Talk 9th Dec 2008

Selma Banich

Sandra Banić Naumovski

Marjana Krajač

OOUR was founded by Selma Banich and Sandra Banić Naumovski as a collaborative initiative of a group of authors involved in various artistic practices, who came together with the aim of researching the limits of their predispositions within the predefined concepts of performance. The group has recently staged performances such as “Creation of Eve” (2006), “Salon” (2007), “Chew” (2007), and “Whitebox” (2008). We interviewed them ten days before the premiere of their new show.

Where do you stand at the moment in terms of process? It is always interesting to ask something like that ten days before a premiere. Many things have become clear, but many more are left open for debate. How would you describe your current phase?

Sandra: We are always at the end and at the beginning, all at the same time, we neither close things down nor extend them too much. We crystallize very quickly those points of interest that will remain open until the very last moment.
Selma: A few days ago, we were not even sure how it will look like in terms of presentation, whether it will eventually be a quintet, a quartet, a trio, or a duo. Two days ago, we defined that point, even though in our processes a new solution that turns out better for the show can quite easily emerge immediately before the premiere.
Sandra: Two days ago it became a duo.
Selma: That is typical of our work. While working, we crystallize which segment of the performance is the most accurate one and we define whether it will eventually be a quartet, a duo, a solo, or a performance without performers.

How do you decide on your working methodology?

Sandra: We are not tied to our positions, neither as authors nor as performers. The number of performers and authors is constantly changing. For example, if the two of us start a research, that doesn’t mean that we will also complete it. It can happen that someone else from our team of collaborators, who is not primarily a performer, decides to perform instead of us.
Selma: The performing positions are not the only ones that are transitory. The positions of authors are the same. We never enter a project with clearly divided functions. The very decision about the project produces certain “non-plastered” functions that will later adopt us. Our shows are quite coherent in terms of aesthetical, ideological, and performing systems, they are a product of vague circumstances and the lack of need to create through function and performing predetermination.

Within such a fluid system, is there a differentiation “before the theatre and after the theatre”? Once you’ve materialized the decision, how do you manage the transition until you reach the stage?

Sandra: We all know what are the approximate deadlines and the amount of tasks. The takeovers occur spontaneously.
Selma: The final process and the actual decision about the duo happened intuitively and, in terms of evaluation, it was on a rationally economic and accurately intuitive level.
Sandra: It turned out that the best way of making the idea concrete was to present the material in a duo.

Is it a methodology of reality?

Sandra: It is rather a methodology of circumstance, even though we have no defined methodology, since the process is defined by the project, as well as by time and space.

The lack of methodology can also be called methodology.

Selma: Methodology is thematically, aesthetically, and ideologically tied to the circumstances of the group and the individuals.
Sandra: We were never interested in developing a particular working methodology. Instead, we were interested in our projects and our research, which meanwhile resulted in a certain type of methodology. But we have never dealt with developing a methodology that would help us in the future to pass more easily through certain processes. We try not to fit any common working models and we avoid getting to solutions by following familiar paths. If you work “after a recipe,” there is no challenge.

How does such a process of awareness function?

Selma: When I start a process, I need very much time to understand what I want to achieve with it and through it in the first place. It is only after I become aware of these things that I can start dealing with the methodology. Methodology is marginal with respect to the processes of reflection and sharing thoughts with the others. I have neither reasons nor the emotional capacity to approach my work methodologically, since I’m interested in other spheres of creation and the continuity of opposition. I’m interested in understanding what I’m doing, why I want to do it, how I function, and how I understand the thinking process.
Sandra: I think that is something that we have in common. If something can describe and sustain OOUR as a collective, than that’s it. We are involved in trying to communicate our own thoughts.
Selma: For OOUR, the non-common process is specific. There is no moment when something must become a common process and we do not start from that idea. Each individual has a thinking process “out of passion” and it takes place in parallel collateral reflections that result in a performance.

What are your strategies of selecting topics and the phenomenology that you will engage in?

Sandra: We always start from our own interests, questions, and doubts. We do not start from any concrete topic and we do not discuss anything like that.
Selma: When you apply for a project, you develop a certain idea of what it might be like. But that has nothing to do with the reality. Talking about the topics more broadly certainly crystallizes them, but you reach them through a sort of compromise. We are dedicated to the ideas of passage through a micro-process or of flirting with our own interests. The specific aspect of our work is not what I can do with a topic through theatre, but what I can’t do. I think that is a more provoking position, although not in terms of topics, but rather...

