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Library of Letters
Primoľ Jesenko, Dialogi 2013The Muzeum Theatre's Handwriting in Italics - Underscoring the Present Moment through Letters and Art History
Artists' correspondence contains something ungraspable to today's standpoint. Letters of Slovenian Literary Authors on Literature, a compendium of correspondence among the Slovenian literary authors (2008), does not simply capture into universal phrases the direct informative fragments, but an entire space, time period and a very specific intelligence of emotion and verbalisation of thought, feeling, of oneself. The comprehensive stack of letters written by Lojze Filipič or Herbert Grün, to mention but two fundamental Slovenian dramaturgs after WW2, or by Balbina Baranovič from her 1965 study year in the USA, moves us with a special touch of grace and with the broad range of language registers not entirely self-evident, if not unreachable, to an aesthetic of our period. Today's mentality finds a point break in the example of Taras Kermauner, who within the framework of his lifetime project dubbed Reconstruction and Reinterpretation of Slovenian Drama dedicated several books to his correspondence with compatible artists. Nowadays, a written letter is a relic of the past - at the time of internet, the reproduced corpuses of correspondence bearing witness to the ideas, concepts, feelings or doubts are oozing into an abstract distance. At the time of browsing the web as one would have a library at hand, written correspondence is different, it seems simultaneously flattened and branched out, bearing several voices and accelerated reactions. Most of all, it is a field game of erasing the boundaries between the public and the private.
Library of Letters is a theatre performance, the text of which is made up of a variety of subtexts. In the first part, the music scores adopt the tempo of the questions posed by the Inquisition, which is an embodiment of an unscrupulous system without the least bit of self-consciousness, featuring a refined theatre language full of self-esteem. The word sequence articulately, as well as strictly sets the interrogated artist into the position of an individual facing the system, who at the given historical moment simply remains unheard, his voice muted by the authorities. Thus, the perspective of the Library of Letters, engraved by time into an individual with a broader insight into the state of things, is bitter. The Renaissance period: the voice of Janez Starina doubtlessly sets us into a time when battles were fought simultaneously with the development of humanistic thought for local interests and universal power. In the notes of the Venice Inquisition from 16th century, the target becomes art. The artist with his bold profane inserts into his painting supposedly violated the accepted pattern of Christian iconography.
It is word that is set into the forefront of the performance, spoken as well as written word, a memory seeking the source and the origin transcending centuries. It gets closer to our time through the cosmopolitan autobiographical speech of Nina Berberova. Using several intermezzos, it transforms the performance into a metaphoric and symbolically charged sombre experience, a solitary one, into a co-existence with a fallen (off) glass chandelier. Even the chandelier looks the same in the rerun of the performance, although it is not the exact same one. »Italics are mine«: theatre discourse enables restoration, repetition, transformation and opening up.
The chair sat on by the theatre director-actor trying to answer questions in a composed manner, is falling apart. It is restored in the next rerun. In the performance, there is no attraction of the visual which could conjure up a sensational event for the viewer, as was done by the gigantic painting by the Venetian Paolo Veronese entitled Marriage at Cana. The directing is based on a unique form of minimalism and conceptual visual communication (scenography by Petra Veber). The performance leaves an open space into which it draws the spoken word. Dürer's dream of the apocalypse, Leonard's old age notes on storms and catastrophes. As if one is observing a sky blue watercolour painting describing a dream, or perhaps whirlwinds drawn in red crayon. And again the symbols, the cloud, the room, the textual alleys and gardens.
At this point, the Library of Letters perceives a direction into which space and time are oozing perpetually, a direction drawn and immediately erased, yet flowing onwards. In this sense, the performance is an exact reflection of space-time in which the profundity of perception and understanding is founded on the written word, still engraved and chiselled in, in the dialogue with the image "written out" in the form of thought. Library of Letters is steadfast and radically honest. And despite the circumstances, the performance cannot but be even more truthful. It does not call attention upon itself, but inhabits a scene found by chance, an unknown warehouse. A stroll across the internet always takes into account the accidental element of unpredictability and thus improvisational coincidence. The theatre is a world wide web, too.
It seems that the present time is neither calibrated as the Renaissance nor does it face the coordinates of humanism. With a precise intuitive break-through into the very heart of history (art), we experience an unusual subversion, present in all of Muzeum's projects in the field of theatre perception, from the performances Cricket in the Fist, Lo Scrittore, through Emilia, Paracelsus and Frankenstein, Moliere, Rodin II to the authorial interpretations of texts by Racine, Shakespeare, Chekhov and Harms.
Library of Letters is abstracting the intimacy, meanwhile offering us a social voice in the form of an answer clear of ludisms and encoded messages, a decisive and very recognisable vote in favour of art. It is here, in the large empty accidentally found space with numerous windows, with the passing train causing draught and whistling loudly. It does not simply go home. Thus, the Library of Letters represents a new episode in the history of Barbara Novakovič's Muzeum, and at the same time, an opportunity to set up a different and very special perception of theatre.
European Union National Institutes for Culture
Theatre festival "Magic of the Language" - Interview about "Library of Letters: Walk through the letters"
