make sense (not only money) of art again.

‘Incasso’ had its première in 2004 and is about greed. Has the worldwide economic crisis changed the perception of the performance?

Essentially perception hasn’t changed. But the economic crisis has raised the interest for Incasso performance. This fact confirms that our relation with money is highly personal – this was our starting point while working on performance. Financial crisis reflects that our global economic system is melting as ice on polar caps but it does not change our relation to money, on the contrary, it intensifies it.

Is there a central storyline, or do you keep far away from storytelling theatre? It’s about the complex relationship between people and money. Can you briefly explain the complexity and how it shows on stage?

Not only theatre, whole art is about storytelling. For me a story (a myth) is the beginning of everything. In this case I’m really conservative. For me each painting or music is a story, or there’s a story behind it and I’m the one who must read it, recognize it in the art piece – otherwise the art doesn’t work. In contemporary society we have professional art “readers” (critiques, theorists, art historians etc). Nowadays the audience depends on their reading, audience needs their “brief” in order to consume the art work; on the other side artists “use” these professional art readers as translators, mediators, moderators… In this sense we’re trying to make a shortcut: what we do is what you see, there’s nothing behind to understand, there’s no deeper meaning, there’s no need to learn about the history of contemporary performing arts to understand what we’re talking about.
Yes, Incasso is about complex relationship between people and money. The power, the totalitarity of money is what makes everything unbearably simple. Money is means by which we exchange values, with money we define the values of practically everything in order to be able to trade with everything. Things get complicated when we confuse the value with the meaning or sense or importance of things. And we do it constantly. The same is with art. We’re forced to fight for our meaning (importance) through the market value. This is the game we must accept or there’s no place for us in contemporary times. In theatre there’s always money between us also. The most obvious moment is a ticket a person must buy. We trade something in advance; the audience is ready to pay for a kind of promise, a possibility, a chance that this might be an artistic or at least an entertaining event. In this way a performance is pure economic relationship of exchanging the values. In Incasso (some may not know, incasso is Italian expression for box office money) we disclose this symbolic relation: we openly put money between us in order to take away this symbolic mandate from it, to degrade it to the level of a stage prop and to create “art pieces” from it.

‘Incasso’ also reflect on the way artists in Eastern Europe deal with the changes after communism and in a ‘free’ world that is reigned by the power of money. How has that changed reality personally/artistically affected you?

At first as deliverance, a sensation of freedom with the liberating feeling that suddenly all doors are open, although Slovenia was never a hard boiled communist country. But it was not the change of economical system or brutality of capital or liberalization of our political system that quickly made us sober – what stroked us the most was the loss of the Idea and that’s what we are still fighting with. This was the biggest and unexpected change: we lost big ideas about brotherhood and unity between Yugoslavian nations, we lost the idea of socialism – we’ve been trained to believe in big Ideas or to fight against them. Suddenly there was nothing to fight for or against. I hope you remember the movie Deliverance directed by John Boorman. It’s really a great metaphor for Freedom, and this is what Freedom is doing to us -delivered nations, delivered individuals – right now.

What are the reactions of the public? Is there a a big difference between the countries where you perform? They can pay as much or as less as they want to see the performance. Has the crisis made people more greedy?

Of course there are differences. Because of our straightforward attitude the audience in the Western Europe can be really suspicious and distrustful at the beginning; it’s trying to discover what’s hidden behind all we’re doing, maybe expects some ugly manipulation or something similar, while the Balkan audience enjoys this attitude and usually immediately grabs the opportunity not to be formal. I’ve noticed that money is more a pride issue than a greed problem, because of the displacement of values I’ve mentioned before. We all are aware that our relation to money can quickly disclose what kind of persons we are. Generally people do not want to risk this disclosure in the open relation we are offering – to fix their own price for the performance they came to see. Usually they pay around average price for the ticket they’re used to pay. Crisis makes people passive; they know that this is not their game. It is a big lecture about greed of the system, people; I’m angry knowing that we will all pay for it, but not to get rid of it, no, to save it, to preserve it. It’s definitely a greed story.

Can you give some examples of reactions from the public that really amazed you in either a good or a bad way?

My standpoint is that public reacts according to a deal you’re offering. There’s always a kind of an agreement or a silent contract in the theatre. If sometimes I was disappointed about audiences’ reaction then I was disappointed about myself, because I recognized that what we were offering was not interesting or good enough for them to accept it. I never underestimate the audience. We’ve learned that people are ready for things beyond our imagination if you find a way to approach them. While we were working on performance OUT (2008) we decided that the audience should be the one who stopped the performance (not us) and that we would stay on the stage until they left the theatre. It was the performance about pride, the last of the 7 deadly sins series. So we decided to play “fetch and bring” dog game with the audience: performers were on their knees, half of them naked, barking and throwing the ball to the audience, going wild if somebody hesitated not to throw it back on the stage. We expected that audience would be amused at the beginning but also bored quite quickly with this game, and that they would stop after some time. But even if they were bored they threw the ball back to us, because that was the rule. Nobody wanted to stop. We’ve made lots of different changes in the performance in order to give the audience good reasons to stop it and leave the theatre, but after 10 performances it was clear that we had to change the rule: in the middle of this dog play one performer asked the audience not to throw the ball anymore, while dogs were going mad asking for the ball. After we gave the audience a clear chance to decide, the game started to be fight we were looking for.

After seven years of ‘Via Negativa’, you’re now working on ‘Via Nova’. What is it about?

After seven years of researching the relations between a viewer and a performer we’ve returned back to the beginning to use materials from this period and to work on them all over again in order to find new ways to do it. We’re moving from questions of ethics of creation towards questions of aesthetics of creation. That’s why we call this project Via Nova.

„Srbin pišao po crkvi Sv. Dominika u Zadru.“ Neobično, takav je, jamačno tržišno uzbudljiv, naslov (zasad) mimoišao medijske objave koje su popratile ili će tek popratiti premijernu izvedbu trodijelne predstave slovenske skupine Via Negativa „Via Nova“ na završetku festivala suvremenog kazališta Zadar snova, 14. kolovoza 2009. Ili možda još bolje: „Slovenac Bojan natjerao Srbina Kristiana da se pomokri po svetom tlu hrvatske crkve“. U gradu poznatom po svom domoljublju i crkvoljublju, koje se ljupko ujedinjuje u jumbo-plakatu zagrljenog haškog i rajskog podstanara (general Ante Gotovina i papa Ivan Pavao II.), predstava kakvu nudi Via Negativa priziva peticije udovica domovinskog rata, demonstracije s križevima, onim istim koje Mesić želi izbaciti iz javnih institucija, pobunu protiv bogohulja, hrvatohulja i općenito vražjih posala koje zadarski festival sad već trinast godina potpomaže (između ostalog, i zadarskim gradskim novcem). Ipak, takav radikalan odgovor na podražaj izostaje – možda i stoga što medijska pažnja, čak i u sezoni visoke konzumacije srdela i kiselih krastavaca, kasni, dolazi post festum.

Trebao je doći završni dan Zadra snova, pa da se na festivalskom akreditacijskom pultu pojavi veća hrpica novinara proširenih nozdrva, uvjerena da Via Negativa može smrditi na vijest. I smrdilo je. Matematičkim rječnikom Ivice Nevešćanina, novinara Slobodne Dalmacije koji je 2007. godine slovensko gostovanje popratio tekstom „Jeza u Zadru: Hrvat i Srbin na sceni se izrezali noževima“, mogli bismo sumirati sljedeće: jedna osviještena osoba (sam novinar koji je autoironično (?) pristao sudjelovati u trećem fragmentu predstave kao razgovaratelj s umjetnikom), decilitar ljudske mokraće, četiri novčanice u anusu i deseci šokiranih novinara, rezime je predstave „Via Nova“ glumačke skupine Via Negativa koja je u petak premijerno izvedena na 13. Međunarodnom festivalu suvremenog kazališta Zadar snova. Nesvješćaninov… Odnosno, Nevešćaninov diskurs (oprostite, čovjek ima neobično zgodno prezime) možda je prije dvije godine, kad je pisao o „jednoj onesviještenoj osobi, decilitru ljudske krvi, četiri kirurška ‘punta’ i desecima šokiranih gledatelja“, bio jedan od zaslužnijih elemenata (a svaka ideja mora se zaslužiti, čuli smo u predavanju o umjetniku) da se Via Negativa prihvati upravo re-cikličke metode primjene performerskog materijala. „Via Nova“ reprizira i iznova kontekstualizira performanse po kojima je ova skupina proteklih godina postala poznata široj javnosti, dovodeći u fokus paradoksalnost kreacije novog kao preduvjeta suvremene umjetnosti. Stoga u novoj zadarskoj premijeri gledamo „novu“ Marinu Abramović, „novu“ igru s noževima, „novo“ uriniranje na sceni, „novi“ ples s petokrakom zalijepljenom za penis, „novo“ zalijevanje stabla u ustima umjetnika, pa na koncu i ne manje važno – „novog“ Ivicu Nevešćanina.

Upravo je medijska (ne)pažnja, pri čemu je u sceni „Razgovor s umjetnikom“ novinaru-glumcu Nevešćaninu nametnut (podmetnut?) diskurs mislećeg Branimira Bilića, visoko intelektualiziran govor koji se razmeće citatima (od Foucalta do Webera) i duboko analitičkim pitanjima koja su sama sebi odgovor (opservacije o „temeljitoj oslabljenosti potencionalnosti radikalne potrošnje“, „konvencionalnim dispozitivima reprezentacije“ ili o „glumcu koji proizvodi komunikaciju sa sredstvima komunikacije“), kritička točka na kojoj redatelj Bojan Jablanovec temelji nešto što bih nazvao politikom pojašnjenja. Teoretizirajućem govoru Nevešćanina (koji je zapravo čitan s papira, čak i u onim trenucima kad glumi spontanost konverzacije u kafiću, čime je dodatno naglašen re-citatni i prilično masturbacijski akcent u medijskom odnosu prema sebi i drugima) kontrapunktirana je praktička nastava u izvedbi Kristiana Al Droubija koji umjesto verbalne re-akcije radije nudi performersku akciju, pojednostavljujući sukus svojih odgovora na pokušaje destrukcije prema vlastitom tijelu, radnoj knjižici ili novcu, u društvu koje vrijednost ionako pridaje isključivo robi. Ta nije li set noževa kojima si Al Droubi i Kadin napadaju prste, u akcijskoj prodaji za 129,99 kuna na svakoj boljoj lokalnoj televiziji?

Reaktualizacija tog medijsko-stvarnosnog kontinuuma koji tematizira „Via Nova“ nije stoga moguća bez da pozornost obratimo i na sam medij. On je u završnom dijelu („Razgovor s umjetnikom“) prisutan kroz bilićizaciju i blesimetrizaciju ne-razgovornog jezika talking-heada, u središnjem dijelu („Igra s čačkalicama“) on se manifestira kao odbačen papir, otpadni materijal s kojeg viču senzacionalističke medijske konstrukcije dok ih glumac Boris Kadin čita podsjećajući na bivše kontekste u kojima su predstavljani njihovi performansi, dok je prvi dio („Što mi je rekao Joseph Beuys dok sam mrtav ležao u njegovom naručju“) više uvodno predavanje o bitku umjetnika, nužno građenje podloge za razlučivanje kreacije i rekreacije. Nakon što je Kadin, s ucrtanom Rubikovom kockom na majici, u početnoj sceni prislonio oštricu noža na zapešće, izgradivši scensku napetost, a potom prasnuvši u smijeh nad tim poigravanjem s glađu publike i medija, presvukao se u čistu bijelu košulju, a na glavu navukao jutenu vreću oblikovanu kao lice zeca. Ultimativno pitanje: kako umjetnik može doći do „važnih“ enciklopedija suvremene umjetnosti, ili bolje – kako uvrštenje u iste može poći za rukom umjetniku Via Negative? Dok je zeko držao predavanje, neki su u publici sjedili na svojim ljudskim ušima, a potom, u „Igri s čačkalicama“, i na očima. To saznamo dakako poslije, zahvaljujući internetskim tražilicama. S obzirom da je, rekoh, neodvojivo performersko revidiranje medija bez medijskog revidiranja performansa, iznimno je važno pogledati što je iz nove prilike za popravak naučio medijski dio publike. Isti dan kad je napisala članak „Požar na zadarskom balkonu bez veće materijalne štete“, Večernjakova novinarka Stela Filipi objavila je i tekst „Golotinja i uriniranje pred kazališnom publikom“. Ona, za koju google tražilica kaže da piše o lopovima koji kradu pršute, o provalnicima koji odnose riblje konzerve, o otimaču ženskih torbica ili pijanom Zadraninu koji se skida do pojasa i vrijeđa goste, o nepokretnoj ženi koja je izgorjela u požaru obiteljske kuće ili, da ne bude sve tako crno, o zadarskom ribaru koji je ulovio morsku lisicu od 107 kilograma, poslana je na kazališnu premijeru koja je mirisala na krv. I nanjušila ju je. Bio je to pravi, krunski zadatak.

„Kada se jedan od glavnih glumaca slovenske skupine “Via negativa” skinuo do gola na sceni, sve je ukazivalo na egzibicionizam, no kada se još i pomokrio, publika je ostala zgranuta“, analitički je primijetila novinarka istodobno motreći i reakcije publike i ples malog piše na pozornici. Pravilo dvije strane – prvo pravilo novinarske objektivnosti. Podsjetila je i da im to nije bilo prvi put – prije dvije su se godine, kaže, Srbin i Hrvat „rezali po prstima u igri s noževima dok je krv prštala na sve strane“. Ove godine „na sve strane“ prštala je pišalina, no čini se da novinarku crne kronike, uz sva moja pogrešna uvjerenja, i nije tako teško šokirati. Poslušajmo ipak Jasena Boku, u predstavi citiranog kritičara koji je Nevešćaninovu tekstu prije dvije godine dao „kontekst“, pozivajući se na prakse drugih izvedbenih korištenja tjelesnih fluida: „Kad lokva krvi pod njegovim nogama dosegne impresivne razmjere, Franko B. se zbog gubitka krvi ruši na pod. U pauzi umjetnik dobiva infuziju kako bi u drugom dijelu predstave opet mogao krvariti do mile volje. “Četri punta” Via Negative u ovom se kontekstu doimaju zaista kao dječja posjekotina i predstava za najmlađi uzrast.“

Na jednoj strani, dakle, imamo šokiranu novinarku crne kronike, koju ni prediskustvo „štrcanja krvi na sve strane“ (zvuči kao da je zbog performansa „Ne kao ja“ čak iz Zagreba morala biti dopremljena pošiljka transfuzijske krvi, što je dobro znati kad sljedeći put budete neoprezno rezali luk) nije priviknulo na šok, a na drugoj strani o „ne osobito sablaznoj“ pišalini na HNK i „dječjim posjekotinama“ kirurški secira oguglali kazališni kritičar, lijan koji je bio na Eurokazu i sve to, i kojem nikad dosta. Što ga ne sprečava da svojom karticom i pol teksta (sic!) kritizira višak medijske pažnje za taj, naravno, nimalo važan nedogađaj. Možda je ovdje poučnije citirati Nevešćanina, onog starog, koji je u svojoj nevijesti zapisao: „Teško je reći što je bilo jezivije: gledati kako se bez glasa i trzaja ubadaju ili slušati ritam tupih udaraca oštrice u drveni stol.“

Jablanovec, Kadin i Al Droubi, uz nemalu marionetsku pomoć Nevešćanina, novom predstavom uspijevaju ukazati na paradokse medijskih i umjetničkih diktata, pokazujući da ništa ne može iscrpiti patološku medijsku potrebu da svisoka reagira na navodno niske strasti, a istodobno ne prepoznaje ikakvu potrebu da ikako tretira umjetnost kao područje političkog bunta. Možete ih hraniti hrskavim brusketama premazanim rajčicama, mozzarellom i spermom, ali zalogaj u ustima publike koja na umjetnost gleda kao na egzibiciju nikad neće biti adekvatno začinjen. U zemlji u kojoj svećenici svakodnevno po crkvama piju Kristovu krv, urin na radnoj knjižici, krv na nacionalnoj oštrici i novac u anusu plesača labuđeg jezera ne mogu poprimiti jednako simbolična značenja, čak i kad se to događa također u crkvenom prostoru, dakle mjestu gotovo posvećenom simboličkom imperativu povjerenja. O tom paradoksu nije suvišno raspravljati, jer nije teško primijetiti da je jalov posao staviti maslinovu grančicu između umjetničkog i medijskog svijeta. Čak i kad je riječ o cijelom maslinovom stablu umetnutom u umjetnikova usta (dakle, prostor artikulacije), pomirenje i pokora nisu garantirani produkt – voda kojom bi se stablo imalo zalijevati vrlo brzo presuši. Možda je baš zato rad na recikliranju vlastite umjetničke produkcije kulminativan uspjeh cjelokupnog dosadašnjeg opusa Via Negative.

