Right to torture

Human writes by William Forsyth was shown at the Tanz im August festival

The installation-performance Human Writes by world-famous choreographer William Forsyth and Columbia University professor Kendall Thomas is not a new work. In 2005, it was shown in Zurich, then at Forsyth's experimental site - the Frankfurt Depot, then in Dresden Hellerau, on the choreographer's second official stage, and also in Brussels and Istanbul. Now the performance for 42 participants (15 people from Forsyth’s troupe, most from Sasha Waltz’s company, some civilians) and a thousand people launched directly into the performance of the audience, took place in Berlin. On the Radialsystem V platform, associated with all the latest. Why now is clear. The international festival Tanz im August, with its main theme of “human rights,” needed a powerful, if possible provocative, climax. Indeed, the real stories of slave housewives from third world countries in the Deserve project, or the autobiographical notes of a burqa-clad dancer in the play Manta against the backdrop of Forsythe's grand experiment are nothing more than modest remarks on the topic of the day.

Forsyth and the legal scholar Thomas approached the issue of infringement of physical freedoms globally and illustrated it literally. The scale of the undertaking is terrifying almost immediately, as soon as you cross the threshold of the hall, in which something electronic is grinding and whining, industrial lamps are hanging from the high ceiling, and performers are writhing on five dozen zinc tables, trying to depict on the white canvases covering the tables the phrases adopted in 1948 "Universal Declaration of Human Rights". “No one should be kept in slavery” - in German, about the right to protection - in Russian and other texts in English, French, Japanese barely appear on the canvas. They need to be drawn - this is the task - in an “indirect way”. In other words, simply picking up a pencil and writing is strictly prohibited. Therefore, some writers have their eyes closed, others feel for the canvas, turning their backs to the table, and others try to fix a point on the canvas at the moment when the table placed on its edge falls on them. Write with your toes, placing the charcoal on your nose or forehead. They write lying down, wriggling like a worm, holding a coal behind their back. They throw pencils at the table from about two meters away. They don’t hit, the coal crumbles, hitting the floor, and after half an hour not only the artists, but also the spectators look like miners dodging rock flying from all sides.

It all looks pretty creepy. It was like being in an underground workshop where people with disabilities tirelessly express themselves. Samples of creativity are hung right there on the walls - black blots, smeared letters, traces of sweat and struggle with text, body and unyielding pencil. Such graffiti can be imagined on the walls of a prison, in hospitals for the mentally ill - it’s too gloomy. As an example, on the wall at the entrance there are posters with articles of the “Universal Declaration of Rights”. Many people stop and read them as if for the first time.

The audience has its own function. In front of the entrance there is an instruction for them, in which they are asked to be active (but not immediately) and help the artists. In the second half of the performance, the audience really diligently joins in the process - they direct, for example, the “blind” (“to the left - now straight - a little down, stop”) or do the work for them, watching, for example, the movement of the artist’s eyes, indicating which direction to move the pencil. An elderly lady, who had been watching for a long time as a young man hovering over the table on one hand and trying in vain to reach a distant letter, resolutely offered up her back. The witnesses gasped, but the lady, having supported the weight of the artist, stood up with a beaming smile from Timurov.

Forsyth himself, known to us in Russia as a director of brilliant high-speed ballets, but not as a coal-stained performer, worked tirelessly in one of the sections of the hall. I put a pencil on the table, placed my heel on it like a heel - the pencil bounced off, the line did not work out. Forsythe slobbered on the resulting mark with his finger and militantly smeared the resulting dirt on the table and his own forehead. He looked very concentrated. A natural organizer of space, Forsyth stood out. Half an hour later he had already put together a small workshop around himself, where he rather gave a master class. He directed, directed and skillfully directed the audience, sparing no time for explanations. The task was to draw letters on a canvas placed on its side, which he himself showed while moving between the tables - of course, in a special way: he could only walk with his back and in certain directions. If the subjects hovered over the tabletop for a long time, Forsyth smiled like an all-understanding patient doctor, let them go and immediately recruited others.

“Would you like to draw?” - Looking straight into the clear eyes of the genius, I suddenly honestly said “nope.” It’s not that she has firmly decided to exercise her right “not to participate.” Rather, taken by surprise, she trusted the triggered instinct of self-preservation (how can you explain to Forsythe himself that the former Soviets have an idiosyncrasy for any kind of collective action, that some do not even stand up for the national anthem out of a sense of protest?). "No?" - asked the greatest, and a slight surprise flashed in his eyes.

Meanwhile, the action was moving towards a climax - the hall was roaring. The tables moved, piled one on top of the other, formed fences, courtyards, wells, tall platforms, which, in combination with the ropes with which the performers wrapped themselves and each other, evoked associations with platforms for execution. The space looked more and more like a torture chamber: the audience, who had previously generously come to the aid of the disabled, now themselves found themselves in the position of people with disabilities. However, willingly. Two girls were chasing a spectator who had a pencil in her hands, but she absolutely failed to touch the surface of the table. The table was literally knocked out from under her hands by the performers pulling it on ropes.

It’s clear that it’s like words about rights written down on paper - they exist, but who will give them to you. The game turns into manipulation, cooperation into exploitation, democracy into the tyranny of collective control. Everything is like in life. What is not clear is that the audience, politically correct to the point of self-sacrifice, voluntarily changing roles with the actors, easily accepting any rules of the game, knows where to stop? Or is their trust in the genius so boundless that the brakes don’t work? Do they, for example, naturally reject “pretend” crippled people who, for the sake of the global metaphor of “unfreedom,” imitate the bodily torments of those who are truly disadvantaged? Or does the feeling of protest not arise simply because such a reaction is not written into the rules of the game? But then, it turns out, we can be forced to play by any rules, having first written an appropriate declaration on how to move in a cage and provided it with the most intricate instructions possible on how to defend freedoms, because if you don’t fight for them, it’s as if they don’t exist ?

It actually turns out like this. But it is up to Professor Thomas to think about these topics.

Olga GERDT, Berlin