PERFORATIONS FESTIVAL
DUBROVNIK & ZAGREB
24-30 SEPTEMBER 2009

Should anyone invite you to Dubrovnik , drop everything and go!  What an amazing city; it combines a long and troubled history with stunning architecture and the surrounding sea.  The complexity of such a combination is mind boggling.  Looking through a book on the 1990’s war with photos of massive destruction, it is hard to believe that, not 20 years later, thousands of tourists get off cruise ships each morning and fill the streets with shoppers.

Organised by Zvonomir Dobrovic, the founder of the ground-breaking festival, Queer Zagreb, this first Perforations Festival included theatre, dance and performance art from Bulgaria, Serbia, Slovenia and Macedonia, as well as Croatia.  The first three days took place in Dubrovnik, the next three in Zagreb.  There is a strong conceptual streak in contemporary visual art as well as performing arts in the region and the borders between the genres are quite fluid.  Siniša Labrović is one such conceptual artist whose work is often critical of today’s culture.  His work, Perpetuum Mobile, posits that the body is a self-sustainable unit.  This is illustrated, for 15 minutes, by the expulsion and ingestion of his own urine.  This was, hands down, the most radical of the performances we saw, an especially tough one for my jet-lagged American colleagues sitting in the front row.

Via Negativa is a Slovenian theatre company that, over the past several years, has been working on a series of performances investigating the seven deadly sins.  One piece incorporates the role of the dead rabbit from Joseph Beuys’ first exhibition, another involves a rhythmic game with knives in which the hands of the two performers are nicked, leaving bloody traces.

Branko Brezovec , a pioneer of Croatian theatre from the 1970’s, founded the theatre group Coccolemocco at the age of 15.  So So, a co-production with the French Compagnie des Loups, was performed in a penthouse hotel suite in Cavtat, south of Dubrovnik on the border of Montenegro.  Three actors, speaking in French and Croatian, engage in mysterious and portentous behaviours.  The full moon, setting into the sea, added an ineffable element of décor.

Dance artists included Dalija Aćin from Serbia whose work, Duets/Meet the Expectations involved individual audience members entering a performance area with the choreographer which was visible from the viewing area but acoustically isolated.  I was only able to stay long enough to watch two of these encounters, in both of which the pair conversed but never moved.  BADco., from Croatia, presented a work entitled The League of Time.  A “mad” scientist filled blackboards with endless equations while two women seemed to chase futurist possibilities, bounding in and out of the space, “flying” on a ladder etc.

The Slovenian choreographer Mala Kline showed a work in progress, The End, “a game piece” somewhat inspired by Artaud.  Trying on, trying out characters to see what we, the audience, wanted, she became more and more frantic but never quite found her answer.
Ivo Dimčev is a Bulgarian choreographer whose solo, Lili Handel, has toured widely.  In Dubrovnik, he presented that solo plus Paris, created for Christian Bakalov, a fellow Bulgarian dancer currently based in that city.  An extreme performance, Bakalov’s tasks involve both the painful (hopping on his knees) and the risky (slip-sliding on a painted – or bloody –floor).  A poignant portrait emerges of the anger and humiliation one experiences as an immigrant.  A happy substitution for a company that had to cancel was the young Macedonian choreographer Kire Miladinoski who presented One Way Inside, a short solo and a duet with Ana Josifovska.  His vocabulary Is very personal and I hope to see more of his work.

The schedule was intense, with performances starting from 7pm and going until after midnight.  But this gave us day time to see the islands off the coast of Dubrovnik and swim in the sea – a great bonus.  Heading back to the hotel at 1:30am one night also gave us the incredible opportunity to see the main street empty.  Five stars!