Five years ago Bojan Jablanovec founded the theatre project called Via Negativa which annually focuses on one of the basic human attributes as defined by the deadly sins: pride, envy, gluttony, lust, wrath, greed, sloth. He says that the mechanisms and strategies of defense against the sins are core defining factors of and individual’s identity and one of the universal agents of human nature. So far, he and his international team, dominated by Slovene actors, have presented Wrath, Gluttony, Greed, Lust, Sloth and Envy. The project has received numerous acknowledgments both at home and abroad, but has also spurred scandals. Male masturbations on stage, urinating on the HNK stage, an actors extreme overeating, hammering a nail into the penis, a knife-play that draws blood… are just some of the scenes that have guaranteed Bojan Jablanovec’s Via Negativa a lifelong core of fans or relentless adversaries.

It’s five in the afternoon. Which of the seven deadly sins tested you most today?

This morning, I had a discussion, connected to what I am currently preparing myself for. Therefore: pride, as Pride is the next project of Via Negativa.

How did it test you?

How did the sin test me? In 2009 we will attempt to create a synthesis of the seven years of Via Negativa, entitled Via Nova. Pride tempts me to regard what I do as something more important, something more than it really is. So I must keep curbing my own conceit – that I am more important than I really am.

What do you mean?

I think it is important to constantly keep in mind the facts of who you are and where, what you know and what you don’t. When you cross the line and believe your own ego, you simply loose touch with reality. The entire project of Via Negativa is testimony to the fact that one must always maintain one’s connection to reality intensively. In this sense pride tests me – it is connected to my work and what I am attempting to achieve by it. I am always trying to achieve more.

Don’t the actor’s narratives – as personal as they are, perhaps even more so than in their private lives – qualify as “more”?

For some people perhaps, for others not so. For some this is a step backward, away from art, for others it is a step beyond. To me, each opinion is valuable information about what we do. But we could also mention pride again. Why is someone certain that he can step on stage and talk about himself? That is the moment when we find ourselves on slippery ground… Why do we believe we can do this? The simplest answer lies in that societal roles have been assigned and someone must do this, too.

The Via Negativa project declaratively abandons aesthetics in lieu of ethics. One of the performers in Wrath tells us a story of how he lost his parents in a car crash, which really happened. His intimate tragedy is shared with the spectators. Who is he testing: us or himself?

It’s very simple. Each man is his own story. Each tells what they are ready to tell. If an actor dredges up a story he finds necessary to tell what he wants to tell, no moralizing is necessary. An ethical imperative is necessary: that only those with something to say and show may step onto the stage. Via Negativa discusses things other will not or dare not show or talk about, even if they may wish to. To me, theatre is a space in which we, the creators are on stage in order to talk or do instead of the spectator, to sin if you will, for him and in his name. This is why the spectator comes to the theatre, because we are prepared to do this instead of him. If we do it right, the spectator is ready to see himself in a way he would otherwise not want to.

Considering the fact that you are dealing with pride – would you be ready to step on stage in a few hours and interpret it? Where are your own personal stories in Via Negative and its seven sins?

Is this the classic question of what a director does in a project like this?

Not really…

In each of the performances I am present where and when the time comes to contextualize everything that has been said and done in the process. This is my work in the practices of Via Negativa. You are not he first to want to see me on stage – I get similarly provoked by the performers I work with. But I am no actor or performer. I am much more effective behind the stage than on it.

The man in the background?

This is not about modesty!

Are you back there in order for others to express themselves?

No! Not at all! I want to be good alongside them. And again: this is not about modesty! More likely it’s about the opposite – being overly confident. Only alongside them can I do what I would never be able or willing to do myself.

Via Negativa is a theological term. How do you interpret it?

It is proving the existence of God through what God isn’t. Via Negativa is not a proof against the existence of God. It is only a process through which, by proving what God isn’t, one comes to the dimensions of what God could be. Such an argumentation for God came about as a result of understanding that understanding God is impossible. The dimensions of the divine surpass the capabilities of the human mind.

How do you transfer such argumentation to the stage?

I cannot stand definitions of theatre – what is theatre. Theatre is an open space. In truth, every definition of theatre is too narrow. Which is why I rather think about what theatre is not.

One of the notions is that the spectator is God in the theatre, isn’t it?

This is the notion that, even though it’s rather old, was our basis for envy. In our last performance, Four Deaths, we interpreted envy as the relationship between to individuals, opening toward a third. For this, we used the Abel-Cain-God paradigm, which is about the two of them attempting to achieve their own confirmation through divine love. Because Cain does not receive it, his envy causes an act of destruction: fratricide. If theatre is about the public liking us (we wish to inspire admiration, interest and approval) then the spectators are in the position of God, divine love, then we asked ourselves – who is our Abel… We found him in the field of contemporary performing arts. We sought out the big names of the European and World stages in any way connected with the work we do or the performer himself. Thinking about who God is in theatre can, through the prism of pride, quickly transform itself: pride culminates in the moment, when the actor sets himself as God. Everything he does, he does to elevate himself above all else. We talk about this a lot in Via Negativa.

Is the feeling that in Via Negativa, the quality of art is born through torture and suffering, the correct one? Is that what sets the audience’s approval in the end?

It’s hard for me to agree. Every work of art that desires to persevere is hard and serious work. I allow that artistic surplus may come about as an idea. But how will you surpass in the next performance? In this, a component of, if you will, torture or hard work is present. Otherwise – all art is a battle with oneself. On all levels. How much do you demand from yourself? How do you respond to an audience’s demands?

The audience can also be discriminatory toward and artist…

They can. But in historicizing art, which is getting quicker all the time, artists ourselves must make sure that thing fall into place. But of course this never happens when we want it to. Always too late or too soon. But whoever blames the audience for this is, I believe, actually arguing with himself.

Considering that Via Negativa comes from theology, do you feel a certain “godliness” in your work. Do you discuss it?

Not at all. From the very start, we have been avoiding theological or catholic contexts.

All right, but you are dealing with internal existential problems of man, as collected and recognized in the seven deadly sins by christianity.

First and foremost, I understand the seven sins as elementary expanses of an individual’s existence, which law and religion have denoted as negative. In reality, these are the areas that define an individual indelibly. Everyone must form an opinion of them and it is the relationship toward the negative that defines one as a personality. To me, this is the area that defines man as man and decisively structures all societal relationships in which one lives. What is the judicial system? It controls and via repressive mechanisms dominates all these seven areas. This is the reason we are doing the seven sins cycle: because they determine the everyman and the entire western-christian society.

Via Negativa is a project that should take place round the clock on the streets. Does it require theatre?

It’s always a battle. A conflict we play out each day at home, at work, in the kitchen, in the toilet, with each other and ourselves. We succumb to our own wishes and slip into sin or keep resisting it. What we are looking for on the stage is the right story, gesture, action with which to stage this conflict on ourselves. The authors always build from themselves, at a very personal level. One must always enter personally into a relationship with art. For instance, if someone says to me “I’m not lazy, look, I’m always working”, I answer: “Do you really think so? Through which laziness are you speaking now?” Once one enters the capillary system of one’s negativity, one discovers drives, which one doesn’t really even want to know about. This is when one discovers sloth, envy, pride … The performer must have the capability to untangle this from himself, to let and force it through his body in order to inhabit the audience with its presence.

On your website, you say that “Via Negativa focuses on the relationship between the spectator and the actor. It tests the pleasures of their presence within the theatrical convention.” What is the theatrical convention?

A convention is an understanding, an agreement through which we accept our roles in theatre in advance: someone is a spectator, another an actor. One is passive and receives, the other active and transmits.

In Via Negativa a spectator’s passivity transforms into activity…

Conventions, stereotypes and other forms of societal consent through which we enter into preordained relationships are what interests me most as a director. It’s a matrix we live in every day and consider self-evident. It’s a complex system through which we maintain our positions. In theatre, I am interested in borders and the possibilities to overcome them. There is no theatre without a spectator so by being there, they are never really passive. That’s just an illusion, which some artists use to safely deal with themselves. We enjoy the success of moving the border and getting the spectator on stage with us.

I suppose that the presence of spectators means that you don’t know how things will finally unravel…

Of course. We don’t know how they will react. In the moment when the spectator steps on stage, he enters a space he is unfamiliar with. Into a performance only we know. He doesn’t. Anything could happen.

What would happen if a single spectator kept intervening in each performance… would you ban him?

No. When we’re working on a performance, we attempt to predict as many scenarios as possible. Having a single spectator to keep intervening has not yet happened, however in Would Would Not the same spectator collaborated with Katarina Stegnar. This is a scene in which she shows her privates and implies that she will have sexual intercourse with an audience member that showed his. When the same spectator did this for a second night we all began to worry about what was going on. As soon as the visual exchange takes place Katarina leads the spectator “to places unknown” as Blaž Lukan put it. In reality they go for a drink into a nearby bar, where they discuss that all this is only a play, where we count upon the fact that the spectator will accept this. But when he entered the scene for a second night, it seemed as if it was him leading her out. That is when you realize that the play had extended into reality and it sends shivers down your spine as you no longer know whether the play had become reality or reality began to play with you.

Almost all of Via Negativa’s performances were accompanied by scandal. Is this a good way to get sponsors?

Certainly not. Potential sponsors deem the press they would get by sponsoring us negative, even damaging to business. One of Slovenia’s larger companies, having sponsored More, demanded we withdraw their name from all promo material after seeing photos of the show.

The scandals usually arise due to nudity or sexually explicit scenes. A man masturbating for instance or urinating on stage…

The scandals arise when we cross the boundary of the socially acceptable. But our intent is not to cause scandal or shock. It is to show ourselves in a way that makes the audience see us or see what we want to show them.

But considering that other theatres do not do these things, you must anticipate at least some shock…

It would be naive not to and we approach this expectation strategically. At the beginnings of Via Negativa the question was unimportant. Later, when for example More caused scandals in Germany in regards to us treating food immorally and when magazines began to complain about our undertaking, these responses opened up another dimension to our work. And it did not scare us. In the next project, Incasso (on envy), in which we used money as a prop, we gave a lot of consideration to approaching this theme strategically and making Via Negativa into more than just a strategy of scandal. And even though one would expect an even bigger scandal due to how we handle money in Incasso, this did not happen.

That means we have bigger prejudice when it comes to sexuality than when it comes to money?

I think it is primarily a question of context; a certain action can cause scandal due to the context in which it takes place. When we were preparing Viva Verdi in Zagreb, the opera ensemble of the Zagreb Opera rebelled: that they would not sing Va pensiero from Nabucco, with a naked performer on stage. Later, a great deal was said about the fact we urinated on the stage of the Croatian national theatre.

What do you answer to the questions or doubts of spectators, whether it is really necessary to piss on the national theatre’s stage?

My answer is: yes. In the given context, this seemed like the best way to get people to listen and understand what you are trying to say. The responses in Croatian media confirmed that they understood exactly like we wanted them to and this made us happy.

Do you think we spectators need shock to focus on content better?

We are always looking for actions that would upset the accepted patterns of viewing. I do however understand that shock is not the best means to this end. A shock can close the spectator. If it’s too forceful, the audience turns away.

Like what happened in Zadar with spectators leaving the venue horrified?

In Zadar, Boris Kadin and Kristian Al Droubi repeated Marina Abramovič’s performance Rhythm 10. But using the knives on each other. And of course blood was spilled. The knife-game is the finale of the performance on envy, entitled Not like me. We did not want what happened: the shock was so great for the viewers, it occluded the context of the performance. A lot of the spectators could no longer accept it in the context of what the performance wants to say. The newspapers only wrote about a Croat and a Serb cutting each other up on stage. We were quite depressed at the end of the show, even though we could also probably happy – ha, we did it, we created a scandal.

Why was it necessary to provoke further in the Zadar version of the performers – by having the national flags of the performers next to them on stage. After all you are probably aware of the bloody history of the Zadar area.

That is the right question. There came a time when we had to tell ourselves who we are again. The possibility that a Croat and a Serb take the places of Abel and Cain, killing each other because of envy, was brought up by the performers themselves. I thought it was a great displacement; I just wanted to make sure no one knew who was killing whom anymore. Of course we knew it would also be understood as a political provocation.

Did you try to serve the audience an interpretation on a plate?

We took a risk. We wanted to open up another layer of reading the performance: that the envy of which we speak can also be understood politically. And this tore the knife-game out of the show and spilled over into Croat and Serb newspaper headlines.

All the way to the British Independent?

(laughter) Yes.

Do the performers sometimes find themselves in less agreeable emotional states after the premieres due to what happened on stage?

I have a feeling we are discussing Would Would Not, the performance on lust.

That too.

It happens, yes. It is often connected with what we wanted to achieve with an action and what we actually achieved. Even though we consider our strategy carefully, we are not always successful. After the premiere of Would Would Not we significantly adapted and focused the strategy we used to let the audience decide on how the performance unravels. Behind all this is the desire to test borders. Would Would Not is considered the toughest performance of Via Negativa. Every scene in it demands audience participation. We never know what we will be able to do and what we won’t or whether we will even be able to finish the show.

But the audience expects the scenes to finish. For instance, Marko Mandić was unable to ejaculate on stage, as was I suppose intended. How did this go in rehearsal?

There was no ejaculation on the night of the premiere, but there were performances where he did.

What are the factors on which whether something is performed or not depends?

