After Mandala Performance Festival

January 15th, 2010

This year’s edition of the festival was special for a couple of reasons; firstly – that was a fifth anniversary of the event, secondly – it was planned as a festival of premieres. Among others: Harakiri Farmers’s Beat Hotel, Sylwia Hanff’s Dromenon and Simone de Beauvoir by Niezależna Manufaktura Taneczna [Independent Dance Manufacture]. The so-called ‘genuine’ performances, because of their transitory form, retained one-off character and uniqueness.

Briefly speaking, the program was satisfying and the organisers often stuck to their previous choices. Artists such as Angelika Fojtuch, Johannes Deimling, Dominika Knapik and Sylwia Hanff have already taken part in Mandala. The organizers have been dealing with performance art and its popularity for many years, presenting its various embodiments. The performance art encompasses different areas, mainly of visual arts, dance and even social sciences. Marvin Carlson, an American theoretician of performance, emphasizes the role of the adjective standing before the term as it defines the context and subject. The colloquial word ‘genuine’ performance usually means a singular action whose structure is open and develops during encounter with the audience. The most common subject of performance is body in different aspects and the performer’s biography.

In this year’s festival program it was easy to spot a division into dance section and performance art section. Hajime Fujita, the only exception, both a perfomer and a dancer, who finely joined the specificity of the two art forms, especially in his second show – street performance.

It began before the festival audience managed to get to Solny Square; Hajime Fujita decided to resist the everyday haste and caused a traffic jam at Kielbasnicza street by jumping on window sills, dancing in the middle of the street, disappeared in dead ends. He thus became familiar with the space of this part of Wroclaw. The interactions with the fast driving cars which the performer chased, tried to stop or danced after they passed – were the most interesting. The drivers looked at him stunned and disoriented. The artits’ appearance on the street led to confusion and disorganisation of everyday urban rituals. The artist did not manage to immerse in the city life, its rhythm. His bare feet, stylised movement aroused interest, the festival audience and passerby followed the dancing artist, wondering how he would use a gate, a bicycle standing nearby or a post; all the objects attracted the man who never stopped dacning and – like a child- tried to find an inventive and seemingly ‘inproper’ way of using them.

In the performance presented the day before Hajime Fujita [see photo] also used his experience related to urban space, perceived as hostile and unfriendly to man. The artist referred to what he had physically undergone during the time of his homelessness in London. The performance began very naturastically as Fujita urinated into a plastic container, then took clothes out of a bag he brought with him and put them on his shivering body. Thanks to quite radical means, he suggestively captured the situation of a homeless person. The smell of urine in the basement of Galeria Miejska reminded of railway subways, its homeless people wearing layers of dirty clothes. Fujita acted out a tramp but sharing space with evoked neither pity nor disgust. Only his first action could have been an exception, since quoted straight from the street where intimacy and sense of shame are scarce. His later behaviour was quite acceptable, nothing so extreme happened. Fujita convincingly turned his experience into theatrical action, even more intense and distinct as not just an imagary representation, variation on being homeless, but justified by his own life story. At the end of the performance the artist unrolls toilet paper with writing on it, a sort of ‘letter’ to homeless Tom with whom he happened to share a bench one night. He apologises in simple words. His sense of guilt merges with naive hope and a promise of his return. The authenticity of the story, of the narrative which Fujita creates from getures, actions intermingled with short verbal comments – simply moves.