Problems?

Selma: Yes.
Sandra: With OOUR, it is not about rational decisions, but about the intuitive recognition of people. It results in a constant change of collaborators. I could say that we have no common starting points or aesthetic tastes, but somehow it will always be channelled into a common interest and the pleasure of creating.

How would you define intuition?

Selma: For me, intuition is a very concrete thing and even a physical category. In order to reach and understand what theatre cannot do, you pass through a reflective process of confronting what you don’t know. For that you need time, space, and intuition as a physical category. Creative process is a genuine working category, through which something can be, although never finally, offered and recognized as a result of group action.


(Sandra must leave for some urgent appointments before the premiere)


Part II

Selma Banich

Marjana Krajač

In your recent pieces “Salon” and “Whitebox”, you seem to have radicalized very decisively the artistic use of time or duration. Here is a very interesting quotation from Meg Stuart on the topic: “The choreographic act is an act of personal relationship between the author and the time factor.”

In “Salon”, we dealt with real time in the process, time as a co-performer. In a way, we created a flow of time during the performance, we made time visible. The real time spent “between” the performance and the spectator became visible at that very moment. I do not speak about time in the philosophical sense or as a collateral victim of the event. Time is not only “something that is spent in the performance.” Time is the integral part of the event and something it is equally performative as the performer. In “Salon”, we adopted the incarnation of ideas through performance. The performance encouraged dealing with time and produced visible time. By abolishing the virtuosity of live performance, we gained time that was passing. And by doing so, we raised the question of the spectator’s role in that time, of the way he was participating in it, and whether he was producing a time-performance. The by-product of the show was very interactive, although not in the sense of tactile interaction. What happened was a sort of spectator’s reaction to the flow of time and the way in which he dealt with the fact. What he was producing by facing the time that was there.

I would like to sketch a sort of triangle, namely: the author, the spectator, and the work. This triangle is present in every performance, but in “Salon” it becomes hyper-present, since it is not concealed by any other content, so it even becomes a sort of Devil’s Triangle. What would be the missing link in the interrelation which we presume as clearly set?

When I think about myself within OOUR, I can clearly see that I’m not involved in making theatre, but in making  what the theatre cannot do. In order to be involved in it, I must put myself into the position of my own work, or rather, I must put the work into the position of the spectator and the spectator into the position of the performer. By dealing exclusively with the idea of what the theatre can do, I am involved in recreating the reality, which then comments upon the reality in a certain moment in order to become interactive with the spectator. But in order to make the performance real enough, we needn’t recreate the reality or comment upon it. What is opening up here is an interface with the spectator that participates in the triangle on an equal footing in order to make the idea of reality alive and performative.

Do you think that such materialization of performance needs an additional production of context? In other words, how can you produce additional context as an author, since otherwise it happens that one vertex of the triangle is not stabile enough and that all discourses that should take place during and even before the performance take place post-festum.

I think that the act of watching the performance is an autonomous act, it has its own rights and I cannot influence it. The question of placing something before an autonomous spectator is the question of whether the performance is really a site of asserting something different and equally free. Personally I think it is not, especially if it uses the strategies of recreating the reality. It facilitates the act of watching the performance, it becomes more accessible and brings one vertex of the triangle into a more normal and stabile relationship with the other two. When we start or repeat a process, we are never sure in our side of the triangle. And that position is OK for me, since it is only then that I can say that I don’t want to reproduce, I want to be involved in a performance because it is equally unknown to me as I am to it. This kind of insight makes it possible for one vertex of the triangle to be equally unstable as the other two. What I want to say is that the position of the spectator is the most defined one, since it is based on a theatrical convention. In some of our performances, the position of the spectator may be perceived as the sloppiest one, but it should be the other way around, it should be the most stable one, since it is perfectly clear that “I come and watch.” But to agree with the part of the triangle that is hanging loose requires full dedication on the side of any spectator. At the same time, that is where he is in the best position to feel, quite prosaically, that he is alive. He is not watching a reproduction of the reality and he is not invited to think of what is reproduced in order to think about the reality.