We’re dealing with the uncertainty of performative acts and their repeatability. If an act only depends on the performer, then the rendition often depends on his or her body. The border of the body is often the essence of the message of an act; for instance not being able to do something you want because of your body. Such a scene is performed by Barbara Matijević, who in Viva Verdi promises to fill a glass with her sweat. But even though she spends the entire show dancing to the point of total physical collapse, she usually collects no more than fifty drops of sweat. A completely different example of non-rendition is the scene in Would Would Not in which Kristian Al Droubi asks a spectator to come to the stage and hammer a nail through his penis. We still have a problem with this scene. On one hand we cannot allow this to happen due to repeatability of the performance, but on the other, the spectator who accepts the play feels let down, when the performer does not allow him to do it.

Why do you then form this scene – if you can predict that someone from the audience might be tempted to swing the hammer.

We wanted to know whether a spectator is willing to do this even symbolically. The rendition itself is not that important. The problem is in that we expect the audience to take us for real, and then this reality is not confirmed. I believe the spectator cannot be satisfied with this, which is why neither am I. Sometimes we catch ourselves into a trap when forming scenes and it take a lot of work to unravel it.

What does the fact that an audience member is able to do this tell you as a director? What does it say about this spectator? What makes him different from the others?

Would Would Not brought many surprises. The third time we did it, five guys got naked on stage, as part of a scene by Barbara Matijević, which was completely unimaginable to us during development. People came prepared to see the show. They knew what would happen. They came to act. A completely different audience came to the shows. Tickets were reserved for groups of six people, the people who had seen the show brought back friends to see how far they would go… We opened up the game, the audience came to play with us. It was a great experience for the performance and the performers.

How come there are only younger performers Via Negativa. Would you find older ones be harder to work with?

I wouldn’t but they certainly would. I had an experience in Slovensko Mladinsko Gledališče, where while working on No acting, please! the director Tomi Janežič wanted me to work with the actors in the Via Negativa method for a while. Janežič wanted to test out as many different approaches as possible to creating theatre. I was also very interested in whether it would be possible to work with the ensemble, generally considered very open. I was greatly disappointed. Most of the actors would not accept my methodology, stating it was manipulation on the personal level and had nothing to do with theatre or art. Some said that being an actor does not oblige them to uncover personally, others that such a process would frustrate them too much… Although I was able to establish a creative relationship with some of the SMG ensemble. I encountered similar resentment in Vienna, where I wanted to open a Via Negativa workshop, but during the debate most of the thirty actors almost booed me off, also stating that I wished to manipulate them.

You probably did.

All directing is manipulation! Someone leads the work and sets criteria. That is the work of the director.

What are the mechanisms of manipulation in directing?

Hey! The first manipulative moment takes place when you choose a theme or text and decide how to work then set out to find people to work with and convince them to want to work with you. My way of working, my processes, my aesthetic orientation, my ambition – all these determine the rendition. To some, all this is manipulation, to me it is a creative process that someone has to lead. We are constantly in this relationship. As far as I am concerned, a performer must, even though I invited him into the project, fight for his or her right to be on stage. So in a way, they are trying to manipulate me and must keep trying. The quality of the show we make depends on how far we let ourselves be manipulated by each other. And then there is the performance, which is nothing but a manipulation of the audience, regardless on whether it sits quietly in the dark or whether you keep addressing it from the stage. But I would prefer to say all this manipulation is actually communication.

What will you do in 2009, when the Via Negativa project is over?

I will begin a new cycle of projects, perhaps longer than seven years. Negativa will keep working.

Slovene director Bojan Jablanovec speaks about Not Like Me, a production that is provoking strong reactions from the public and is a part of the project Via Negativa built on the treatment of seven deadly sins

Boris Kadin as a Croat and Kristijan al Droubi as a Serb shocked the public at the end of August in St Dominic’s Church in Zadar at the 11th International Festival of Contemporary Theatre Zadar Snova as they were stabbing each other on the stage in the course of the performance Not Like Me. Quite a few people from the audience left the theatre, and one girl fainted. An hour-long performance created an uproar among the public of a nation whose daily lives of the last decade of the twentieth century were exposed to images that were much more gruesome. Most unperturbed seemed to be the two actors, despite the fact that having just slashed each other’s hands to the sounds of music from Tarantino’s films they had to be rushed off to the hospital. Clearly the performance of Not Like Me has succeeded in testing the boundaries of perception of extreme happenings for which, or so it seemed, everything had already been said. The performance was directed by the well-known Slovenian director Bojan Jablanovec, the founder of the project Via Negativa built on the theme of seven deadly sins. Not Like Me is the sixth part of the sequel, presenting envy. The project was started in 2002, with the intention of treating one sin per year. The year 2009 anticipates the production of Via Nova, which will consolidate the previous seven.

In your production Not Like Me, Kristijan and Boris stabbed each other until they bled. Was bleeding part of the scenario or did it come about by accident?

The reference and starting point for the knife game is the performance of Marina Abramović called Rhythm 10, which she premiered in 1973 in Edinburgh. In contrast to Marina Abramović, who performed this to her own body, Boris does it to Kristijan and Kristijan to Boris. They split ten knives between them, so that each has five knives to work with. Blood is a constituent part of the scene. This demands from the performers a high level of concentration, exceptional control and great confidence in their partner.

The blood on the stage provoked many strong reactions in the media, many of which carried explicitly political overtones.

The political context is part of the story told by the performance and therefore the reactions in the media do not surprise me. The knife game is the last scene in the performance and at the same time the most destructive phase of envy which constitutes the theme of the production. The finale in which Boris, the performer from Croatia, and Kristijan, the performer from Serbia, drive knifes into each other’s fingers is a paraphrase of the biblical story of Cain and Abel, in which one brother is led to kill another due to God’s love. In Not Like Me Boris and Kristijan are locked into a bloody circle because of the love of the audience. In politics people kill for love of the nation. Too much love kills. In Not Like Me Boris is so enamoured with the theatre that he wants it entirely to himself, but Kristijan so much wants to get into the books of art history that he is quite prepared to cross the boundaries of imagination and transform the story made up by Boris into a blood game of reality.

The Zadar audience reacted fairly vehemently. To what extent can you predict in what way the viewers will experience the performance?

Since the primary field of our exploration is communication in the theatre, the strategies we adopt in our performances are always carefully considered and have a rationale behind them. That means that everything we do, we do very consciously, anticipating also all possible scenarios and reactions from the audience. So for us there haven’t been any major surprises with the performances of Via Negativa so far.

In what way does this production present envy?

Envy is always a story about the other. About the other’s qualities, achievements. Envy is one of the most deeply rooted and destructive urges that govern human behaviour. In Not Like Me the subject of envy is the love of the audience, a theatre theme par excellence. The theatre, the actors, the director – all of them thrive on the audience’s love. They all want that love for themselves and for some exclusive position with the audience. The production problematizes the ambition to always come out on top, to always come up with something new and original, to be in the centre of attention. This is the spiral in which we ourselves are caught and, wanting or not, have to play the part. Envy is, of course, always present; it can even be stimulating. But if in this game envy assumes the one and leading part, then this is the end to creativity. The goal of envy is not that we become like the person we are envying. The sole goal of envy is to destroy the other person.

Via Negativa deals with exploring the seven deadly sins. Why does the project carry this name?

First of all, Via Negativa is a project exploring theatre. The starting point of the project is to explore theatre as a medium of communication. In that sense what most interests us is the relation between the performers and the spectators. The audience in the theatre is always real, existing here and now – they come to the theatre with certain expectations, preconceptions, and stereotypes, bringing with them their personal and social histories, particular socially-conditioned fascinations, etc. All this is the subject matter with which we want to communicate. In order to do so, we need some general theme, a theme that is broad and basic enough to open up a space of mental communication for anyone who is willing to enter it. Seven deadly sins are the most basic negative characteristics of the human condition, with which every individual has some very personal relationship. On the one hand, as individuals we try to keep these negative urges under control, but on the other, we yield to their pressure. This is the civilizational conflict that operates in the intimate space of every individual. This is also the field within which the project Via Negativa is operating. By struggling with the negative we are trying to get to the essence of the human existence; to put it another way, we are trying to find our own answer to what makes humans human. The other part of the answer to your question about the name of the project relates to our principle of work, which is best summed up by the simple fact that we do not know what we are looking for, but we do know what we don’t want. We are stripping theatre of everything we dislike about it and everything we find superfluous, so that in this way we might get to what we are looking for. Via Negativa (the negative way) is not about destruction, it is merely a way towards theatre as a medium of open communication.

With your productions you have radically taken the theatre in a new direction. What is it that the conventional theatre lacks, or what is it that the conventional theatre should be?

Classical theatre, say, stage theatre, is a big anachronism in our age of highly sophisticated media and technology that protects and sustains a national cultural politics with the argument that the cultural identity of a nation is at stake here. So, rather than making the theatre into the centre of living art, it transforms it into a museum. That is perfectly logical, in a way, since living theatre always opens questions for which no one has the answers; it points out things most people would prefer not to see; it broaches subjects no one wants to discuss. Theatre is a powerful medium, and in an age where our lives are increasingly digitalized it is becoming more consequential than ever. Living theatre will always remind us that we exist, that we are flesh and blood and that life is a fascinating force that needs to be made the most of as creatively as possible. The problem with the conventional theatre is simple: it does not know what to do with theatre; it does not recognize how strong a medium it is dealing with. Or, if it does, it runs away, frightened of its own power.

The performers in your productions come from many different countries. Does that mean that you are looking for some surpassing expression that would bridge cultural differences?

You could say that. In principle I am looking for a basic language of the theatre. If you swim only in your own cultural pool, it is difficult to speak a universal language. On the other hand, I am convinced that art is in itself a universal language. My experience so far, working with performers from Ljubljana, Serbia, Croatia, Ireland, Belgium and Austria, only confirms that. Cultural differences have never been a hurdle or a centre of our attention. In a way, the cultural differences brought into – and merged with – our productions through various individuals are always a test and proof of the ambitions and goals of Via Negativa. For instance, the dimensions which the Serbian performers Kristijan al Droubi and Sanela Milošević have brought into Via Negativa could only be realized by them themselves, even though these are crucial for the development of the project as a whole.

What are the criteria that guide your selection of actors and what are the stages of any one of your productions?

In Ljubljana there is a group of actors permanently involved with Via Negativa productions. They constitute the nucleus of the project, whereas the selection of new performers takes place mainly at the workshops. The principle of selection is very simple – actors themselves will resign, when they realize they are in disagreement with the principle of work. But those who don’t give up and endure are the ones I finish collaborating with in a performance, for example, with the one now in Zadar, or I get them to work on the production we are now preparing in Ljubljana. The performers of Via Negativa are actors, performance artists, dancers … They are authors of their own work, which as a director I help structure and contextualize into a performance, bringing out what we wish to put across to the audience. Their task is to find a story and come up with a performing action through which they articulate a personal stance about the subject they are exploring. They must be willing to accept the method of work, which is that they themselves, their imaginations, their personalities, their bodies, are the subject of their work. This is the principle of performance art. The key question in any one production is how to be real, authentic in front of an audience. The process can take up to a whole year.

Any plans to visit Serbia with your project in the near future?

As we speak, a Via Negativa workshop on pride is being conducted by Sanela Milošević in the Cultural Centre Rex and I hope we will soon get a chance to meet the Belgrade audience.

Evropa, Beograd, 6. september 2007

At the end of February, you can view a reprise of three of the five VIA NEGATIVA performances at Glej Theatre and Stara Elektrarna. These are works that have already been seen on Slovenian stages. Incasso premiered in 2004, Bi Ne Bi (Would Would Not) in 2005, and Viva Verdi in 2006. The rotating cast is made up of latecomers to the theatre and those so ignorant that they have never even seen the piece being performed. Because of the open structure of the staging, the interaction with the audience, and the changing cast, each performance of the work is entirely unique. .

VIA NEGATIVA is a seven-year theatrical project. It is an international theatre group which does not function according to the principles of a static fixed cast but instead has a rotating cast comprised of actors from Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Ireland, and Spain. The goal is for the number of VIA NEGATIVA performers to increase through open workshops organized on an ongoing basis. The group has a number of extraordinary performers, radical artists that exist outside of mainstream institutions, and non-professionals. This kind of theatrical collective confirms the claim “that there are actors that act a lot, actors that act well, and actors that love what they’re doing.” In terms of Slovenian theatrical artists, we should mention a few elite, research-oriented performance artists: Katarina Stegnar, Gregor Zorc, Petra Govc, Marko Mandič and Barbara Kukovec.

The basic question of this experimental theatrical project led and directed by Bojan Jablanovec is how to be truthful in front of an audience? All of the elements of theatrical illusion are eliminated; there are no costumes, no set, and no script. Theatrical conventions are further undermined by elements of performance, namely that the actor is both author and material.

This long-term project is based on the research of the human characteristics that are known as the seven deadly sins and were written about in the Christian apologia: wrath, avarice, greed, gluttony, lust, sloth, envy, and pride. The focus is not the moral or ethical aspect of these human qualities but rather their universality in human nature.

“Via Negativa!” was the rallying cry of neo-avant-garde theatre and was considered the motto of stage artists in that space and time. If we compare the orientation of the neo-avant-garde to this historical avant-garde, it is worth noting that the new version has renounced any efforts at direct advancement of revolutionary social goals. The reason is not political cynicism, as explored by Hans-Thies Lehmann, but rather changing evaluations of the possibility of it actually working.

VIA NEGATIVA strives to break through rational mental processes with the intent of pursuing an image of the unconscious. This type of guidance or communication in the theatre takes place on an idiosyncratic and personal level – each unconscious mind has a discourse that is all its own. Therefore, consequential and genuine communication, more than understanding, is grounded in impulses of personal creativity reception. When the futurists, Dadaists, and surrealists devised the foundations of artistic action, they were inclined toward the radical re-evaluation of civilizational values and the revolutionizing of all life conditions. Today such artistic action no longer has at its centre social provocation and the demand for the immediate change of the world. Engagement takes place above all in the preparation of events, exceptions, instances of deviation which, in an era of conformism of the senses and media-filtered perceptions, is not only important but refreshing.

In the phenomenon of historical avant-garde theatre, provocative actions have used conflict with the public as their central element. This tradition is carried on in new theatre and has the potential to change the concept of theatrical communication itself. The new theatre, which has emerged in the last several decades, diverges from political forms that dominated the experimental theatre scene during the period from the historical avant-garde up to the 1960s. Theatrical communication has ceased to be treated above all as a confrontation with the public but more as the creation of situations in which participants question themselves and their previous experiences.

Happenings and performances are theatrical phenomena that were enthusiastically embraced by the avant-garde. They focused on physical, affective, spatial relations between actors and the audience, and researched the possibility of cooperation and interaction. At the heart of this research was presence, real events rather than representation, mimesis in fiction. In this kind of theatre, the end result or the product is less important than the process itself or the functioning of creative forces.

And why focus on the performance pieces of the theatrical group VIA NEGATIVA?

Because the group strives in its work for real experience, experience that transcends representation. Its works have the direct intention of experimenting with the real in terms of space, time, and the body.

