FAKI Festival, Zagreb
Watch the silhouette of a big city, its roofs, and chimneys, the towers on the horizon giving the apocalyptic impression of nowadays and people in urban areas working from their flats and houses, reducing danger from the brand-new coronavirus! What language is imparted to us through one look at London or Buenos Aires rooftops? Under clouds in the morning, in the starry nights? And all the work and courses of the streets, straight or crooked, broad or narrow; the houses in London, bright and dark at the same time, in New York and in all other Western cities that turn their facades, their faces into an urban railing, graphite’s against the city wall, toward the street; where you could feel the spirit of squares and coffee corners, impasses and prospects, where people in the rushing hours wearing masks, looking at each other with fear, with no feelings, with distance, with no human conversation, just caution. Street art in urban areas was and are very well supported by the main practitioners of physical theatre, because the urban environment offers ‘full’ art form for the physical theatre expression. They focus on the dramatic potential that can be unlocked by proper movement in between the walls and city parks, hidden away but yet again reopened for the audience that may not be considered as a theatre audience. The work often described as existing at a crossroads where movement and drama meet. Well, a known method of the psychical theatre is using this form to explore complex aspects of human relationships, especially now after the coronavirus breaks out via social and cultural issues.
Some words are better left out and not to be said with words. Many experts think that physical theatre is the perfect theatre form for the urban areas, because you don’t have to use words to express yourself, but techniques such as movement, gesture or dance to explore complex cultural issues as the answer to a social aspect of society. Putting the human body at the center of the storytelling process gives the results that is an often abstract style where proper the movement needs to be stylized and representative where their ideas choreographed through movement in the performances with no actual dialogue.
If we are talking about theatres, it may be noticed that the theatre – as the building or any other kind of space in which a performance takes place – will usually, emphasize to a correct definition of what constitutes its interior and sometimes also of what we can see on the stage. But only if theatres as buildings have meaning with its outside shape and the significant physical space of the auditorium may be the component that we use in understanding the spectacle that we are not quite aware of because there may be no other theatrical elements to support it. The performance will generate different meanings if it is staged in different spaces. Urban planning has integrated artists alongside and in collaboration with urban professionals by feeding an ambition that is valued as the democratization of arts through participation process and bringing up the issue of how art and culture actually contribute to laying out of modern cities. If the physical theatre was influenced by Bertolt Brecht then the use of a definition of physical theatre has common characteristics that may occur as necessary.
FAKI Festival, Zagreb, Croatia
Source: FAKI Festival
Physical Theatre in the Old Factory
If the perspectives that the geography of art, urban studies, and arts in various disciplines are the ones that opens and relates to the reconfigurations by artistic spatial forming in the “worlds of art,” cities today have become an important part of the lucrative aspect of the economy, vitality, and revitalization, also if it is seen as a metaphorical stage, where various sets are explicated by all sorts of historical and contemporary plots? At the theatre certain locations in the city become a brand-new artist’s destination or one of the possible choices, where there are variety and quality of whatever the city is capable of staging, created this way with new identities, re-writing history with theatres of all kinds. There is a good example of a good urban physical theatre in the old deserted factory located in Zagreb, Croatia. Zagreb as the capital of Croatia has many deserted factory buildings, but only this one is turned into an art center. There is an old pharmacy building, factory from the communist period called Medica. Factory Medica offers different art content and events, funded by the city of Zagreb all year. But one of my favorites is The Festival of Alternative Theater Expression (FAKI) FAKI. I am talking about physical theatre within the walls of the old factory in the open space and inside in between walls. With this building, it is possible engaging with new audiences by bringing performances into spaces that they know and feel good or bad about. This aspect of the practice allows the audience easier access to a range of emotions which a physical theatre performance may evoke because they are in this environment: it also may remove the fear of going to the theatre. It is not the news that traditional theatre sometimes puts people in an uncomfortable state of ‘do not belong’ feeling. A fundamental problem in some social classes of Western countries that brings up the question of how people are supposed to emotionally engage with a theatre piece if their emotions are hindered by an in the definitive sense of discomfort created by the society they are coming from?
The Festival of Alternative Theater Expression (FAKI) https://www.facebook.com/fakicroatia/ offers the space of AKC Medika in Zagreb with theatre performances, dealing with physical theater devoid of generalizations and stereotypes, free of boring categorization. Medica here plays a part in the city of Zagreb, as a performing platform of independent, traveling theatrical narratives that operate outside the institutional framework by developing space for special expressions. This alive theatrical practice, in the creative devising process, allows the human experience to be a primary resource. This experience is developed by the creative process, where feelings, cognition, intuition, and intention are activated and expressed with physical movement. There are secondary experiences with appropriated material put in a certain space that becomes a theatre space with the inventive aspect of experiential and aesthetical benefits created into a new theatrical expression. According to the organizers of FAKI in Zagreb, Croatia, in the step with modern tendencies in which technology takes over many aspects of the work of a living person, the human body is still a unique phenomenon that is difficult to replace. The authors performing there used the human body as their starting point as the most important instrument for expressing the dichotomy of desire and will, passion and reason, understanding, with nonverbal performances. Today all information is summarized and placed as quickly as possible without pausing in certain segments, where image, video, and sound travel faster and faster, well let’s mention FAKI’s performances that require: time, preparation, performance, and observation in the characteristic space of the post-industrial cultural center.