To touch, see, perceive, this is the strength of art, which looks at the things outside with wonder. Art is continuous astonishment.

-Viktor Shklovsky

 

I would like to stage Uncle Vanya in the crumbling house in Krivina – a village near the Danube – where my father spent his childhood and I spent the summers of my childhood. I would like the house to be un-crumbled, to undo the damage done by an earthquake, time, distance and neglect, and to place the performance and the audience in that house. Krivina is where I learned about land, and – it is near two rivers – about water. My father used to go fishing in the river, and I with him. The surrounding fields were covered in wheat, sunflowers, watermelons, corn, strawberries. The Danube and Yantra were full of fish. It was quiet and everyone knew everyone and the streets were not paved over. It sounds like another time – and it was. I think Krivina, without knowing it, is where I really learned about play, imagination, and therefore, about theatre.

In Krivina summers we – a crowd of children – used to play strajari i apashi, which loosely translates as “cops and robbers.” We split into teams. The strajari (cops) gave the apashi time to get away, the apashi ran and the strajari chased, and when caught there were rhymes and rituals, then more chasing. We ran around the whole village – or at least it felt like that – we ran in neighbouring streets. We ran barefoot. We climbed fences. We picked fruit off trees. The adventure was total and euphoric. It was unbounded joy. We were allowed complete freedom into the evening. And then, in the evening, the only sounds you could hear were donkeys, occasional dogs barking, a cart going home, people’s voices. The air was sweet and quiet. Nature surrounded all.

Seeing the world through the eyes of the game, being at once in the imaginary world and in the real world with a new sense of wonder and noticing, alive and excited: that is what I long for in theatre. This awakened seeing, in relation, is reminiscent of the moment in Martin Buber’s I-Thou, when he writes about the possibility of really seeing a tree: “That living wholeness […] of the tree […] discloses itself to the glance of one who says Thou […] something lights up and approaches us from the course of being” (Buber 2013: 89).

Johan Huizinga writes about play being central to culture, being of the real world and make believe at the same time, being fun yet deeply serious (Huizinga 1955). The playing in Krivina was like that: the game spilled into the surroundings, and at the same time invoked the surroundings into the game: yards, fences, dusty streets, fruit trees, outside toilets (a new slipper fell into one once) – playing the game was entering more intensely, somehow, into the real world. Playing called the real world into our game and our game made the real world come to life fully, made it more itself, real and magical, vivid, everything mattered. Performing there would be like playing strajari i apashi – the world of the play immersed in the real surroundings. Shklovsky wrote: “Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony” (Shklovsky 1965:12). He asked: “what is art’s great achievement? Life. A life that can be seen, felt, lived tangibly” (Vitale 2013: 53). Can performance be this? Can it awaken me to sense in a way that matters? Not to close off from the world to enter the performance (as performer or spectator), but to enter the world more vividly, through the play? A performance that is a heightened experience, a game, within the real world?

In The Concept of Body as the Nature We Ourselves Are, Gernot Böhme writes about moments in which we are fully in life, in the body, as moments of what he calls “joyous emphasis”:

Emphasis is joyous participation in what happens of its own accord. One example is a child racing off along the beach…There are life performances that are experienced with a tendency toward intensification…Emphasis is therefore a way in which we ourselves are nature, on occasions when being-nature is experienced not as a burden but as a joy. (Bohme 2010: 236 emphasis mine)

This, I think, is akin to play, immersed in the ordinary, but with a heightened joy. As Huizinga writes, “the fun of playing, resists all analysis, all logical interpretation” (Huizinga 1955: 3). And certainly, it is akin to the experience of theatre.

I want to feel the play in that place: a lived, three-dimensional artistic event that is at once imaginary (the events of the play) and real (the place for performers and audience alike). As Tadeusz Kantor wrote, theatre that “(includes) r e a l i t y o f f i c t i o n in the r e a l i t y of life” (Kantor 1993: 36).

I want to stage Uncle Vanya in Krivina because that’s where it all started for me, the connection to land. Chekhov’s play is about trees, land, happiness, time, and wasting time. In it he suggests the anxiety of extinction, of things passing irretrievably. It is also a play about change, taking responsibility for change. To me the play says: “If change is needed, do something. Change something.” I also want to stage it there to remember that land and water are precious, but we live in a way that seems to forget this. In  Krivina the seasons and the food from the land were present in a felt relationship, close, proximal. We walked from the river, rode donkey carts, picked fruit with our hands, crushed grapes with our feet to make wine. There was little plastic. In the evening songs were sung. We washed in tubs, in water warmed in the sun. The soil was fertile and the mulberries black, sweet and huge. But most people left. It is now a village of few, mostly old, people. To perform there will be to “make whole what has been smashed” (Benjamin 1968), to perform in both the past and the present, and to connect art and land.

We have performed it now in Australia in four places (Avoca, Eganstown, Steiglitz, Bundanon). I want to now stage it in the crumbling house in Krivina to say – come to this beautiful place that is not really here anymore. Ways of life, land, water can be lost. And that has implications for the choices we make for the future.

Theatre that is part of place, but also traverses place and time, to invite people into an experience that is more fully alive.

The streets were dusty and all sounds carried in the surrounding quiet.

 

REFERENCES

Alexandra Berlina. Shklovsky: A Reader. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016..

Gernot Böhme, “The Concept of Body as the Nature We Ourselves Are.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 24, No. 3 (2010): 224-238.

Martin Buber. I and Thou. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

Anton Chekhov. Chekhov: Five Plays. Translated by Ronald Hingley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Anton Chekhov. Sobranie Sochineniy (Collected Works). https://az.lib.ru

Johan Huizinga. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955.

Tadeusz Kantor. A Journey Through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos, 1944-1990. Edited and Translated by Michal Kobialka, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Bagryana Popov. “The Uncle Vanya Project: Performance, Landscape, Time” in Art, EcoJustice, and Education: Intersecting Theories and Practices. Edited by Raisa Foster, Jussi Mäkelä, and Rebecca A. Martusewicz. New York/London: Routledge, 2018.

Viktor Shklovsky & Serena Vitale. Shklovsky: Witness to an Era. Translated by Jamie Richards. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Viktor Shklovsky. “Art as Technique” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Edited and Translated by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Omaha, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1965..3-24.

Walter Benjamin. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations:Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.