Further into the triangle:“Whitebox”. I would say that it is a choreography that has abstracted itself. While being in that space and asking myself the first and very basic question of “what is my function now”, I realized that it was an almost mythological moment. I was the spectator, the performer, and the work in the same person, and we were thrown back to that primordial beginning.

In “Whitebox”, the most radical fact is that the performance exists without the one who is performing it, and that is the basic concept. Regardless of the fact that there is no subject, there is an object that makes it possible for the performance to take place and for the spectator to become the performance in terms of experience and feeling. There we abolished the function of the subject that usually makes it possible for something to happen. It is very simple: there is space – whitebox, a bed, a soundtrack, light, and scent. That is the construct of the performance and it remains with the spectator to say “my experience is the performance” or “I am the performance”. There is a possibility for the spectator to see himself as the performer or for the performer to see himself as the spectator. There’s that idea about a set up that makes a universal act possible.

I have an urgent question regarding the 2008/2009 season, which is about the methodologies of artistic survival. We have often talked about a sort of egotism in artistic existence, as you termed it yourself. I have found an unofficial description that has intrigued me, namely that being egotistic actually equals being antisocial... What are your methodologies of artistic survival? Take methodologies very broadly: How do you survive?

On the one hand, it is something that you must procreate each and every day. Each time you must get reborn in order to survive, that is, to convince yourself that something and you in that something deserve to survive. I’m not interested in work that guarantees survival. The more often you survive, the more need you feel for a stable system, because of the so-called fatigue of conviction. In terms of work as such, I must continuously find reasons why I am keeping it alive, that idea that I want to do theatre, the idea that I should be the maker of a creative product... That creative energy can be anything, I mean, nobody ever said that it should be artistic production, God forbid. On the other hand, I think that the problem is very typical of our local scene and that we are intensely dealing with it in our work. With that set of questions, we provoke survival and persistence within the theatre itself. In a way, we are doing theatre in order to deal with the reasons why we do theatre at all. I don’t mean this only as a self-referential act or an exclusive dialogue with the “divine in the theatre”; I think that survival has become a sort of machinery today, and just like there are the machinery of entertainment and the machinery of economy, there is the machinery of art – and certainly also the machinery of survival. When I speak of that machinery, I’m referring to an inexhaustible, self-sufficient device that produces survival.

A sort of perpetuum mobile?

Yes. I think that it is closely connected to us individually, as human beings, but also as workers, professionals, or artists. All these questions that I put to myself as an artist who wants to survive, I can also put to myself as a human being that wants to survive. Finally, I can conclude that I’m not dealing with the methodology of survival within the artistic production, but rather with the methodology of survival in life. In other words, it is not egotism as the antisocial aspect in a human or professional procedure, but the indestructible idea that I’m dealing with a phantasm. I can relate it to the fact that I’m doing theatre, which is the carrier of phantasms. In our work, we do not base ourselves on theory and philosophy, but rather on intuition, we want to see what the theatre can’t do or shouldn’t do. We are stepping out of the field of phantasms into the field in which it is, rather poetically, easier to give up on survival and fighting for survival. When I speak of phantasms, I do not mean fiction.

And finally, what will be your focus in the future? Which needs would you like to fulfil?

Very pragmatically, it would be a new beginning. I think that it is only now, when some ideas have become part of the convention, that a possibility is opening for new ones. When some ideas or actions that are now considered progressive or radical become part of the convention, new actions will be fertilized with an opposing idea. I’m interested in what will happen when some of our ideas or actions become part of the convention, what will come next... Besides, my fantasy is stimulated by the question of what the new generation will produce, or rather what their opposition will consist in with respect to the conventions. That is a place of political, aesthetic, and artistic ideological hybridization. When something that used to be opposition becomes part of the position. And that brings us back to the question of phantasms and survival... All that is cocooned in a single equation. There is a quotation that says, approximately: “The fact that you’re alive is a proof that nothing has been completed. That it remains to be completed.” I want something to keep stimulating my fantasy about the future.

Ok, our time is up. A single question left: if OOUR were a band, which one would it be?

But we are a band! (laughs)

www.myspace.com/oourcompany %^&