These performances have undoubtedly produced hitherto-unknown moments of life experience and radically altered thinking about art. At the centre is the direct experience of the artists and the auditorium. Performers manipulate and play with duration, fluidity, simultaneousness which cannot be repeated. The task of the audience is not mental reconstruction, renewed creation, and the patient description of fixed images, but instead the mobilization of their own capacity for response and empathy. The actors themselves are not conceived of as interpreters of roles but as performers that project their own presence through reflection and contemplation.

The work and research of VIA NEGATIVA creates vitality, the provocative presence of the subject that, instead of being embodied in images, engages with the production of presence, using the intensity of face-to-face communication. This is most directly expressed in the work Bi ne Bi (Would Would Not), when lewd desire is put on stage in front of the audience and then removed a safe distance from the rows of unmoving observers. It is precisely in such moments that we observe the free-thinking impulse of the performative decisions that do not adhere to some previous valid criteria but instead to the effectiveness of communication. In this way, theatre moves away from previous norms of staging in which the product is conceived of as reified product and instead approaches elements of communication and exchanges that are not determined by the hierarchy of the theatrical situation.

The new theatre artist does not so much perform as organize and construct actions that claim his or her body. This artist summons an instant that is real, emotionally convincing, and is happening here and now. In this way, he or she acquires a productive presence that is neither representation nor mimesis. It is the presence of the subject that strives to be different from the presence of sound, images, architecture and therefore can never be here and fulfilled in the broadest sense. It always maintains the sense of the visible, the revealed which can also disappear and enter into contemplative experience.

VIA NEGATIVA’s two reprised pieces, Incasso and Bi ne bi are structured as a series of scenes. Each individual performer chooses, based on the specific theme, a situation and a memory, writes a text, and adds physical movement. It is a sort of psychoanalytical physical self-reflection on the stage. All texts are actually written by the performers and everything they say somehow connects to their own secret personal history.

VIA NEGATIVA practices what is an almost aggressive verbal and physical form of artistic attack on the audience. The attack is not physically direct but is directed toward fixed perceptions and the automatism of the senses. The actions the performers physically carry out are brutally rationalized, instrumentalized, and demand control, will, the presence of intelligence, and the desire to provoke extreme reactions.

VIA NEGATIVA, as a group, excels in running, jumping, revealing, and delighting in naked bodies. The body is the method with which performers direct and alert the flow of secret meanings, the emergence of associations, the imaginative adventures of the audience. Despite the occasional banal moment or claim, each VIA NEGATIVA text, as action, possesses precisely reflected material. Some events take place on an entirely conscious and trivial level, some on a vulgar level, but these are only shortcuts to the fundamental root pattern of the political and social mentality of our times. The politics of the theatre is nothing other than the politics of perception.

Viva Verdi is a performance piece that moves away from the spatial intimacy of the solo numbers that dominate in Incasso and the provocation of personal intimacy in Bi Ne Bi. Instead it tackles the magnificence of sloth. Sloth or the desire for lasting peace, inertia, and inactivity is also the stubborn persistence of comfort and safe refuge in one’s own mentality. Viva Verdi graphically creates a situation on stage that places actors and opera singers in opposition. Namely, the actors initiate actions that are considered disgusting, improper, and inadmissible by prevailing social forces: from urinating to an experiment of how to make a fountain out of a flask of urine, roughhousing, nudity, vomiting, filling one’s mouth with soil, etc. These actions are frequently interrupted by the entrances of dignified opera singers who are contemptuous of these activities. With the gracious and educated range of their voices and their physical images whose massive size finds its roots in the elegance of the salon, the singers project the antipode to chaos and the deformation of good manners. They are trapped in the perfect representation of their own theatrical mission and as such are absent. Though untouchable and filled with pride, they are, in terms of real life, unreachable and omnipotent.

While these singers from the socially established cultural institution of opera use all their power to preserve their total control and fascinate with their performance, the eyes of the voyeur take in the events on stage with irritation and disapproval. The unease with the singers is anchored in their physical appearance and posture. Yet they undoubtedly perform extraordinary work as does the musical ear and precise comprehensiveness of the director Bojan Jablanovec, the driving force behind VIA NEGATIVA.

All three pieces, Incasso, Bi Ne Bi and Viva Verdi, engage with the existing canon of the permissible: what can and cannot be done on stage. What is forbidden by a rational and civilized person what is allowed? These stage events are not merely pretentious improvisations but are thoughtfully conceived and free of connotations. If this were not the case, they could be seen as excessive, banal, primitive, and tasteless. The radical interventions into the territory of the physical are premeditated and serve as a material device that catapults the subject into a psycho-physical condition, into emotions that must be genuine because of the extreme pressures placed on the body. Such interventions include the cutting of fingertips and the smearing of banknotes with blood, the grotesque declaration of prenuptial promises made with a mouth filled with money, the illustration of the sarcastic statement “what matters is the principle” by urinating on bank notes.

While this experiment successfully shattered the hierarchies of theatrical method and the accepted divisions of artistic genres and the cooperation between the performers was fruitful, we should also note the death of illusion that for a long time has been immanent to the theatre. With VIA NEGATIVA, we must recognize that there is no longer a fictional space of communication that unfolds on the stage. What is intensified is the axis of the theatron, the communicative tunnel between the stage and the auditorium, which now directly addresses and recognizes, revives and thrusts.

In a period of luxurious simulation of reality, the almost unavoidable interfaces of communication – from mobile phones, television, and the internet – are the antipode of direct communication on the stage which is here and now. The body contains the irreducible surplus, the imperfect vitality that unmasks the voyeur who, helplessly fascinated, strains his eyes and ears. Perhaps it is a fascination with the effects, though not of the kind we might call the wakeful vitality of the subject. It is human and uncontrollable imperfection – charisma – that the subject reveals itself as unique in a mechanized and automated reality.

And why does theatre need a phenomenon like VIA NEGATIVA?

The experimental impulse that has already taken root in many other artistic practices has now caught up with the theatre. For a long time the theatre had been a relatively expensive aesthetic practice that survived on financial contributions determined by the number of theatregoers who attend performances. For this reason, established cultural institutions have not been able to take advantage of the forces that support and initiate experimental processes and that are essential to the development of theatrical expression, pushing the limits of reflection, comprehension, and perception.

Experimental theatre has often been neglected because innovative work is not always acceptable to a wider audience and the creative process sometimes needs many years to develop new ideas. And yet experimental theatre is all the more valuable in an era not favourable towards idiosyncratic art forms, in other words in times when disengagement, disinterest, and general apathy prevail in the wider culture.

If Tadeusz Kantor managed to create his theatrical canon during World War II, during the time of the German occupation when Poland was under Nazi rule, a time when plays had to be staged in private, carefully guarded apartments because the discovery of artistic activity could be punished by death – then surely we can find a niche where art with a capital A can be created in our space and time.

Even accomplishment of the metaphor of sweat as a proof of work didn’t succeed to argue audience’s prejudice that the “quality” art is only the one which has its result in “torture”. It is obvious that the audience too has its own system of discriminating artists.

At the beginning of the play Viva Verdi, Slovenian director Bojan Jablanovec, head of the group Via Negativa, appears in front of the audience on the scene of Croatian National Theatre announcing sequent: Pretentious artistic concept proposed by the selectors Branko Brezovec and producer Gordana Vnuk in the festival booklet has nothing to do with group Via Negativa. Everything you’ve read in booklet is only concoction. We do not deal with thesis of festival directors. We do not make any difference between quasi avant-garde and other theatre expressions. That’s why we’ve decided that this performance will not happen. This is a protest. The irony of this statement is pretty complex. Not only because of that after quoting manifest of independence from the Eurokaz programme the play in the frame of Eurokaz selection it happens anyway, but also because in twenty years none of the gestures nor programmes nor critiques change conceptual machinery of Eurokaz: the show goes on with interesting and less interesting performances, but important here are constantly present rhetorical expression of festival narcism as if it is mechanical device which is able to laud only itself, and not institution which accepts at least one voice of disscensus of the milieu it is dedicated to. Personally, I’ll remember Eurokaz as manifestation which director routinely, from one year to another, insults critics only because we do not agree with her editorial with untouchable glorification of the festival, or because we dare to ask questions she’s not able to answer. Jablavec has right: the only thing man can do is to make a public protest and continue to participate. And it was the same this year too, jubilee, when the book for the twentieth anniversary of Eurokaz was published. Guess who is the author of the evaluation of its twenty years? Gordana Vnuk, of course. For the purpose that we wouldn’t, in any case, read or hear any arguable dimension of thinking about the festival.

The fall of extractions

But the critique has been smuggled on the festival. Team of the play by Bojan Jablanovec (Kristian al Droubi, Petra Govc, Barbara Kukovec, Marko Mandić, Barbara Matijević, Sanela Milošević, Katarina Segnar, Dylan Tighe, Petra Zanki, Grega Zorc) used the interesting dramaturgy of mad juxtaposing of performative, acting and opera protests because of the fact that the play is “called off”. They pissed on Eurokaz booklet, drained the sweat into the glasses, watered the plant seated in the mouth of performer, who, in the gesture of transforming his body into the fertile soil saw the only purpose of himself in the art; mixed the beer with urine and than with their mouth formed a small Duchamp “water fountain”, vomited. With the exception of bleeding, they played the full repertory of general places of performance as genre, and presented how something that was in the sixties egregious gesture, in the meantime become distinguishing, clichés protocol of scenic behavior. They posed a large amount of questions on what theatricality is. By the words of Thomas Postlewait and Tracy C. Davies (Theatricality, 2003): As theatricality was used for centuries to describe the gap between representation and reality, for what usually exist perfectly precise and correct term mimesis, theatricality is used also to describe “heightened” state of reality which is attained exactly by representation. The actor who comes out on the stage and tells the story how his girlfriend left him because he is actor, explaining: “You are such a nice man. Why are you actor than? You are not like them!” – in essence is an echo of the ancient platonic debate on the adversity of theatre on life, especially of theatre as a place which escapes the decency. On the scene of the performance Viva Verdi at the same time is a love for theatre which finds “certain challenge” in everything: Barbara Kukovec, whose optimism is transformed into the parody of torture. After she firmly claims for twenty minutes how nothing can reassure her from standing by the performance, Kukovec climbs up to the small stand with two pan bags raising them highly into the air, and than tries to fulfill this effort of straight stand, victorious standing with smile, which fades on her more and more tortured and face distorted by pain. While her hands and whole body are trembling of effort, behind on the scene, opera choir of slavery sings ecstatic tones from Verdi’s Nabucco. Yes, it is hard to persist dealing with art. Katarina Stegnar claims how she never received any bad critic and nor she will in performance Viva Verdi. Than she says how Jablanovec “didn’t know how to make the play and thus so he called it off”.

Systems

With the tone of furious teacher, Stegnar demonstrates typical performance protocol: tying her body with different adhesive tapes, choosing physical activities (here: jumping from the chair to the first range of the scene, where artist lies on the floor and stands up again and jumps back to the chair), with a goal, accentuates, truly exhausting body, after what is usual to switch to something “disgusting” (Stegnar pisses in her trousers, wallows in her urine), and than says: But this too becomes cheap effect. She does not understand why she even consents to do that. Why?
Probably because typical actors always need some system, says Stegnar. This scene of the play is particularly important because it demonstrates how System by Stanislavski and other ineradicable procedures of much younger art of performance really shape specific performative protocol, so it is completely unreal to treat them as contrasts.
For Barbara Matijević system is connected to paternal imperative on “useful work”: only if she’s dancing with the sweat on her face she made a “job”, how her parents would say. For that reason, Matijević danced for ninety minutes or moves through the second plan of the stage, finally sweating only thirty two drops of sweat out of the whole drill. It is obvious that art is not the same as digging tunnels: the sweat here is not used as argument for the utility of performance. But many people in the audience continued pointing out how she was the only that “named” her part of the play, while others “only presented something”. Thus so, accomplishment of the metaphor of sweat as a proof of work didn’t succeed to argue audience’s prejudice that the “quality” art is only the one which has its result in “torture”.
It is obvious that the audience too has its own system of discriminating artists.

»“Self-consciousness”«

Petra Zanki exposes to the audience information about her private life: when and what has she graduated, which workshops she participated in, with whom of artists she collaborated in performances. The list is impressive. Her golden dress and golden shoes should convince us how she really is self-conscious young dance artist, and the same function has a dance solo she performs lying on the floor, highly rising and lowering her legs, turning her hips. We believe her too, until the end when she presents the information how she “performed her most important performance while she was 23. It was the abortion of fetus.” In the light of positioning this data at the very end of her addressing to the audience, as signature to the whole performance image, artist’s previous Just do it! gesture becomes problematic: it seems that in front of us we do not have incarnation of artistic freedom and enterprise, but someone who is trapped by his personal ambition. Numerous ethical studies proved that decision about abortion presents for all women traumatic experience, but Zanki does not play any “public pain”, nor transforms private drama into cultural capital. Petra Zanki simply accentuates the price of ambition. Personally I would estimate her performance as very touching, because behind that decisiveness of her voice and loft guard, runs out something we can’t qualify as “success” and exactly this self-control of painful experience is more important and obscure than any social achievement. Petra holds in her hands small round aquarium without golden fish, also signifying the “lack” with which the performer gets along with in a stoic calmness on a declarative level, while under the surface crawls unspoken word, “death” avoided on the scene. In theatre we can rarely see performance comparable to the strength and performative energy of Petra Zanki. Speaking about self-consciousness of performers, Zanki definitely has the reason for it.

The play which wasn’t there

The way Verdi’s arias are introduced in the play is also interesting. They are not the sign of “anachronism” of the opera, but they are posed as a certain sublime object of artistic longing: they are too emotional, too melodramatic, but at the same time unachievable solemn, divine in their “uselessness”, without the urge for excusing about dealing with melodious, seducing music. The only extraction which performers can’t extract by their on will and which is extremely attached to the theatre as media, are tears. Tears can be the theme of the performance (as in the play by Emil Hrvatin), but can’t be also “just one among” other extractions. Crying on the scene surpasses the frame of irony. But, tears are not the only way of crying. Almost all performers in the play by Bojan Jablanovec witness on some sort of hurt, but they are not talking about it in a compassionate or self-compassionate style. More freely speaking, we could say that all the used extractions are acting the inexistence of tears, but the audience pretty precisely feels that behind humorous confessions there is no unaccomplished utopia, but specific cry for numerous taken plays; for culture that simply does NOT EVALUATE the art of performative creation itself. If theatre performer must perform the worst thing that can happen to him is the impossibility of thinking the scene, and nice witness of such suffering is the play Timon of Athens directed by Branko Brezoec, which will be discussed some other time. Considering Bojan Jablanovec, the formula is clear: if we do not have a scene, if we do not have a right on scene, than we have “nothing”. Playing that “nothing” was the most exciting event of this year’s Eurokaz.

