Maska - Volume 38, Issue 213-214, 2023

Jaka Bombač introduces his thoughts on the performance From Particles (Dance Theatre Ljubljana, 2023) by Ana Cvelfat, Kaja Vajdetič and April Veselko with a reflection on the nature of speculation, which is also non-linear in time, and continues with an in-depth analysis of the action on stage, which escapes the specific speculative temporality.

The cabaret form, which was a popular form of performance practice in the early years of the last century, nowadays most often exists within the margins, but in the view of writer Metod Zupan, An Evening of Dance Solos (NDA Slovenija, 2022) by Dejan Srhoj relocates this form to the field of contemporary dance and explores the current trends in this genre of performance.

It is my one and a half year in this city. Quite naturally I met with people from different ways of life and backgrounds within this relatively short time span; I attended live concerts, festivals, film screenings, theatre and dance performances, public happenings etc. However, I think my perception is still unblemished in terms of prejudices toward the cultural scene in Ljubljana. In general, I think it is getting harder and harder to focus our attention on a single thing, but rather we get washed under unfiltered information from many directions, for the benefit of few. Being a multitasker in any occupation was a thing that has been practiced by less people then now. The roles were more precise for us to function within the modern society. Harnessing the attention has always been a part of human society and it is closely related with many kinds of economies, whether it is financial, affective, or political. In the meantime – as a recent additional actor – digital algorithms (which are owned by some elites and non-human corporate bodies) run and sustain a boring dystopia nowadays. Moreover, excessive use of media devices may be causing digital and chemical addictions and hormonal rushes to survive this condition.

Let me begin with a brief counter-memory about the first performance I saw of those Zala Dobovšek reviews in her monograph (I saw Izdajalec (The Traitor) a bit later on). It must’ve been in spring 2011 in Belgrade. I was on a student excursion. I haven’t the faintest memory how I chanced upon the performance Rođeni u YU (Born in YU) or where I got the tickets, since I spent most of my days hanging in bookstores, which later on turned out to have a significant influence on my graduation thesis and further studies. But I do remember Radovan Vujović and Branka Petrić, even though the cast included the likes of Mirjana Karanović and Predrag Ejdus,1 and a spectacular applause on an open stage, which I’ve never witnessed before (or since, except in Serbia). About 22 years old, I was dismayed by the outspokenness and emotional charge of the performance, an unforgettable experience that left me profoundly rattled. In theatre, it’s something that happens to me approximately every three years.

The present article is a kind of post-production of the project A Dancing Guide to the Catalogue of Comfort (2022), which processed the effects of different technologies on our cognitive apparatus. The initial and less obvious aspect of the performative material still calls for an additional word: how performative and somatic practices, or the performer’s intelligible body, can reveal the modes, ideologies and conceptualisations embedded in technology and hence inform us about both the dangers and the benefits of various technological acquisitions. How technology displaces human presence and presence in its action, on the one hand, and how at the same time human beings are invisibly present in its design.

Attention, as sustained thoughtful focus, differs from distraction solely in view of the deliberated object’s social value. Social risks and contradictions, typically regarded as a collective concern, have colonised privacy through processes of individualization and are nowadays considered exclusively from individual’s positions – attention aimed inwards as an outside distraction. Coincidentally, in this era of “the attention/distraction economy,” what we socially evaluate as distraction is extremely profitable for perpetuating the system and respective capital. Individual(‘s) guilt while serving the aforementioned purpose, reinforces the perception of individual responsibility and steers the(ir) focus towards strengthening personal discipline and continuously upgrading one’s biography. However, if disruption, which steers our thoughts towards the collective or outward, does exist, I’d call it art.

The following thoughts are a journey through examples from some of my practices and positions that I inhabit most often as a dramaturge, while looking around my ecosystem that might otherwise be called the local context of Zagreb’s independent performing arts scene. I want to share several tentative claims that stem from my recent efforts in dealing with working conditions in culture, while also trying to derive methods for devised performancemaking from them. I’d like to think of this journey as bearing resemblances with the Babushka-like experience of waking up from a dream to yet another dream.

This co-authored article discusses Asa Horvitz’s three-hours long performance A Dream that Belongs to No-one (2021) as a generative experience of disorientation. The performance takes place as the sun is setting, in a big wooden space with glass windows. The audience is given a booklet with fragments of text that describe experiences of overwhelming streams of images, and sits around the sides of the space. Through a dramaturgy of a sideways moving attention that occurs while the night falls, two entangled experiences of disorientation are proposed: a pause in the dark that allows attention to drift; and a sense of falling into darkness that evokes groundlessness and instability. While in disorientation, the audience is immersed in cycles of dream-images that they are invited to wake up to, and to summon these as a way to reorient themselves.

This paper follows the figure of the ultra-healthy queer masculine subject as a unit of value across online fitness instruction and amateur netporn – two rising vernacular, digital performance genres of the Covid-era. Such performances exploit the vulnerabilities of attention to commodify a disciplined mind as a means toward selling a future-oriented, hyper-athletic, disciplined body. With Covid-19 and HIV/AIDS hovering at the edges of the frame, this paper draws on the queer politics of embodiment and digital intimacies to address disciplinary questions surrounding Performance Studies and its precipitating interrogations into digital media.

The question of bipolarity in understanding theatre as the concept of live event in contrast to the concept of mediation is in the frame of the economy of attention turned to the question of post-digital dramaturgy and the direction of the spectators’ gaze. In the mentality of the society, trapped in a constant bombardment with information and impulses, we the theatre makers have to ask ourselves: with what kind of procedures in performing arts can we address that issue? How and if at all can we transform the logic of the infinite open tabs in our browsers and our brains into a theatre experience?

Since the advent of computation, we have witnessed a trend of adapting cultural production to our cognitive capacities in a sort of feedback loop through which cultural production is progressively optimised and increasingly responsive to our perceived needs. We are thus faced with a certain autonomy of cultural production that appears as an emergent and alien mechanism.

This short essay doesn’t mention ChatGPT at all. But through reading the performance (╯Åã□Åã)╯︵ ┻━┻ screamage it tries to consider the space the performance opens up: the space of the intersection between the virtual world created by technology and the real world permeated by the biological and physical specifics and limitations. Today, it seems necessary to thematize this intersection and to avoid the technophilic hype of the virtual, which erases the real, but also the technophobic panic and its “return” to nature.