Prague Quadrennial

INTANGIBLE - Croatian Exhibition at the 2015 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space.

Damir Bartol Indoš, Tanja Vrvilo: TOSCA 914

One of the key figures of the so called Croatian alternative theatre, Damir Bartol Indoš has remained true to his sources as aesthetic and ethical postulates for almost forty years. He was member of the Kugla theatre company, a radical performance collective from the late 1970s and early 1980s that was a rare example of truly radical alternative culture in which music and performance were the inspiration, means and end. After parting ways with Kugla, Indoš continued to work independently via his own organisation DB Indoš House of Extreme Musical Theatre.

Instead of taking the supposedly next logical step and growing in terms of production and climbing the hierarchical latter of success and institutionalisation, he decided to, metaphorically and quite literally, stay in place. This, however, does not mean that within his artistic vocation he is not permanently interested in innovation, searching continuously for new subjects and associates or improvements of his own artistic production. Considering that his theatre generally includes substantial amounts of used or reconstructed retro technology, which simultaneously functions as scenography, props, musical instruments and his partner, it seems quite fitting to use the term production in his case. On the other hand, he approaches his subjects with an exceptionally humanistic attitude, believing that the artist must, with his personal attitude and engagement, earn or deserve the moral and metaphysical right to the subjects he uses as inspiration or foundation.

This is not the only paradox surrounding Indoš. A sworn pacifist, who began doing theatre because, as he himself admits, he was not brave enough to become a radically left or anarchistic terrorist, he creates performances filled with scrapings of metal, loud or too loud noises of machinery powered by the energy of the performers, deafening avantgarde music and speeches on the verge of barking, causing fear and disgust to the unaccustomed ear. He is also an applied ecologist, recycling materials, parts of machinery and discarded technology, and creating from them his astonishing, almost post apocalyptic stage imagery. Permanently infected with the theatrical and theoretical propositions of Antonin Artaud and antipsychiatry, a discipline that promotes a different way of relating to mental disorders and a different treatment not of disorders, but of those afflicted by them, Indoš is obsessively searching for the ideal expression of theatre that can express the frustrations and challenges of today, because he cannot deny them, at the same time refusing to be reduced to them.

Among the constants of Indoš’s poetics is also certainly the athletic performative aspect, a Spartan discipline and physical fitness needed to endure the high physical demands of his performances that he himself has set. Indoš’s parallelism of an ethical foundation and aesthetic realisation, philosophical education and performative and authorial experience always results in a critical attitude, expressed indirectly and affirmatively via the subjects he had to earn a right to use; potential correspondences with current issues are merely incidental. The documentary trilogy Every Revolution is a Throw of the Dice, which he created and performs in collaboration with the actress and film studies scholar Tanja Vrvilo, deals with the assassinations of high ranking officials of the Austro Hungarian administration in Croatia before World War I. It is precisely when the world was marking the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the socalled Great War and the notorious shot fired in Sarajevo and heard all over the world, that the last part of this trilogy entitled Tosca 914 had its premiere, thematising the unsuccessful assassination only one month prior to the one in Sarajevo, in the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb at the premiere of the opera Tosca. Instead of thematic historiographic and geopolitical analyses, the play offers a different vantage point and discourse, raising the issue of the need to react to political and institutional violence. For Indoš, the answer does not lie in reacting with violence, but in the artistic, personal and collective freedom, achieved only through rigorous artistic and personal convictions structured through the musical, scenographic, choreographic and performative abundance of the sound (and) the fury.

Text: Igor Ružić (web catalog Intangible)
Youtube: INTANGIBLE: Damir Bartol Indoš & Tanja Vrvilo