Can love exist without trauma?

ROK VEVAR, Večer Maribor, 23 November 2007

Via Negativa: Four Deaths, Not Like Me

This weekend the Glej Theatre staged the premiere of Not Like Me, an outcome of this summer’s collaboration between Via Negativa and the International Festival of the New Theater Zadar snova. A good month and a half ago, however, Ljubljana hosted Four Deaths, an established production from the Via Negativa project series (Katarina Stegnar presenting and deconstructing Pina Bausch, Gregor Zorc in the role of the English director and performance artist Tim Etchells, Barbara Kukovec as a Spanish performer Lar Ribot, and Petra Zanki as the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović), behind which lies the distinctive vision of its director Bojan Jablanovec.

One of the principal features of both productions – what seems to be becoming an increasingly explicit structural feature of Via Negativa productions – is the way the role of the performer is constructed. In the last two productions of Via Negativa and Bojan Jablanovec, the performer is first and foremost a spectator of his or her own performance: a spectator of various forms, contents and genres of contemporary performing arts, as well as, inevitably, a spectator of the world. As such the performers bring onto the stage their intertextual and intersubjective positions: they are fundamentally determined first by their career as spectators and only then by their acting or performing (intertextual) roles. The spectator is forever in between, in the liminal space between the auditorium and the stage, the subject and the object or vice versa, between their own vantage point and the world (intersubjectivity). Jablanovec, however, and his performers with whom he is – a point he emphasizes – in a co-authorial position, have managed to relocate in these last two productions the boundaries of theatrical or performing space: creators of performance as persons who are foremost spectators introduce into the production some kind of a meta-theatrical, meta-artistic narrative (a narrative telling us about the theatre, performing and contemporary arts), but at the same time, as “voyeurs” of everyday life they themselves watch and experience reality as theatre, as multiple forms of performance. And it is through them that we are interpolated as viewers: in the same way that performers are spectators so are we as spectators in some way also actors and performers.

The stage production Four Deaths – enacting “envy” as one of the seven deadly sins – is a narrative about the spectator and his desire, about striving “to see beyond”, while positing what is essentially the irresolvable question of intersubjectivity: what has the other got (e.g. Pina Bausch) which I constitutively lack? And as I try to fill this mystery with some content, to give it a name, a definition, a characterization, I destroy precisely what the mystery may have been, since I have named it (i.e. “I love you, but since what is inexplicable in you I love more than you yourself, I maim you”). It is all about the process of reflection, symbolization, of naming – which inevitably means the death of the ineffable, the truth, the Real, the mystery. If in Four Deaths the performer’s identity inflicts death upon the other by filling its lack through the inclusion of the other (Pina Bausch, Tim Etchells, La Ribot and Marina Abramović) into the speech-act, in Not Like Me identity is emphatically constituted through death as the exclusion of the other. In Not Like Me, which is a kind of series of stereotypical love gestures, the field of performance is superimposed directly onto the world: at the end, as a love duo, the Croatian performer (Boris Kadin) and the Serbian performer (Kristian Al Droubi) play a game with knives (Marina Abramović). This way they comment and parody the entry into history: of Yugoslav wars and contemporary arts, begging the question whether the battle to enter history is not always connected with blood and war, with a struggle for supremacy. Be it in the field of politics or performing arts, the question that arises is the following: is not love, so as to enter some intimate history, always directly proportional to the inflicted wounds or wounds which – metaphorically speaking – show up on the skin of their own accord when we are not prepared to inflict them ourselves? Does love exist without trauma, without pain? It all depends on our – Perspective on things.