Artifact

Let’s begin at the end. There is an artifact in front of me: a black box with an inscription on the black-upholstered inside which reads “You know what you want”. A 100 tolars note is squeezed between two plexi-glass sheets. The signature reads Katarina Stegnar. The note is smeared with actress’s blood and now, almost one and a half year later, its color has turned brown. Someone opening the box without knowing where it came from would say that the note is brownish dirty (in fact, the color is reminiscent of excrement). To those who know, this object says more: it is an artistic “vestige” of the performance entitled Incasso which was auctioned, or rather purchased after the show. The actresses’ blood is her “performative” contribution to the scene she played. The symbolic theatrical act thus (also) produced something absolutely real; an aesthetic ‘delusion’ left behind a material vestige. The performance, deposed by time, excluded from its flow and relocated to non-time, to the realm of memory, has been immortalized symbolically in an artifact. That artifact is the performance in a nutshell bought at the premiere in order to anchor it in reality and cover up the horrors of memory. Nevertheless, the black box remains just a delusion, an allusion to something that was once real, so it is itself fading into memory. Yet it seems that it could become ‘real’ – although I know that it won’t – if its function changed, for example, if it accepted a new content, “live” money, a memento, or everyday “dust.” The real produced its own delusion that is embodied in an artifact, a delusion of the real.

Conceptualist mega-project

The project by Bojan Jablanovec, which took its name from Grotowski’s syntagm Via Negativa (“not a collection of skills but an eradication of blocks”), is “megalomaniac” at first glance: eight performances over eight years (2002-2009). Until now we could see Starting Point: Wrath (2002), More (2003), Inkaso (2004) and Would and Would Not (2005). At the beginning is the starting point, and at the end Via nova, the pick of the series. In between, and including the first performance, are seven deadly sins (wrath, gluttony, greed, lust, sloth, envy, pride), as an “allegory of the whole in its completeness,” performed in accordance with the conceptualist principles and equipped with the essential “ideological apparatus.” The latter employs modern theatrical concepts – the basics of theatricality, the relationship actor-spectator, post-dramatic performative strategies, the reduction of stage presence, positive disposition towards the audience etc. Its methodological field is delineated by seven deadly sins, a collection of basic human characteristics on which the actors draw, so they are the source and the authors of their play. Yet Jablanovec’s project is megalomaniac only at first glance. Via Negative is a conceptualist mega-project whose essential point of differentiation and the source of its meaning is its “slow” progress, or to put it differently, the diachrony of its ‘taking place now’ and its continual cross-referencing that is made possible by temporality itself, which, in turn, moves it from conceptual linearity to symbolic synchronicity. Although it wants to encompass “basic human traits,” its “real essence” becomes revealed in something that is much smaller than the concept but by no means inferior. Just in passing, let me mention that this phenomenon, or a paradox, is frequently encountered in conceptualist projects: once they chart their path of progress, they frequently (I’ll avoid saying ‘as a rule’) stray from that path, with those most auto-reflexive even charting the path with the clear intention of straying from it. What is problematic is not this artistic lapse in itself, which is quite usual, but insistence on the concept even in subsequent interpretations, or engagement in polemics over “erroneous” (critical) perceptions which overlook the concept or exceed it, or, still better, perceptions that take as the point of departure the performance as an act of presentation rather than conceptualization. These perceptions see the performance rather than the concept, although they are aware that the concept can be “fine” in itself. However, at the time of transformation into performance, the concept becomes distributed essentially determining the signifying regime of the performance which thus fully “substitutes” the concept. Accordingly, an attempt at defining the “smaller than the concept” in Jablanovec’s performances seems to be a greater challenge than “itemizing” the archaeology of the sin which is constituted more or less expressively throughout the project. The outcome of this attempt, of course, remains open to question, much like the outcome of the project itself which is currently halfway towards completion.

Via Negativa with Badiou

To use a paradox: the real within Jablanovec’s project is revealed in appearance. According to Badiou (this text is the third in a row and the last in the series that approaches theater through Badiou’s inaesthetics), theater is in the first place the art of mask, of appearance, whereby he has in mind primarily Brecht’s theater, emblematic of the 20th century. According to Badiou, theater mask, or appearance, symbolizes the significance of the lie in the 20th century, or, in a more narrow sense, the relationship between the passion for the real and the necessity of appearance. Brecht’s theater actualized the interspace between the play and the real and dismantled the fundamental ties that link the real with the appearance and that arise from the fact that appearance is a realistic principle of embedding the real, or that which localizes and makes visible the brutal effects of its contingency. For Badiou, keeping distance is the axiom of 20th century art, since what is involved is turning the power of fiction into fiction, so that the effect of delusion appears as the real. The gap between the real and an appearance of the real (much like the gap between a ruling power and a ruling ideology, which, however, is not the subject of our interest in this essay), gives rise to artistic gestures that were impossible in the past, so what once has been the waste product of art is now presented as art. Badiou draws on Hegel when answering the question of the function of appearance in the passion for the real. The real, understood as the contingent absolute, is never sufficiently real to avoid raising doubts about the appearance. The passion for the real necessarily involves suspicion. Nothing can prove that the real is truly real save for the system of fiction where it will play the role of the real. The role of appearance is to expose the brutality of the real, whereby we do not have any formal criteria for distinguishing the real from the appearance, that is, nothing apart from nothingness: only nothingness is not suspicious, because it does not point to the real. And, the only act that does not create in us suspicion about its reality is death, although not in theater; there, death can be simulated

Badiou derives the thesis that the 20th century was, not only in politics, but in art as well, a century of destruction that took two directions: destruction as purification and destruction as subtracting; it attempts to measure the inevitable negativity; a subtracting thought can conquer the blind imperative of destruction and purification. To illustrate the protocol of subtraction, Badiou uses Malevich’s “White square on white”, which is in the field of painting the climax of purification that manifests a zero difference between white and white, the difference of the same that can be called a disappearing difference. However, this is not the destruction of painting but acceptance of subtraction. What is real in this process is not identity of the real but an interspace, a minimal one. The passion for the real that is based on identity is the passion for authenticity that can be accomplished only as destruction, which also represents its limit. The differentiating and the differentiated passion for the real, compared to maximal destruction, establishes a minimal difference which it tries to axiomatize. Or, to return to Malevich, subtracting acts must invent a new content to fill in the place of the minimal difference, where there is almost nothing.

The Non-space of Via Negativa

What is then ‘real’ in Jablanovec’s project? Where do his performances take place? The site of his performances is a gallery, an empty space of the experimental theater. It is a non-institutional stage with all the needed equipment, but naked: space as a fully equipped abstraction in which there is nothing that would direct one towards the performance or theater in the sense of illusion. Jablanovec’s space is a space ready to accept the real; the space as such vanishes. In our perception it appears merely as a non-defineable background, as a light (which, however, doesn’t know light effects; its intensity remains level most of the time, or, in other words, it illuminates the stage and the auditorium neutrally), or as time, duration. The first performance in the series, Starting Point: Wrath, is perhaps an exception in this regard, because it incorporated the context of the event, i.e. the gallery and the exhibits that even directed the actor’s choice. The space of Via Negativa is hence a kind of non-space, or perhaps even a pre-space, meaning an endless nothing that waits to be filled with some (new) life, the allegory of the real. To be more precise, In Jablanovec’s performances there occurs a kind of de-territorialization; attention is redirected from the macrocosm to the microcosm, i.e. the body. The space of Via Negativa is sooner or later the body, the body as omphalos, meaning the point of the (severed) link with the uterus, the body-in-a-chain, the body of bodies, or the body as life, anima – through which via (negativa) becomes vita (negativa). Or, it is the body as oikos, as (the only) home, a refuge, a cavity or an aperture where life is “at home.” In Jablanovec’s project, the body is an opening, the negative image of the space, and a result of fundamental subtracting – Jablanovec calls it reduction – where the (new) time of the performance becomes anchored.

The de-territorialization thesis is further supported by the fact that the viewers of Jablanovec’s series find themselves in a kind of non-political and even non-social space which is marked by the relationship between the public and the private sphere, but not in the political or social sense. It is invariably a space for emphatic theatrical communication where the “media” component is especially pronounced. Jablanovec intentionally directs viewers’ attention by introducing various guiding strategies, ranging from a simple and implicit guided tour of the gallery (Starting Point: Wrath) to masters of ceremony (More and Incasso) to ‘agreed economy’ of viewers’ participation in the performance (Would Would Not). Although the last mentioned strategy creates the impression of viewers’ contribution, apparently dispelling all doubts, its purpose is to make the audience passive and stiff, and to take it away from the context and redirect its gaze towards appearance with which Jablanovec replaces the reality of the space. Despite being continuously in the “spotlight,” the viewers at Jablanovec’s performance can nevertheless hide within their own perception which is continually filled with the specific dynamics of the relationship between voyeurism and exhibitionism into which they are gently pushed by Via Negativa. Jablanovec’s de-territorialization is thus also ex-territorialization, a throw-out, but back into one’s own body.

In addition, Jablanovec’s performances are no stranger to certain “political” re-territorialization. Look at their geography: when selecting the places for their guest performances (they do not have their own physical space; they have no ‘home’; perhaps their only home is their web ‘domain’) they look for modern, or (formerly) avant-garde settings, and post-modern environments reminiscent of ‘supermarkets’. On the other hand, the list of places visited so far (Podgorica, Novi Sad, Beograd, Zagreb) suggests that in a certain respect these performances are re-assembling the former common state, or the former shared home now ‘dismembered’ into extremities.

The Real As Surface

Furthermore, the real in Jablanovec’s performances reveals itself through something that can be named surface, in want of a better term. This superficiality is a consequence of a kind of absolute disclosure that occurs in these performances. The viewer frequently has a feeling that there is nothing behind the scene, in the background – everything is at the foreground and everything has the appearance of an unproblematic media, or art talk show; a succession of stand-up pieces, exhibitionist peep-shows or even reality shows, where everything, in an absolute sense, radiates from the display/screen, where neither the volume nor the background are important. The emotional glow of the covering, or ‘curtain’, to use Lacan’s allegory, i.e. the curtain as a complete illusion, conceals the ‘background,’ the space, the depth of field, and redirects attention to the body. The viewer is forced to immerse in the realm of corporality, which amounts to a kind of a 360 degrees turn around the perception axis redirecting along the way attention to itself. Although at first glance the viewer’s position in Jablanovec’s performances is traditional, Jablanovec requires from the viewer a symbolic turn which is similar to the viewer’s real shift from the square of theatre box to the circle, to the space of play, or the situation as such. All of this is characteristic of 20th century theatre.

The notion of surface is paradoxical: despite being focused on the body it excludes tactile sensations (or enables them but in the way we experience them when using touch-screens), and it constitutes the viewer as a voyeur. In some cases, for example, in More, the viewers even choose the sequence of scenes, which brings them close to the position of players who insert the “object of their desire” into a video or DVD player establishing in this way their own territory of gaze. The surface suggested in Via Negativa by the frontal positioning with respect to the spectators is further reasserted by other performative strategies, for example, addressing of the audience, actors’ mutual consideration of each other as an element of their supra-identification ‘technique,’ their appearances “out of the blue” (never resulting from the story) as in a puppet theatre show, and their vanishing over the edge of the space. Paradoxically, the very decision to stage the “fundamental human traits,” the very foundation of our humanity, causes a shift into a non-space, or even to the very border of humanity. Sin exists outside every space; it is a kind of floating performance hovering over the surface, always on the edge of the surface; it is an absent signifier which the representation of space attempts to simulate, a kind of helium balloon which, however, does not push upwards but downwards: Lacan’s spot. Jablanovec’s performers relate the story about humanity and sin as non-spatial bodies, as bodies-spaces, as flattened background, and as McLuhan’s media mirrors. But only this – along with the no less paradoxical ‘exposure’ of one’s own body and intimacy – enables their ‘recognition.’ Undoubtedly, it is sensible to point out that recognition takes place as a perception of ‘material substance’, as Žižek would say, behind the veil of self-presentation there is no substantial reality, no ‘essence.’

Linearity Of The Structure

The surface is also suggested by a certain linearity of Jablanovec’s performances. The scenes follow one another as lines of events following the principles of parallel symmetry and a geometrical sequence. In certain cases (e.g. More), these lines partially overlap or merge, but this does not destroy the basic principle. Linearity produces several effects. First, it constitutes substitute spaces within the original non-space. These are ‘streets’ (the street was Jablanovec’s stage set ‘ideal’ before the time of Via Negativa, for example, in staging of Pierre Corneille’s L’Illusion comique, Slovene National Theatre, Celje 1993) along which the ‘banal’ real moves, the reality of everyday life. The lines also suggest the parallelism of para-spaces and create the illusion of volume, levels and planes, and finally, their rhythm fragmentizes events into temporal segments, creating the slices of time that frame events.

The structure of Jablanovec’s performances is only apparently “primitive,” or linear. The assembling of this structure is the basic condition for an appearance to work; an imperceptible sequence of ‘scenes’ in the performance follows the principle of the actual gaze of a viewer in the street who dissects an integral development into individual segments, but perceives these as one whole. This is similar to what we experience when watching an underground train pulling out of the station: a series of window-framed “stories” each consisting of the images of bodies and faces ‘pasted’ onto the lit surface of the glass. This is the principle of continual substitution where the next covers the previous, which, on the one hand, refutes the principle of ephemerality or temporality, and on the other, constitutes it anew. Or, to put it differently, this is time as such. Finally, in this way the passengers-performers become somehow isolated, absent, even ‘departed’, as Boris Grays wittily described the actors on the screen.

However, linearity cannot be attributed to Jablanovec’s principle of repetition. The project Olga Grad vs. Juanna Regina (2001) introduced the “special conceptions” of individual performances or repetitions, now further varied in Via Negativa with the help of moderators who direct the show, a unique audience at each performance with whom the actors always anew “negotiate” the flow of events, and critical responses that govern ‘corrections’ in the structure, the progress of the performance or individual scenes. To put it differently, Jablanovec’s projects interpret idiosyncratically the category or performative reiteration, whereby in reproducing ‘one and the same thing’ they reconstitute themselves anew to a certain extent. This is similar to what does Marina Abramović, who re-enacts certain well-known performances from the 1960s and the 1970s, transforming into harsh reality something that has long since been consigned to memory, and through this auto-multiplication process she produces always new delusions, an infinite chain of repetitions vanishing in Magritte’s mirror.

A Test Of Reality

Derealization in itself does not inspire delusion, but it does give it a nudge. The most powerful ‘mise-en-scene’ shift in Jablanovec’s performances is a minimal deflection from a body to a body, i.e. from the body of the representative to the body of the represented, from real intimacy to represented intimacy, fictitious intimacy, which through this becomes contingent again. A body in a space is never self-referencing. As Pavis says, only the stage machinery is self-referencing, or the auditorium as a space. Stage presence is always transitory, duplicated in dual exposition, retreating through a spiral turn into the perspective of the background and into its ‘whiteness’, into the “difference with respect to itself’, or into subtraction that projects into it a new “corporality.” Generally, the acting process could be divided into several phases. Pavis call the first phase sous-partition, which could be understood as sub- or pre-manifestation, and he sees the actor as a reservoir or a web of associations. Actually, it enables his/her “stable” presence on the stage. Presence is the presence of actor as such; an actor’s role is a medium of transcodification (after Elam), and all of this is realized through the relationship between the actor and the role that takes the form of identification or distance. On the level of perception, a process of communication takes place between the performer and the viewer which Schaffer calls “fantasy negotiations.” This involves a constant degree of dissatisfaction to which the fictitious, ludist world is continually adjusted, which is made possible by, or which makes possible, the continuation of the play. Similar negotiations take place within the performers themselves, whose presence is constituted through the dual denial or shift; the actor’s “not-not me” means “neither I nor Hamlet,” but also not some third thing (the so-called “third body” emerges only as a result of the productive contact between the performers and the viewers). Or, this third thing is, so we assume, Badiou’s appearance.

