Natural limit

Modern theater is constantly trying to find new boundaries of what is permitted - to test the territory, including its own endurance. When, after the end of Alan Platel's VSPRS performance, shown at the Territory festival, the audience gave an ovation and the happy artists took endless bows, I suddenly realized that my limit had unexpectedly arrived. Yes, I was terribly bored, since I received the message about social and existential loneliness in the first minutes of the performance, and then the theme was only repeated in different ways, although I well understood that the author of the performance was incredibly skillful, inventive and intricate, that his concept modern and, probably, absolutely honest. But in addition to boredom, looking at the syncopated movements of the artists of the Belgian troupe, I also experienced physical discomfort. And then I thought that this is how - purely physically - my body resists disharmony.

Alan Platel, today one of the most fashionable and vibrant directors and choreographers in Europe, while preparing his performance VSPRS, carefully studied the behavior of patients in a psychiatric hospital and came to the conclusion that there are many similarities between hysteria and religious ecstasy. This is the basis of the performance, in which ten actors, sometimes separately, sometimes all together, twitch in incredible convulsions, demonstrating the borderline capabilities of the human body. Here a certain stump is squirming in wide trousers, from which either an arm or a leg appears, or both together; here a dancer with classical training, starting a ballet step, suddenly breaks it off in the most inappropriate place and falls, twisting in a monstrous manner. Someone minces, someone shouts out individual words, someone, in a fit of despair, stands on their head - without arms, just for a moment finding themselves standing on the top of their head. People hit the floor and each other. They hang on the walls. The limp torsos of their partners are dragged to the top of the mountain. A large girl with fused eyebrows recites “A Poem about a Lonely Turd” in Russian.

I confess that it doesn’t bother me at all that the musical basis of the performance is Monteverdi’s “Vespers of the Blessed Virgin,” arranged by composer Fabrizio Cassol in such a way as to sound like a strangled, intermittent cry. Poems about poop, collective masturbation, dropped pants and the movements of mentally ill people imitated to the point of absolute authenticity are not embarrassing. The desire of modern directors to separate harmony like a corpse and never try to put it back together doesn’t bother me either, and I also don’t believe in the direct influence of art on the morals of society. But when I watch for two hours how people wriggle on stage, albeit very technically, with whom the master worked so well that he did not leave them a single natural, free and clear movement, where every gesture and every sound turns out to be only an illustration the insane melancholy of a destroyed person, who is cramped and uncomfortable in his body, here my natural limit comes.

Because art can talk about anything and by any means, but only when it remains above the content of its statement. Roughly speaking, while the artist himself seems to be looking at the earth from the sky. When, despite suffering and despair, he resorts to the language of art to console or console. But when he is sure that there is no meaning in this life at all, totally, that even a creative act does not give even a short-term illusion, and the artist is only required to state this state, and the more accurately he conveys it, the better - then, in my opinion , it’s better not to take on this matter at all. Because this is not true, as I suddenly became convinced of at Platel’s performance, realizing that what resists him is not my consciousness, which knows how to perfectly adapt to any intellectual somersaults, but precisely the body, so intelligently and harmoniously designed, able to move, warm itself with its own blood, transmit signals from nerves to muscles, become infected with someone else’s emotion and suffer not only from physical, but also from emotional effects.

Alena Solntseva