Desnica: Games of Spring and Death

“What dangers to what is most essential and greatest in a work of poetry lie hidden in so-called ‘stage realisation’, and to what extent can it empty out, distort and devalue a great text! And from this necessarily arises the thought not of identity or some kind of mutual integration, but quite the opposite: of the pure antithesis between what is called the ‘stage’, a ‘stage work’, ‘stage art’, and what is called ‘a poetic work in dramatic form’, or simply: poetry. Seen in this light, theatre sometimes appears to us as the art of turning true values into false ones. (...) For goodness’ sake, what can theatre possibly add to Aeschylus or Sophocles? What can a performance give us beyond the reading of their texts? And what else, what better thing can a theatre-maker do, if he is truly intelligent and truly an artist, than to let Aeschylus and Sophocles speak, interfering with them as little as possible...”

These are the reflections of Ivan Galeb’s interlocutor in Chapter 46 of the novel.

This passage hung over me like a suspicion in a dialogue with myself. It prompted me to uncover the intuitive motives behind staging a work such as this — an almost unstageable one — and to seek justification for cutting a carefully, almost milligram by milligram weighed and structured novel-essay down to a handful of passages and, in doing so, bringing it into the realm of a “poetic work in dramatic form”.

In that dialogue, I escaped my own pretentiousness like this: I admitted to myself that I was being pretentious, thereby forgiving myself for half of it; and in the other half I realised that my identification with The Springs is deeply rooted in my own being, and that this path of play and reflection upon intimate and social reality, upon great themes or insignificant details, is a safe haven and the best defence against the “evils and all disorders” that make a mortal more mortal still, forcing him to exhaust himself in confrontation with the “real sector”.

And there, through a phrase like this, we arrive at the disclosure of an ideological position: why Desnica? And why an agnostic contemplation of death?

The ideological position is clear through these two questions, but the answer lies in the universal:

“The only truth that does not grow old, that does not wear out, that does not lose its force and relevance, is death. But what can be built upon that truth?”

And there is yet another question — and an answer:

“People ought, in general, to see things more often as they appear from one’s deathbed.”

In a recent interview, Vili Matula says:

“From its very beginnings, theatre has been a space for collective reflection on human nature and a place for thinking about community. Audiences do not need theatre to point out anomalies in society; audiences are very much aware of those anomalies. We need theatre in order to search for ways and means of overcoming them.”

In that sense, this performance has been created as a means of overcoming ideological, national, state, materialist, class, generational, gender and all other such relations and divisions — and as an invitation to befriend life in dialogue with death, because:

“Too much, far too much dying goes on in this life!”

P.S. ... and, of course, an invitation to read Vladan Desnica :)

Juraj Aras, 10 November 2015