Angelica Fojtuch’s work also gave interesting results. She stands in front of the audience, looks at her mobile phone, changes its settings, silence descends in Galeria and everybody is waiting as it seems that the performace has already begun. But absolutely nothing happens. Fojtuch is standing, people are looking and getting impatient. Somebody’s phone rings. The artist is taking up the challenge of expectations, attention discouregement, and nervousness of the audience. They cannot bear such idleness – they have come to see the performance so the artist has to be forced to act. Somebody passes her a chair, then a newspaper and water in a cup – she accepts them and still does not react else than by saing ‘thank you’. One can sense disapproval in the air, someone walks out, someone comments aloud the situation. Fujita joins in, he comes onto ‘stage and looks at Fojtuch, then other people follow him. Some sort of ‘produt’ must be created since peop have come not to contemplate silence, Cage-like jokes do not appeal to the audience so they take over. The product – the performance – has to emerge, regardless of Fojtuch wainting it or not. The audience will not let her be inactive. They do not know that this is exactly what the performance is about – its aim is to activate the spectators. The man who has already passed a chair, water and newspaper would tease her again. The situation, seemingly boring starts to enliven, take its own course. At first a man sits in front of Fojtuch, Fujita tries to give her a massage but then resigns and his attention is turned to the young seated man with whom we will later fight for shoes. An older man intervenes by pouring water over them, then starts to massage the performer’s feet, taking her shoes – this time without any fight. Another woman joins in who stands behind Fojtuch and puts her hands on her shoulders in a maternal gesture, as though giving her full acceptance and support. Maybe that is the only proper attitude. Actions undertaken by men irritate me for many reasons, firstly because the woman’s passivity leds the their silly overexcitability, They animate Fojtuch, impose on her their expectations that the performance has to be ‘about’ something and – surprisingly – it becomes such, concerned with violence, social norms which we cannot abandon, beliefs that in perforamnce art just like in theatre some sort of technique has to be shown. It may also be about human nature. Fojtuch’s passivity puts her in a position of a victim which is then exploited by the audience or – to be precise – its self-aapointed leaders. I forgot to mention that the performer has a deeply sad and desperate facial expression, looking for the audience’s understanding – it all makes her even more mobbed. Although lack of action in art is not a novelty since Cage or Beckett, choosing such form for the performance proves a sensible yet controversial choice. There are more advantages: the lack of action becomes an opportunity to negotiate with the spectator and an attempt to hold the spectator responsible for the performance. That was a masterpiece, even though Fojtuch has not created any artefact for the next generations.

Completely different emotions accompanied the action of Johannes Deimling who – like Fojtuch – became a victim for a moment, torturing his body by hitting his head and smashing an apple, followed by an onion (which he then rubbed on his eyes) on it. When he took off his heavy shoes and put against his head, one could feel the dread among the audience who feared for the artist’s safety and crossing the border of pain. Luckily we have not witnessed anything like that. Squeezing his head with the shoes was last extreme. Pain and suffering not just acted out but really experienced still resonated with the spectators. Deimling frightened the audience with his performance but when he reached the culmination point he released the tension by using the simplest, children-like means. The artist painted sun on the wall and sprinkled the audience with flower petals. Katharsis happened.

Dance at Mandala

Only solo performances represented the Polish dance scene which – as Witold Mrozek recently written diagnosing the artists’ situation – has become dominated by ‘solo generation’. The variety of solo shows ranged from minimalistic etudes, focused on movement (Anita Wach, Basia Bujakowska) to almost full-length performances (Janusz Orlik, Sylwa Hanff), taking into consideration their duration, volume of techniqal preparations and amout of props. Due to a coincidence, Anita Wach and Janusz Orlik – as in the first edition of Solo Project – showed their works together. Also Arkadi Zaides arrived after completing GAGA workshop in Stary Browar to present his Solo Siento. Like Wach, he concentrated mainly on the movement, intensified presence of body. He shifted from one form to another, making the shape of his body invisible under the the weird costume which was especially easy to spot when observing his dancing shadow on the white screen. The etude calmed the spectator, the artist managed to create a specific atmosphere similar to the one experienced on poetry readings. His movement and body as well the style of figure activated the audience’s perception in a very sensual way, focused more on touch than sight. The result of such sensual language was additionally emphasized by the projection. We watch the dancer’s body without his costume. At first the camera explores it recumbent in peace, then locates hollows near his back and convexities of his buttocks. Following the camera eye one can almost sense the texture of skin, its softness and muscle tension. The film is shot in warm colours. The dancer’s body looks like deprived of subjectivity, as if it has become a separate being. It moves, then rises breaking the law of gravity, or flows. The poetical arrangements of the body are inconsistent with human physicality and thus the sense of its autonomy intensifies. The body experiences only the space and its existence in the world. Maybe it is only the video camera that moves, filming from different angles. The naked body of the man was framed to show as few anatomical details as possible, to avoid embarrassment – its beauty absorbs even though it does not try to be attractive, its sexuality has been repressed. One looks at his nudity so naturally as if watching a child. Solo Siento could be read as a poetical and sensual statement.