What can we learn from this “test of reality” conducted on Jablanovec’s performers, and what do these performers actually “show” us? We shall approach the answer step by step. The physical, public explicitness of the performers in Via Negativa is increasing with every performance. This holds true for both the explicitness of address and of corporality. In both examples, the performers adhere to the wish to open up, to uncover in the non-space of the show their bodies and turn them into the space of perception, of viewers’ pleasure. In the Starting Point: Wrath, speech mainly sufficed. In the succeeding projects, the bodies discarded various auto-biographical, cultural and civilizational deposits and reached the point at which they stood naked in front of the viewers. There is no need to draw attention, however, (and Jablanovec is aware of this) that the literal, explicit nakedness of the body as such does not reveal its physical manifestation but points to what lies behind it, or underneath it, that is, the actor’s pre-manifestation. Moreover, the degeneration of the body, its discharges or wastes, and its partial “destruction” enabled by the gap between the real and appearance, do not open the door into the body, although the body’s apertures lay wide open. Sperm, blood or urine on the stage can to a certain extent simulate the actor’s “inside” or “intimate self” (for example, the color of the urine is specific to the actor as is the taste of sperm), but these have a “higher” value. Speaking metaphorically with Laporte, the beautiful does not have a smell; the border between a stuffy smell and a nice smell is fragile, and there exists an “essence link” between the two; there exists an analogy between a perfume and excrement; the system of relations closely links together the figures of god, excrement and soul, and it is especially in dealing with excrements that “the colonization reflex,” as Laporte named it, comes into play. (12)

The body as such, with its discharges, conceals within itself more than that. It is not something that belongs not only to a performer, but also something that belongs not only to man. Non-body in a non-space thus uncovers something non-human, and that can only be nothingness. Inasmuch as the bodies of performers in Via Negativa point to nothingness, (or death), they stand in front of us as the only criteria that help us overcome the original suspicion concerning the real, or help us distinguish between the real and delusion. Still better, the performer’s uncovered body along with its discharges causes a minimal shift in which it can find its new contingence, and the same is experienced by the viewers. The performer and the viewer both hit upon a limit which leaves no possibility of repetition and beyond which it is not possible to simulate the real, or life as such, the border of death, of nothingness. To be a bit (demonically) visionary: Via nova, which will bring together “the best” from the previous projects, can only be an explicit “play about death,” about the real that is not possible to simulate.

Therefore, in Via Negativa the intimate self of the performer is in the service of stating something, stating nothing, rather than stating so-called self, one’s own pre-manifestation as manifestation or a role. Despite this, the performers constitute themselves before the public as certain recognizable identities. Through installing themselves in the given space, or still better, through their ex-installation or exposition, they attract the gaze of the viewers using specific representational strategies which are the creations of their own. This is not about stories or situations, but about defining the manners of presence and realizing the viewer’s wish. At first glance, all Via Negativa performances aim to fulfill a wish, to put it simply, or to show that which the viewer has long wanted to see but dared not ask for it; they are intended for doing what many have done as children, or in perverted dreams. It is, in brief, a kind of variety or cabaret style coquetry with the delicate, the obscene, the forbidden; it is a “shadow” theatre or a public psycho-analytic séance, perhaps even a mass “game” of truth with therapeutic effects. That is the first impression, and not completely unfounded. The pre-manifestation of performances is frequently “nightmarish” and “perverted,” since this is declaratively the “staging” of deadly sins that occupy a very precise place in our collective memory.

Despite all, every performer attracts the viewer’s attention through some specific trait characteristic of him/her only. I do not talk here about the performer presenting a “part of self,” which is not flesh, as Ovid would say, which is a maxim for actors in porno movies, or placing the viewer in a “third” position, also characteristic of porno movies, in which the male viewer does not identify with the male actor but, as Žižek concluded, with the position of pure gaze observing the woman who fully surrenders to pleasure. The point is not to show to the viewer the “real” pleasure attained through, say, masturbation (as in Would And Would Not), or to uncover “that” which resides beyond pleasure and takes us to supra-pleasure, to the supra-sensual and transcendental. The point is in what can be named an attempt at occupying a non-space, in want of a better definition. The occupation of a non-space is a battle for space, but it does not involve the process of placing oneself into a space, inserting oneself into a space. It is an operation that makes incision in the body, the carrying out of a “pure incision that separates the thing from itself.” The consequence of the incision is not the disappearance or destruction, but what Badiou named subtraction. We can only perceive ourselves as “we” through a minimal difference with regard to ourselves and to others, either as performers or viewers of Via Negativa. Or to borrow from Lacan, who recapitulated Freud on an occasion, we become “/…/ a mouth kissing itself.” The principle is both Aristotelian and Brechtian, and in some respect Artaudian, while tallying with Pfaller’s theory of inter-passivity characteristic of virtual reality.

The Call of the Real

Let us conclude with the beginning. We are attracted to Jablanovec’s performances by the real. In an isolated theatrical space we experience a minimal shift from “life” into which we release desires in a manner of an animal released from the cage. Eroticism is not an effect but a prerequisite for the entry into our own negative. All virtues we assume we posses are left outside the theatre, and we arm ourselves with suspicion. We do not want to participate because we know that the play will take place without us just the same, but we still place ourselves at disposal, including that which is the most intimate and the most valuable: good name, clothes, sexual organs. Sometimes, halfway through the performance, we begin to believe that what we see is real, but this sensation is subdued by its opposite counterpart: all is delusion. We wish for more truth, more minimal shifts, more effects of the real, and that precisely in order to perceive a new real within the delusion, and to feel, let’s be straightforward, the weight of our back pressing against the seat, because at that moment that is the only proof that we are. We are attracted to Jablanovec’s performances by the fear that in the brutality of the real we shall perceive our reverse side, but as an illusion only. Nothing human is alien to us, but still, there is nothing more lonely than the humanity of another laying bare in front of us. We know that despite light and closeness we can isolate ourselves within our own wish, our own dark horror that dissolves our responsibility for it before making a decision. The open text of Jablanovec’s performances is in fact a test of our readiness to accept ourselves, subtract from ourselves and then go on. Nothing fateful, the real thing, but worthy of trying.

Glossary

Real/appearance – The role of appearance is to reveal the brutality of the real, whereby there is no any formal criterion that would enable us to distinguish the real from appearance, save for nothingness.

Deterritorialization – In Via Negativa, attention is redirected from the macrocosm, or from space, to the microcosm, or the body.

Non-space – The decision to put on the stage the “fundamental human traits,” or the very foundation of humanity, causes a paradoxical shift of the performance into a non-space, or even to the very border of humanity.

Surface – The notion of surface, despite the focus being on the body, excludes tactility but constitutes the viewer as a voyeur.

Linearity – The structure of Via Negativa is only seemingly “primitive” and linear; the assemblage of scenes is a fundamental condition for appearance to function.

Intimacy – Intimacy is expressed through the attempt to conquer a non-space, which is in essence the battle for space. However, this is not the process of securing place, or intrusion into space, but the operation of incision in the body, acting out of a “pure cut that differentiates a thing from itself.”

* 1 Jerzy Grotowski, Revno gledališče, Knjižnica MGL, Ljubljana 1973, str. 15.
* 2 Anton Grabner-Haider in Jože Krašovec, Biblični leksikon,, Mohorjeva družba, Celje 1984, str. 646.
* 3 Prvi iz serije je tekst “Paradigme presežnega gledališča: De Brea, Janežič, Lorenci«, Maska, št. 1-2 (96-97), letnik XXI/2006, str. 5-11, drugi pa Užitek v prehodu, Matjaž Pograjc, tekst za zbornik SMG, še v pripravi.
* 4 Alain Badiou, Dvajseto stoletje, Analecta, Ljubljana 2005, str. 66. Vsi nadaljnji navedki so iz poglavja 5. Strast do realnega in montaža dozdevka.
* 5 Slavoj Žižek, Kako biti nihče, Društvo za teoretsko psihoanalizo, Ljubljana 2005, str. 10.
* 6 Boris Groys, »Opazovalec sam na sebi«, Maska, št. 3-4 (86-87), letnik XIX/2004, str. 52-56.
* 7 Patrice Pavis, Gledališki slovar, Knjižnica MGL, Ljubljana 1997, str. 282.
* 8 Patrice Pavis, L’Analyse des spectacles, Nathan, Paris 1996, str. 92.
* 9 Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, Routledge, London in New York 2002, str. 76.
* 10 Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Zašto fikcija? Svetovi, Novi Sad 2001, str. 284.
* 11 Richard Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 1985, str. 123.
* 12 Dominique Laporte, Zgodovina dreka, Študentska založba, Ljubljano 2004, str. 115-123.
* 13 Peter Klepec, »K Agambenovi profanaciji pornografije«, Problemi, št. 1-2, let. XLIV/2006, str. 179.
* 14 Prav tam, str. 1974.
* 15 Alenka Zupančič, »Realno v igri«, Problemi, št. 1 – 2, let. XLIV /2006, str. 92.

Sodobne scenske umetnosti. Edited by Bojana Kunst and Petra Pogorevc. Ljubljana: Maska, 2006 (Zbirka Transformacije, 20).

(fragment)

What happens when viewers themselves become objects of the gaze and together with the performers find themselves within their own field of perception? Such a situation was created by Bojan Jablanovec in Would Would Not (2005), the fourth event in the series of seven performances of deadly sins named Via Negativa. With this project, Jablanovec abandoned theatre as an art of representation and creation of stage illusion (he ended his engagement with drama theatre when he embarked on the Via Negativa project). For Jablanovec, theater as a realm of aesthetic representation no longer holds attraction. He is interested in theater as a medium of communication among the participants in a theatre event, and in studying that which »takes place between the performer and the viewer,« as Grotowski would say, whose performative method gave the name to Via Negativa. However, Jablanovec’s Via Negativa does not follow the aesthetics of Grotowski’s methods, but rather the ethical imperatives which find expression with regard to the performer and the viewer. Seven deadly sins are just a framework for the study of the dynamics relationship between the performers and the viewers (1). The first three events (Wrath, 2002; More, 2003, and Incasso, 2004) approached this relationship primarily through the issues of representation (the method of representing the subject, the perfomativity of language, the search for the site of theatricality, deconstruction of events etc.), while in Would Would Not, it is the viewer’s perception that is in the foreground. While in the past Jablanovec saw perception as a result of the transaction in signs that flow between the performers and the viewers, he now approaches perception as a process of opening the channels of vision. In so doing he most explicitly, and perhaps most profoundly reaches into the viewer’s space, i.e. his/her body. In the studies of wrath (Wrath), gluttony (More), and greed (Incasso), the constellation of relationships among participants was such that the viewers were left on the other side, meaning outside presentation. In the study of lust (Would Would Not), the viewers – although still sitting in the auditorium facing performers – are introduced into the field of vision in a way that they are visible to themselves and to the others (performers and other viewers), so they themselves are subject to (self)observation.

In Would Would Not, Bojan Jablanovec is no longer the director of the event as he was in the first two parts of Via Negativa that took place at the intersection of theatre and performance. He is now the organizer of a performative (non-theatrical) play deliberately located in the world of trans-aesthetics. He addresses the viewers as sexual beings. The performance begins with music, strawberries and wine, as if it were a party, and the viewers are invited to join the performers in experiencing their intimate desires. The performers use various passive-aggressive strategies in an attempt to involve viewers into the play (the play cannot be accomplished without viewers’ participation) while strictly observing the principle that one who rejects cooperation is not pressed to join in but is allowed to assume the role of the observer. Yet this position is not voyeuristic, since the auditorium is brightly lit, so throughout the performance the viewers are visible to both the performers and other viewers. The situation that suits this aim is established by the actress Barbara Matijević during the first ‘full frontal’ scene. She slowly discards clothes all the while glancing seductively at the audience and then sits on the chair uncovered. She continues to seduce the viewers glancing at them for some time and eventually puts on the sun glasses so that they can no longer see her eyes and do not know who she looks at. At that moment, the perception relations are turned upside down. The viewers in the auditorium no longer have control over the represented; we ourselves become the viewed ones. We are placed in the position of Sartre’s voyeur who is caught by surprise by the gaze of the Other.

In L’Étre et le Néant (1943), Jean-Paul Sartre distinguishes between two types of looking(2). One occurs when the voyeur peeps through a keyhole in the door and is so absorbed in what he sees that he has no awareness of his own existence and his own being »evaporates«. Sartre’s voyeur is the same as the observer in Diderot who is fully immersed in the scene: his self is transposed to the observed world and he forgets about himself as an observer. The second type of looking begins at the moment when the voyeur is taken by surprise by the gaze of the Other. The voyeur becomes aware that he himself is observed, perceives himself as a spectacle for the Other and this awareness that he exists for the Other creates in him the awareness of the self. The voyeur first experiences the loss of illusion that he is the master of the field of vision in which the world escapes his gaze. To be more precise, he is still the master of the situation, yet this situation acquires a new dimension. The unexpected gaze of the Other disorientates the voyeur, since it fully changes the coordinates of his perception. It introduces a new aspect into the situation which the voyeur now sees differently than a few moments earlier. He recognizes that he himself is part of the field of vision and is therefore himself exposed to gaze. So the situation escapes his gaze, because he becomes aware that he himself is a sensational image for the Other. This is precisely what the viewers experience at the first full frontal scene in Would Would Not. When Barbara Matijević begins to observe us from behind her dark glasses, our perspective from which we have observed the event until then changes. We begin to perceive ourselves as part of the spectacle. While a few moments earlier the performer has been a spectacle for us, now we become a spectacle for her. The presence of viewers, taken for granted in a theater, acquires a performative value. The performer assumes the role of the Other, normally reserved for the audience of a theatre show. Being subjected to her gaze, we can no longer be invisible viewers observing from a distance an event outside us in the manner of a voyeur. This is the situation Jablanovec wants to create for us: he attempts to involve us in the play, place us inside our fields of perception, so that we become visible to others and to ourselves and so that we experience ourselves during the act of observation.

Sartre’s concept of gaze has been revised in a key point by Lacan. The voyeur who has been surprised by the gaze of the Other does not experience himself as part of the spectacle, but also discovers that he is a »subject in a function of desire.« (3) Jablanovec attempts to constitute the viewer as a subject of desire rather than the subject of a reflexive awareness. The performers assuming phantasmic identities and presenting the expressions of lust are just a »trap« set to catch the desires of the audience and ascribe to it the role of the subject of desire. The individuals who are needed to accomplish the scenes that represent the satisfaction of sexual desires are chosen from among the audience. The performer’s partner is not another performer but a viewer. The scenes of lust are just a challenge for the viewers and a groundwork employed to shift events to the audience. At the third performance in the series, this was perhaps most obvious in the scene in which a dangerous body-art action came close to being accomplished: a volunteer viewer held a hammer over Kristian Al Droubi’s penis with the performer assuring her that he had everything under control and encouraging her to use her tool and nail the organ to the board, when another viewer called from the auditorium and stopped the action. The meaning does not lie in the accomplishment of the action, but in the study of the dynamics of relationships among the participants created by a specific situation.

