Igor Ružić
A Personal prop beyond the frame
I am 1984 / Tracks

This text was originally broadcast in the radio show Odeon (Editor: Agata Juniku) on the Third Programme of the Croatian Radio, 16 September 2010

As a category in art practice, objectivity is both a difficult and, ultimately – irrelevant question. In addition, objectivity is objective only if one decides to regard it as such. Therefore, to interpret this or that kind of art does not necessarily require one to reveal its beginning, source, or even its fundamental principle. In other words, it does not matter ‘where it comes from’, sometimes not even what it is, but what it does.
Just as it really doesn’t matter whether all the pieces of information that Barbara Matijevic assembles into the continuum of personal history in the performance I am 1984 – or the sound files that she operates in the following part of the trilogy, – a similar although quite different performance titled Tracks – are true or not. It is what they do to us, the spectators, the receivers of the message, imaginary and real audience caught in a confession-like moment that is as manipulative as it is sincere.
Although lecture-performance has since long been a legitimate, almost canonized performative form, it has not yet been exploited in any distinctive or significant proportions in the Croatian new dance and theater. International festival guests like Robert Wilson, Dragan Živadinov or Walid Raad have presented similar forms in Croatia, but this form did not catch on in the local performance practice, in spite of sufficient potential.
An even more hybrid form, used by Jerome Bel and Xavier Le Roy – that of the dance demonstration and explication, has also not been exploited; with the exception of some traces in works by Irma Omerzo and Jasna Vinovrški. This gives additional credit to the breakthrough achieved by Barbara Matijevic and her partner Giuseppe Chico: only a year after the initial positive response to I am in 1984, (2008.), the second part of the trilogy – Tracks, was co-produced by foreign partners and premiered in Kaaitheater in Brussels.

I am 1984 is seemingly a confession trying to contextualize a personal biography during and after the title’s year using a flow of verified and / or manipulated facts from the global sphere of business, sports, politics … and everything in between. Barbara Matijevic’s performance is apparently as simple as the concept itself: in spite of her rich background as a professional dancer and choreographer, she is simply holding a lecture in front of a blackboard on which she draws a map of memories, associations and so-called objective, historical facts using large simplified drawings. The links between them resemble the self-generating Calvino-like narrative worlds, flowing in almost regular amplitudes from the speaking subject’s personal history to more global and universal ones. The performer’s drawings on the board create a mental map which at the end of the performance offers quite a concrete representation of the complexity produced by memories: it is both a psychogram and an sociogram, a convincing depiction of the internal landscape and the way one navigates through it.
Whether this journey outlines a desired network of synaptic signposts, or Wikipedia’s virtual memory, is completely irrelevant. The mental map of the year in which the Olympics were held in Sarajevo and Los Angeles, Apple launched an exciting new gadget, and Barbara Matijevic’s historical avatar irrevocably fell in love with ballet, is not designed to give univocal directions. This choreography of facts, the dance of data on the verticality of the blackboard, is only a smokescreen of credibility, an accumulation of material evidence for the subjectivity of memory and identity. This is underlined by Barbara Matijevic’s performance as a benevolent but restrained teacher, keeping a deliberate distance from the object of her study. Speaking of herself in the third person, although acknowledging the identification, she establishes a duality which is not merely the classic process of pseudo-scientific objectification by the so-called neutral researcher, but a very personal attempt to step out of herself.
The slightly ironic approach to facts is the same even when the performer speaks of herself as of a six year-old girl, though – due to a vague touch of tenderness in the otherwise confident and almost icy omniscient narrator’s voice, – this dissociation clearly fails. And deliberately so! Just as it is clear that she has not yet found, and perhaps never will, the state of perfect equilibrium, the moment when the matter turns into pure idea. This is a quote from the memoirs of the ballerina Mia Slavenska who, according to her own words, reached this state while holding a ballet position during which she disappeared in favor of representation, so that the function was no longer separate from the body, nor was the body in the service of expression. The same phenomenon also appears in the description of a legendary touchdown run in American football, as well as in the quotation of Billy Mitchell, the world champion in the video game Pacman, as he explains a complex mental and physical training which enables him to become Pacman himself while doing his shopping, replacing groceries and shopping aisles with targets and strategic manoeuvres. Who has the right to erase oneself and disappear, and who is only playing a role, – even when the only spectator is the player herself, – is not easy to detect. We see both a performer simply repeating someone’s text and a crazy gamer who can’t fit into the real world unless he translates it into a game.
However, what else is Barbara doing, or for that matter, – anyone else in the audience? The spectators are concerned by the story only to the extent in which they are susceptible to different triggers, such as biographical similarities, personal development anecdotes, familiarity with seemingly accidentally selected facts that form the skeleton of the story, or tempted to think of their own life in 1984.
Again we are dealing with a manipulation, because the image that Barbara Matijevic offers is a construction, and she even provides evidence for it by remarking that as a little girl passionately in love with ballet, she used to photograph herself in the mirror in different ballet positions. As the body had not yet been trained, sometimes she supported her leg with a chair, placed outside the mirror and, consequently, outside of the photography’s frame. The factual framework of the first part of the trilogy does exactly the same – it hides the support. And the reason for this is partly revealed in the following performance.

The structure of Tracks is similar, almost identical in appearance, but an entirely new narrative dimension is added to the realization of the mental map – a catalogue of sounds, ranging from the so called ‘pleasant’ and ‘affirmative’ sounds to quite ‘ordinary’ musical quotations, as well as the recordings of extinct languages and species.
Again, the authors have created a deliberately misleading narrative persona: still assisted by the immensity of associative facts downloaded from the network of all networks, Barbara Matijevic uses sound quotations and soundscape theory to compile one of the possible alternative histories of the year 1989.
Sporadic references to political processes, – such as the information that during that particular year the word “camarad” disappeared from the everyday language in Romania, – serve as a kind of audio scenography for the search of personal traces.
But the series of questions that arise from the associative narrative flow go way beyond the personal. Their traces are to be reconstructed from the missing sounds directory, anti-depression sound treatments, white noise, the fact that a man in the soundproof room can hear his own blood, subjective idealism as a school of thought and eventually, sounds that were missing in the Moonshine sonata when it returned to Earth, after having been transmitted in the Morse code to the surface of the Moon.
In the terminology of the internet search engines, these are not traces but ‘tags’, – they are the constitutive elements of the continuing quest for the perfect balance from the first part of the trilogy. Their arrangement is an invitation that may be declined, just as it can be accepted only partially, – by omitting notes that for any reason do not fit into spectators’ mental maps, interior landscapes and identities. Including the spectators who still believe in the opening statement of I am 1984 – “Citius, altius, fortius’, to those to whom Beethoven sounds even better without a tone or two, if it’s not blasphemous even to think such a thing.
In a more classical terminology, their work would be called storytelling, but of a decidedly modern type – the one that does not respect the consistency of plot nor has the classic structure, although it has the same seductive powers. Something like a contemporary version of the stories in One Thousand and One Nights, that have soaked up all the modernist and postmodernist postulates and are now capable of building their own worlds, sufficiently anchored in reality and facts, yet strangely liberated from both.
In the first two parts of the trilogy Barbara Matijević and Giuseppe Chico demonstrate to which extent the availability of data fails to satisfy the desire for personal memory. At the same time, and perhaps paradoxically, they build a structure that offers a way to reverse the usual perspective and give even ideologically primary importance to personal history. Or, to paraphrase an old slogan created at a time when a different reality seemed possible: “If personal history disagrees with the facts, so much the worse for the facts!”