Janusz Orlik’s [see photo] performance aroused the greatest excitement. Its apparent aim was to tease and tempt the spectator. Apparent as the artist uses reconigazble conventions of winning the audience, known from theatre and film for years, only as a subversive way of stating the truth about an actor and his real stage life. Even though the ‘truth’ is quite bitter, the very showcase of theatrical means entertains. Orlik not only seduces and amuses the audience but also leads it by the nose when in the middle of performance reveals its ending while the spectators believe it will actually finish like that. Orlik constantly plays out an actor-showman who has to do everything to keep audiences attention and sympathy. Huge applause definitely pleases him yet such is his (fake) role. The audience claps, Orlik plays the fool, but this is only a joke, in a moment the dancer will present a choreography which is his usual means of communication, deprived of excess emphasis and quoted conventions.

Three more dancers have not been mentioned yet – the French trio: Slawek Bendrat, Dominik Krawiecki and Yoshiko Kinoshita. At first they showed a duet, then a dance variation on Sarah Kane’s plays. The duet presented in Galeria is acceptable but has no features of a ‘genuine’ performance. Bendrat and Kinoshita easily take up the subject of male-female relationships. In the first scene, they swap roles, the man is wearing a thin satin petticoat, the woman is dressed up in a sort of suit but they both behave according to the stereotypes regarding gender. The man arranges situations, is active, the woman only responds to his movement. They run onto the stage and kissing each other try to find a balance and centre of gravity, do not stop to caress and undress – there is finesse and passions in their movement, they appeal to the audience. The next part of the performance gets worse, the tension vanishes, a banal lovestory (with possible infidelity) begins. The lovers keep a thread in their mouths when suddenly one of the endings is given to a woman from the audience who – like the female dancer – will have to respond: movement to movements, petting to petting. Kinoshita starts a monologue in Japanese, as is looking for an explanation or adjuring her lover – the only thing we can undesrdand is the reccuring phrase ‘I love you’. She jumps and leans on her partner’s body but he does not react. Despite tragic complications, the lovers would reconcile and walk out just as they walked in – together.

One could wonder what will happen with the festival from Wroclaw which gathers performers, dancers and musicians in Galeria Miejska and Kalambur Theatre. Which direction will it take? The fifth anniversary is a good occasion to make amendments or modifications. One would definitely be useful: focus on specificity. In the first editions of the festival we could have felt the atmosphere of interdisciplinary artistic agreement. Among ‘genuine’ performers were the classics but also independent dancers, who practised various forms of contemporary dance, there was even room for butoh. A couple of mistakes also happened, for example the performance of Niezalezna Manufaktura Taneczna [Independent Dance Manufacture] who is quite good in its category – amateur youth theatre company – but has nothing in common with performance art. In the performance Simone de Beauvoir three types of scenes occurred: group scences of Staron’s pupils dressed in costumes stylized for previous epoch; Ewa Staron’s emotional, theatre & dance solos; and a voiceover reading fragments from the French philosopher’s writings, having the empty stage lit to create a nice atmoshpere. However, the comment made on stage was far from the author’s views, one could have had an impression that the only excuse to use the biography of famous feminist was actually a trifle – the tile of her book The Second Sex. The result – one big misunderstanding. When the dancers, sitting on stage in a diagonal line, coquettishly dangle their legs while the soundtrack lyrics state: ‘Sexappeal, our feminine weapon… sexappeal, that’s what makes you excited!’ Indeed, they burst with eroticism; the stylization for the 1980’s pop stars is evident.There is no criticism in those fragments, the young girls endear themselves to the audience and find pleasure in it. The ‘weaker sex’ becomes an advantage, erotism – a steer in human relationships; such statement the performance seems to make. The arrangements are all based on the same pattern, the dancers always stand in diagonal line and the group scenes are obligatory interrupted by solos.

What are the prospects for Mandala in following years? Up till now the festival organizers tried to find a common denominator of many forms related to performance art – we can only hope they will stick to this concept.

Filed under: Reviews

Tags: Adam Kamiński, Anna Królica, Dominika Knapik, Harakiri Farmers, Janusz Orlik, Mandala, NMT, Sylwia Hanff, Wojtek Klimczyk, Wrocław