Is it possible to satisfy an intimate desire that is uncovered and exposed in a public space? The question of whether it is possible to realize a desire within the scopic field is in fact the question of whether it is possible to open up and establish contact with oneself under the gaze of the Other. Two scenes are paradigmatic in this respect. The first involves performer’s identity and it was explicated by Marko Mandić. After failing to reach an orgasm through masturbating in front of the audience, he states: »It is hard to be Marko Mandić.« The performer »establishes in front of the viewer a ‘third body’ which is neither the performer himself nor his role, but a being that intertwines with itself and its stage presence having contact with the audience, which is sometimes more and sometimes less than itself and its role.« (4) The performer’s »third body,« as Blaž Lukan calls it, is a body that does not belong to the performance personae Marko Mandić nor to Marko’s authentic self. It is a product of a specific visual order in which the performer opens himself/herself up as one who is visible and shares the viewer’s gaze from the inside. Another example of the failed attempt to establish contact with oneself, as Lukan would say, involves the identity of to viewer who took part in this play. When Sanela Milošević managed to arouse the penises of two volunteers, their experience was the same as that of Marko Mandić despite the fact that they faced away from the auditorium and did not need to meet our gaze. The volunteers sensed and shared our gazed, which probably enforced them to shift to their »third bodies.« Finally, what can be said about the audience in the auditorium who is within the field of its own perception and is aware that it is visible and integrated into the strategy of representation? Does not every spectator in the auditorium have a kind of »third body« inhabited neither by their authentic selves nor their Viewer role, but by a being that feels that it is visible, meaning exposed to performers’ invitations, on the one hand, and to the eyes of other viewers, on the other, all the while being subject to their own gazes as well? The attendants at the event find ourselves in the same existential paradox as performers, and the reason is the establishment of the specific circumstances of perception. We are made visible, meaning visible not to others only but to ourselves as well, and we see ourselves as viewed/visible. Within this intersubjective relationship with the participants in the event, cocooned inside the fabric of the (performative) play, we sense ourselves as a source of the coordinates of perception, and literally so. Our »third body« becomes the converging point of viewpoints projected by performers and perspectives we have at our disposal as subjects who are split between our own selves and the role of the Viewer. The productivity of the gaze in Would Would Not arises precisely from the split within the subjective point of view, which on the one hand, is nested in one’s own self (which is a combination of individually, socially, historically and culturally conditioned traits), and on the other, embedded in the role of the Viewer who is clearly aware of his/her own position of perception. The main reference with respect to which the viewer interprets an event is not the actors’ portrayal of lust, but the subjective viewpoint of an individual. What an individual sees is the his/her own self as a subject of desire which, in essence, is tied to the desire of the Other. Jablanovec shatters the very apparatus of the voyeuristic gaze determined by consensuses, norms, imperatives and desires. He does this in order to enable the viewer to recognize himself/herself as involved in the relationship, to become aware of his/her personal and social place in the web of intersubjective relationships and to recognize his/her own mechanisms of perception

*1 – Nana Miličinski, Via negative, Strategije teritorialnosti, Akademija za gledališče, radio, film in televizijo, diploma work, Ljubljana 2005, p. 6, 69-79.
*2 – Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness. An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, Methuen, London, 1966, p. 252-302
*3 – Jacques Lacan, Štirje temeljni koncepti psihoanalize, Društvo za teoretsko psihoanalizo, Analecta, Ljubljana 1996, str. 82.
*4 – Blaž Lukan, »Tretje telo«, Delo, 27 12. 2005, leto XLVII, št. 299, str. 8.

In a scene in the recent premiere of the performance piece Bi ne bi (Would Would Not, actor Marko Mandić “accidentally” quoted me. I turned to my neighbour and jokingly said: “He’ll see what it means to publically quote a critic…” Well, promises are made to be kept!

The quotation was from the text “To Catch an Actor” and, in fact, was well-chosen since in the scene, Mandić speaks precisely about how to catch an actor and goes even further: how indeed to catch Marko Mandić. It has to do with the well-known (though still exciting) relationship between existence and the role, between the human “base” and the actor’s “superstructure”. Mandić illustrates the problem with his on-stage onanism. Then he candidly discusses his (failed) experience both in connection with the intimate business itself and in connection with the stage and his theatrical performance, and why he tackled this “hand job” in public at all (albeit partially hidden by a screen). Despite the fact that we attribute to all actors the quality of narcissism, a quality that is best released during public performance, it appears that some pleasures are best reserved for other situations. An activity as intimate as self-gratification has nothing to do with the pleasure taken in mastery or control; it has nothing to with the increased attention that the actor receives in his place on the stage, the focused scene as it were; it has nothing to do with the exploitation of an a priori position of power that is the result of exhibition in this highly viewed and examined space. Rather, it has everything to do with contact with the self, with what we termed above as “existence” or the human “base”.

As Mandić teaches us in his performance, physical comfort as an initiator of subsequent “spiritual” appeasement cannot be mastered in the same way as manipulative pleasure arising from primal narcissism. We won’t examine this closely as it would bring us too deeply into the field of “physiology”. Instead, it would be more interesting to examine what Mandić shows us: that the problem on stage is not to find a role, that is a variation on desire in which the actor’s controlled distance (from the self) is reflected; but instead the problem on the stage is for the actor to find a connection with the self. In both traditional and contemporary theatrical performances, it is not difficult for an actor to be a performer representing him or herself. What is a difficult is to simply be the self. Is it no wonder then that the recognition that emerged from the actor’s failure to reach a climax in front of an audience ended with the literal statement: “It is hard to be Marko Mandić!”

If we have gotten completely used to our role as audience member, then we might say that the failure of the actor in this situation does not interest us. But the failed encounter with the self is a legitimate theme of contemporary performance practice. Not to split hairs: but what else but this reflection is expressed, for example, in many of Hamlet’s speeches? But the consequence of the failure of the actor is also the absence of audience enjoyment (this unfortunately was true of the performance discussed here). What is much more productive – at least from the perspective of the audience – is the manifestation of a dynamic, or the conflicting tension between two poles, between the existential and the functional, the existential human base and the superstructure or the transcendence of a character or a role; first exhibition and then resolution that can give literal “birth” to a third original category. In other words, the actors presents to the audience his “third body”, which is neither himself or his role, but instead a self that is permeated with theatrical existence, a creature in contact with the audience which is sometimes more than the self alone but also sometimes less than both the self alone and the role. Because the actor’s performance is something that is his alone and he encounters something that comes out of the role alone, as well as something that springs from the combination of the two, the actor is more a creative witness than a mere reproducer of texts.
And what is this “third body” of Marko Mandić like? True, it is elusive. I do not know why, but it always makes me think of the paradox of the tortoise and Achilles. First, there is something of substance in him, like a vehicle or a medium, that is always ready, mobile, eager to take on for us (and for himself) the ballast of the role. It seems that in his case there is a constant conflict between the physical base and the corpus (the body) of the role, a struggle between the self and alienation, between awareness of the instant and the urgency of a path that is receding into the unknown. Not fear, not at all, more constant courage, though the gravity of the actor is also preserved on the stage; no metamorphosis, no external transformation, but a completely present manifestation of the fateful struggle against death, the painful awareness of the drama of life, and at the same time of submission. That sounds like a criticism, but it is not: this submission is not a priori and is never final. It is a submission that passes into the structure, into the “flesh”, or more precisely into the voice. This submission is the reverse side of the struggle; it is a shield that, like a menacing threat, adheres to the actor’s body and protects it against defeat. Above all, what Mandić brings to the stage is ceaseless sincerity (in the sense of being stripped bare) and vulnerability (in the sense of being wounded), and precisely this is his new “third” way. He doesn’t calculate, he doesn’t manipulate: it is born of the confrontation with his own physical predisposition and the type of role he is given. In this way, the Mandić stage phenomenon ceaselessly vacillates between various spaces and times: at times it stagnates on the periphery; at times it is anchored in the core of the space itself and determines the axis; at times it slowly emerges from the womb, from the era of childish reassurance (and rapture); and, at times Mandič is almost as if without skin, an endless aperture defending everything that exists and everything that the role and the stage present.

Bojan Jablanovec is an economist and theatre director. He graduated in marketing in Maribor, then went to AGRFT (Academy for theatre, radio, film and televison) in Ljubljana and took a degree in theatre direction. In his ten-year career as a theatre director in Slovenia and abroad, he has tackled, among others, Artaud’s Jet of Blood (Curek krvi) and Brecht’s Mr Puntila and His Man Matti (Gospod Puntila in njegov hlapec Matti). He directed Helios and The Triumph of Death (Triumf smrti) with Vlado Repnik. He staged the following performances in various institutional theatres: Stage Illusion (Odrska utvara), The House of Bernarda Alba (Dom Bernarde Alba), Disney the Ripper (Disney Razparač), The Sunset (Zaton), Hedda Gabler and Women Presidents (Predsednice). Having left repertory at the end of the millennium, he and Nana Milčinski developed a framework for the performative theatre in which he wanted to work in future; first he produced three pilot pieces (1999–2002: Lenora, Europe–the Girl Who Rushed Too Much (Evropa–deklica, ki je preveč hitela) and Olga Grad vs. Juannna Regina), and then established his own rules of the game with their attendant chronology. Via Negativa, in which the seven deadly sins are explored, is conceived as a journey of sorts to a skeleton of theatre devoid of the glamour of the stage. Its chronology spans seven years, with a new project every year. The three that have been staged so far deal with anger (Starting Point: Anger [Začetna točka: jeza], 2002), gluttony (More [Še], 2003) and greed (Incasso, 2004). The first fourth will explore lust (2005). The project Via Nova (2009) will round off the series. A number of things interested me, and my point of reference was Jablanovec’s idiosyncratic working methods. Hence, Via Negativa serves in this interview as a reference from which everything originates and returns, as an interface of the author’s ideas, linking disparate ideas, and offering new ones, a new path, which he will reach in 2009. In the meantime, his second project, the gluttony of More, has arrived at this year’s biennal in Venice.

Via Negativa began with a departure from theatre as an institution, and with a venture, as you once put it, into a theatre without power. Why?

Power is not to be understood too literally. If, as an artist, you choose to work outside institutions, this is, in a sense, a decision to work without power. If, however, you choose institutions, you also choose their ideological, methodological, production and financial apparatuses. The problem here is compatibility. After a decade of work in institutions, I realised that the modes of production in institutional theatre are not suitable for me. I am talking about a clash concerning production, rather than aesthetics. In my case, it was a conflict involving a sense of powerlessness, an inability to articulate what gives meaning to my work within the existing system of production.

Is Via Negativa then a sort of departure from everything that the repertoire theatre entails??

Via Negativa is simply a return, a backward glance cast towards the reasons, the meaning, the goal and objectives, as well as the methods of theatre as such. It is not about developing a different theatre or inventing a new stylistic paradigm. It is simply a reconsideration of the meaning of theatre as a medium and an exploration of its mechanisms. Nowadays, I see theatre, above all, as a sphere of communication, not as a medium of aestheticisation. Institutional theatre, to some extent, underestimates the audiences – in terms of how it communicates with them and what kind of language it uses. Negativa is all about opening up theatre as a space of communication.

Why, then, does the last project, Incasso, significantly reduce the role of interaction among the actors, as well as in terms of a physical contact between the actors and the audiences? Why are there no relations??

The utopian stance of Via Negativa is a maximum control of the effects of the stage, for we can never predict with absolute precision what the individual will experience. What we can predict, however, are certain general moments, which we integrate into our expectations, so there are no surprises. It is not true, though, that there are no relations; it is just that Incasso implements them in a more subtle way than More, which employs a convention that is closer to dance, the simultaneity of individual performances, and the conventions of talk show entertainment. Interaction is deeply embedded in conventions of performing arts – theatre is all about the simultaneity of performance and reception. Via Negativa explores precisely the relations between the actor and the spectator; however, not by dint of physical interaction. In theatre, this can quickly lead to the opposite effect – instead of enticing the spectator, it puts him off, it loses him, so to speak. The spectator comes to the theatre for some sort of experience; however, one in which he does not expect to participate physically. Theatre conventions are crystal clear in this respect: the spectator embodies a passive presence, whereas the actor is active. The actor is the entity supposed to do something with himself, on behalf of the spectator, in order for the latter to experience something. The two are diametrically opposed; hence, they attract each other; however, they must not transgress their respective boundaries physically; they must protect their positions. Ideally, these two types of logic overlap. In order for this to happen, however, certain subtle strategies must be deployed. Theatre takes place within the spectator, not in front of him. In Incasso, the physical contact with the spectator is transposed into the presence of his money on stage. The basic premise of this project is to construct the performance as a structure into which the act of looking is integrated as meticulously as possible. What this entails is that the performer tries to predict the effects of his actions as accurately as possible and to control them through his performance. He must be aware of the context of looking at all times.

Are you pushing the envelope here??

I don’t think so. It is all a matter of the degree to which the performer is willing to expose himself, and this is what I follow. The performers, however, do have the task of exposing themselves beyond the point of generality, the task of stepping out in front of the audience with an utterly personal presence and a statement. Every performer must justify his presence on stage, he must have a just cause for his presence in front of the spectator, which is what every performer in Negativa has spent a long time contemplating. His task, on behalf of me as the spectator, is to perform something that I, the spectator, aniticipate yet never demand.

Is this how you function as a director, when you are in the process of creating a performance?

Yes, I function as a voracious spectator. If you are inviting someone to the theatre, you have aroused certain expectations and you need to meet them with the performance. If you fail to do this, performing is pointless. This is why some performances are moving towards a radicalisation of the presence on stage, towards a ruthless exposure of oneself. In fact, it is all about affirming the meaning. Nothing else but yourself renders you meaningful on stage.

Do you ever feel that putting yourself in the role of a voracious spectator is a form of manipulation, that you are letting the performers know what you expect?

No, not at all. If this were the case, theatre direction as such would amount to ugly, rude manipulation. It is about a certain logic of consensus, which presupposes that every performer on stage wants to be seen. If we are watching a classical performance, we are not here to see Hamlet, but rather the actor who performs the role of Hamlet. Hamlet always withdraws in favour of the actor, for the spectator is always on the look-out for a difference between the role and the actor and he relishes the moment when he sees the actor in the role. Via Negativa deals with the spectator through the logic of this relation between a statement and the act of making a statement on stage, for the spectator is the key catalyst in establishing this relation and he fills up the abyss between them. This is the point of what we do. We explore how things put on display are seen, we are searching for variety within this process. These differences are what is performed on stage.

How do you understand the role of multimedia projects in this context??

To me, multimedia projects are, above all, about the ambition to liberate the spectator, who is supposed to have the option to receive the message through various media; however, a counter moment often occurs in this process. What transpires is a certain saturation, disorientation, dispersal. The use of multimedia within a medium, in my opinion, conveys a lack of ability to make the most of the medium in which you exist. In terms of the act of performing, theatre exists as a concentrated sphere of power, fixed gazes and the audience’s expectations. If you are aware of this power of the medium, you must use it as a springboard. You are expected to know how to use this power in a manner that communicates with your temporal coordinates. In Negativa, we use as our springboard theatre as such, its live presence.

Do you, nevertheless, see a possible exit here?

I feel no need to subvert this convention, I am merely trying to use it in as productive a manner as possible. I am looking for material that would lead me to a logical way of connecting the spectator and the performer, these two diametrically opposed presences that have a common goal. In More, I found it productive to introduce the talk show host. It turned out that the performer as the bearer of the statement cannot address the audience in such a casual manner as the host – the spectator always thinks that the performer has an ulterior motive. The host, however, merely performs his function, that is, he orchestrates the spectacle. In this way, I try to expand the conventions of theatre; I am introducing other conventions, however, ones that theatre can keep up with. In Anger, we integrated conventions of gallery spaces; in More, we introduced the talk show host; Incasso deploys money to this end.

Do you see the attempts to redefine space, to cross from one context into another, to open up new spheres and to explore the medium in your performances as political??

I don’t really understand the concept of politics in this context. Every form of performing on stage is potentially political. Money with its exchange value is nothing but a medium of control, which in a theatrical event can lead to the point in which personal statements become simultaneously ideological because they lay bare these hidden regulatory mechanisms. When the actor, using money, performs a personal attitude towards greed or the strategies of resisting greed, he also articulates the way in which he surrenders to the system or the way in which he defies it. This is where a hidden political nucleus resides.

What interests you most in this context?

For instance, the fact that within each sphere that Via Negativa opens up there is a distinct conflict. For lust, for example, we are using the notion of the instinct as a working definition – the instinct that is directed towards the body of the other; however, it has to be sublimated, or else it would be socially unacceptable. These levels of social acceptability are the source of short circuits in the individual’s identity. When the performer feels that an intimate, personal conflict is crossing its boundaries and becoming a presentation of some general relations, this is when things become very interesting.

Interesting for whom – for you, the spectator, or for the performer??
For everybody: for the spectator, for me, and for the actor who in this moment feels the power of theatre, which gives him the right to speak out in a personal manner in a public space. Theatre as a medium not only grants him this right – it demands this from the performer.This is the purpose of the performer, his essence. And this is not a form of social critique, but rather a form of discerning one’s position in society; in fact, it is a critique of oneself, of the individual who consents to these relations.

Does it ever happen that somebody backs off?

Of course, there are also retreats. You can always exercise your right to freely leave the project. All performers are aware of this possibility from the very beginning. In some stages, our work demands a radicalisation of stage action, and those unable to do so quickly become aware of the fact that descriptive performance does not tally with the overall code of the project. Everybody makes his own decisions and sets up his personal limits to which he is prepared to expose himself in front of the spectator.

The project Via Nova, comprising seven performances, will take place in 2009. In what way can this project be seen as transcending theatre as we know it?

The most significant aspect, I think, is the fact that we are trying to introduce the practice of performance into the conventions of theatre in a methodological manner. In this sense, the degree to which the performer in this project is willing to expose himself, without requiring an authoritative reference to amplify his meaning, is also excessive. In the working process we are using the practice of performance, whereas the results are rendered within the conventions of theatre. This is why the performers in the first three projects created predominantly solo acts. It is, however, also possible to do duets or groups, which is something we are going to tackle further.

Are you?

Yes. We are already doing this with lust, because we define the latter as a disposition towards the body of the other. This entails that each performer in his act must speak through an action directed towards the body of the other, which opens up entirely new areas. Every new project of Negativa attempts to find a new realm related to its subject-matter. The problem under consideration is our starting point. This is never a formal decision, it is always related to the content. Save for reduction, there are no formal limitations.

How do you choose the performers?

I find them in agreement with the rest of the team. If truth be told, I wish they would choose me; that would make the issue of the performer’s motive clear right from the beginning. I am interested in specific individuals, by which I don’t mean their competence as actors, dancers or performers, but rather their willingness to enter the process of Via Negativa. Every performer, right from the start, knows exactly what he is expected to do. From the necessity to expose oneself personally to the basic approach through the logic of performance, which means that the actor functions as the author as well as the material of his scene – in short, as a performer.

And generally, most of them decide to join in – except when there are technical obstacles?

During the working process, especially in workshops, people often leave projects. This results either from the fact that it was sheer curiosity that brought them there in the first place and that this curiosity has been appeased, or from the fact that they realise that their perception of theatre differs from ours and they simply leave. At the moment, I am putting together a team in Zagreb; they are actors and dancers, and the invitations and information circulate via e-mail, personal contact and conversation. Before serious work begins, we meet and talk at least a couple of times. Sometimes it happens that after the first discussion somebody wants to participate, but after the next meeting this is no longer the case. Some people leave the project even during the working process, for they find the methods too stressful.

What about the group of Belgians who worked on scenes for More which were eventually not included in the performance?

Ah, the Belgians…This was a peculiar situation. We started developing the idea to have two teams working in parallel on the same topic. The Belgians came up with some really interesting stuff. In Antwerp, their project was staged in a gallery, and tried out in a supermarket; in Ljubljana, we decided to perform More in theatre. The result was a huge discrepancy. When they came to Ljubljana, I thought two weeks would suffice to find a common denominator for our scenes. We immediately started working and achieved a lot in a week. However, as it turned out, we spoke two entirely different languages; they were in an altogether different film, so to speak.

In what way?

Their language suddenly became too metaphorical, whereas we tried to speak in very concrete terms, and we deliberately avoided metaphorisation. The combination simply did not work. What I deemed most important was to uphold our initial criteria, hence I was forced to decide…
Pri tem se mi je zdelo najpomembneje, da vzdržimo kriterije, ki smo si jih postavili, zato sem se bil pač prisiljen odločiti …

…So who makes the decisions – the team or you?

Eventually, I do, of course – this is the director’s task; however, I do run everything by the team. The majority realised that it wouldn’t work, and we learnt our lesson. It didn’t happen again with the Serbians. In June, after the workshop, one of the actresses left, but Kristijan, Sanela and I kept working on the scenes via e-mail and in accordance with what was going on in Ljubljana. Which is why Kristijan and Sanela joined the performance in Ljubljana without any trouble. After this experience, I am sure the Belgian one cannot happen again. The problem was my approach.

Communication malfunction?

Precisely – the Belgians did not start from exactly the same premise as the team in Ljubljana. I was aware of that, but I did not expect this to drive us apart to such a degree. Now, I insist on every performer knowing exactly what the task is about. The problem, the method and the objective must be defined with utmost precision and we need to stick to them. Every performer must also accept the possibility that they might not take part in the final production if his performance does not meet certain criteria.

What is your vision for this kind of liaising in future?

In future, I am interested in linking disparate cultural spaces. For instance, I would like to develop a project with Slovenian, Japanese and Senegalese people. So far, I have had experience with people from Belgium, Austria and Serbia, and I am working with Croatians at the moment. I have no idea where they are going to lead me. In Celovec, I started working with five people, but at the end only Oliver remained on board. One actress, for example, left the project because of a methodological requirement: she was not to discuss or explain her work-in-progress to us, the observers, whereas we were obliged to comment on how her performance communicates with us, what it conveys and how it affects us. According to her, I was a fascist. I said to her, come on, these are simple requirements. But she could not understand that this kind of work enables her to find her own, authentic strategy of conveying her message through a thoughtful stage gesture. The problem emerged, of course, when we did not understand her performance and I did not want to hear her explanation. For her, this was utterly unacceptable.

Despite the homogenisation of cultural spaces, there are still differences stemming from language and manifested in gaps, places of indeterminacy, tolerated in some milieus but not in others. What do you think about this?

This is precisely what I am interested in. But I have to deploy different strategies in different environments to get the results that interest me. In Novi Sad, the strategy was different from the one I used in Ljubljana. Communication there was much more direct, the whole thing was very productive. There are things that I put on hold in Ljubljana, simply because I think it is wiser to do so. Conversely, in Serbia, I felt that the passing of time easily creates hysteria. If something is left up in the air, people become hysterical. I really wonder how I would act in Japan, or somewhere in Africa, and how I would need to conduct the work there to be able to unite the performers in a coherent stage event within a week. If I succeeded in bringing them to the point where everyone would speak the language of Via Negativa, the differences between them would be precisely what I would relish most.

Do you think the control over effects allows drawing parallels with marketing??

The key premise of marketing is to consider the possible interpretations of a message on all levels. This entails controlling effects, monitoring reception, in short, anticipation. In art, the strategy is the same! If you don’t take this into account in theatre, you are naïve! For instance, if you don’t realise that somebody might find something naïve or ridiculous, you have forgotten something. You are creating a performance the audience won’t buy. For example, somebody must die on stage and he is only thinking about how to die; he has forgotten that he is performing death. A commercial brand cannot afford such amnesia; it knows that it must communicate in concrete terms and that it cannot make any mistakes as regards what it promises to deliver. Art projects are similar. They cannot afford to make mistakes as regards promises and expectations, they must anticipate.

Is this your main objection as regards institutional theatre? That it pays too little attention to issues of this kind?

Absolutely. The why is usually completely marginalised; the aesthetic moment, the how, is continually problematised, whereas the why is answered in the form of flowery repertoire politics. Otherwise, however, I think Drama, for instance, functions fantastically. It produces monumental dramatic texts and attracts large audiences. This is the culture of the protocol, and the state, its founder, can be perfectly happy. The audiences that attend Drama probably will not visit Negativa. In Špas teater, for example, a perfect parallel world has transpired. It indicates how much potential theatre harbours. Its audiences have not been stolen from any other theatre. When I first visited it, it was sheer pleasure. Not just the performance – the event itself, the audience! After a long time I felt the immense power of theatre again.

You argue that people go to theatres for a certain experience; and yet, you describe your project as a theatre of non-emotions. How come?

This is a different issue. Affect is always the effect of performing. In every instance, emotions are the basic perceptual space of theatre. What varies are the strategies of soliciting emotions. Some people choose emotions as the stuff of performing, and thus attempt to elicit the spectator’s compassion. In Negativa, we have chosen a different strategy. I do not want to see emotion on stage; I feel pleasure when I feel emotion arising within me…

Generally speaking, the critics always want to assert their superiority over performance.

It is the vocation of the critic to understand the impact of the performance and to evaluate it within a certain referential framework. The problems arise when the critic’s referential framework has nothing to do with the performance, or when it is too narrow, or unintelligible. This is when, willy-nilly, the reader thinks that the point of the exercise is nothing but a self-indulgent intellectual tirade. The critic who uses the critique to prove his superiority over the performance writes about and for himself. No one benefits from such a critique – neither the artist nor the spectator.

You have chosen your own path – transcending the logic of theatre production and aimed towards a final point, Via Nova 2009. What can you tell us about this?

The seven years of exploration in Via Negativa are geared towards shedding light on the rationale and the meaning of theatre, towards opening up as many strategies as possible regarding how to deploy this basic theatrical set up in which the spectator and the actor meet, and to think about what is expected from this situation nowadays. The exploration will be rounded off with the performance entitled Via Nova and the seven preceding projects are nothing but the material for the eighth project. I imagine the spectator receiving a DVD with all the material integrated in the performance. I hope to incorporate the mechanism of production into the performance itself. I have yet to see a performance that lays all its working material into my hands and, at the same time, displays its results. In short, these seven years are meant to generate a certain new logic of production.

What is this new logic of production based on?

Esentially, it is a corollary of our methodology, our working mode. What we do is, above all, a contemplative process with no rehearsals. The key methodological requirement of Negativa is for every performer to immerse himself in this process, structure his act and then perform it. The stage is used as a medium of testing, not as a space of improvisation or investigation. This is why we are able to circumvent a whole series of classical theatrical approaches, and we can use the rehearsals exclusively as a forum for testing the effects and as a space of intuition. Dance, for instance, entails the training of the body; Negativa is the training of thought processes. If possible, I insist on traditional rehearsals being totally replaced with thinking through ideas. Eventually, I wish to divorce theatre production from the logic of rehearsal, although this of course does not rule out some work on stage. We usually meet on stage twice a week; the entire duration of the preparations is seven months. The other important thing are workshops. The dynamics of work is totally different, I am trying to stick to the 3×3 principle (three days per month for three months). I hope other members of Negativa will join me in organising the workshops in future. Thereby, several teams could work on a project concurrently and we would meet at the end and structure the performance.

And what do you see as your role as a director in future?

The director must invest a lot in the strategy of the project. He is not the author, but rather the strategist. He must create suitable conditions for achieving the set goals. Perhaps one day I could transpose the creative process into a virtual dimension. I believe e-mail could facilitate the creation of performances with people all over the world. With the development of wireless video technologies, this is not impossible. The performer could record his act and send it to everyone on the project’s mailing list, and everyone could provide him with their observations, opinions and associations so that the performer could continue his work. I am convinced we could get great material by doing so. Only at the very end we would need to meet somewhere and switch over into the physical reality. I can see no reason why theatre could not function in this manner in future.

It seems that a lot of our projects start off quite well, but then get somewhat lost during the production.

This is predominantly a matter of ideational fitness, the problem of how to keep a certain idea alive. The director’s key task is to maintain his idea. Projects do not usually fail because of the performers or because of financial problems; the problem is the director, his inability to sustain his strategy, to achieve the desired effect. If, for instance, I make a false move, I must admit and rectify my mistake as soon as possible. I used to do the opposite; that is, I used to insist on mistaken suppositions, although I knew they were wrong, but I hoped they would yield results nevertheless. Nothing good ever turned out. Direction is basically a strategy of achieving something I know almost nothing about. I believe methodological discipline is crucial and I always insist on it. Only thus can I achieve a satisfactory result.

We are still fairly disorganised as regards planning in the field of art production. What is the story in your case?

If you choose to explore, you must have a plan, you must create managable working conditions and a precise referential framework, and you must insist on them. If you persist, you will achieve something in the end. In any case, planning in art is mandatory. Art is business like any other. Nobody, be it your colleagues or the producers, can work with you seriously if you don’t know what you are doing tomorrow. I know exactly what I am doing in March 2009, for example; I will start working on the final act of Via Negativa, the performance called Via Nova. Every performer who has ever worked on Negativa knows what to do then. This is why they must prepare their acts in such a manner that they will be able to perform them then and without too much trouble. After a finished project, everybody must record his act in the form of actions that describe his act with precision, and the act must be constructed in such a manner that it would function even if the performer were somebody else. If it did not function, it would mean that not everything had been thought through. This is what we tested with copies of performances in The Point of Departure: Anger. Interesting deferrals emerged, but the act always functioned. And I believe it will be the same in 2009 with Via Nova, even if not all performers are there.

Translated by Polona Petek.

Andreja Kopač is a journalist, dancer, and post-graduate student of Ljubljana Graduate School of Humanities (ISH).

Maska, Ljubljana, XX/92-93, summer 2005