(…) Should one use the word virtuosity when talking about the performances that by all means deny the old representational codes (“tradition”), often resembling an innovative and angry turning over of the child’s chamber pot, or those which are capable of quoting, elaborating and pointing to the accumulation of insight as the principle of every creative knowledge, often seeming so overwhelmed by the past that we lovingly call them the museums of the unconditional surrender?
These questions are also underlining the typically ambiguous Jerome Bel’s performance Pichet Klunchun and Myself, where he confronts his own anti-spectacular and anti-religious understanding of contemporary dance with the traditional religious and dance methodology of Thailand (…)
Barbara Matijevic and Giuseppe Chico engage in a similar confrontation with sports, corporative capitalism and different geographical limitations of the dance art. Their formal focus is on the year 1984 – not only as Orwell’s dystopia of the totalitarian society, but also as the year in which the performer of “I AM 1984” acquires her first experiences as a TV viewer, watching for the first time the opening of the Olympic Games, as well as the ballet The Swan Lake, and participates in the parade organized for Tito’s birthday. It is the period when B. M. (Barbara Matijevic’s alter ego) dreams of “breaking into the television set”. She remembers seeing on TV the famous moment in the history of figure skating – Jayne Torville’s and Christopher Dean’s interpretation of Ravel’s Bolero, which earned them a perfect score, a straight 6, from every judge in the jury. Indeed, how can one get close to this ideal? How to produce the enchantment of the perfect performance? And should one sacrifice his/her life for this kind of exalting of the critics and the public in the first place? Questioning of virtuosity continues with the mention of the prima ballerina Mia Corak Slavenska, who, according to her own words, disappears while dancing her famous and “perfect” Coppelia. Should B.M. go beyond life itself through the virtuosity of her dancing on stage, or should she simply die on stage, in terms of breathing her last breath, which would certainly guarantee a passage into transcendence?
These questions, only differently formulated, are at the core of I AM 1984. And the most important one, never uttered: why does B. M. fall into the trap of chasing Perfection, an endeavor close to the urge of “controlling” the border between life and death?
A possible answer could be found in the title of the show: a need for perfection is maybe a need for the total and totalitarian self-discipline; for the megalomaniac role of the “big brother”: the controller of the world’s attention. But this is surely not all. Nor does B. M. stand alone in her need for the galactic fanfares. A typical characteristic of all those who step into creative processes is related to exaggerated perfectionism, an urge to achieve the “paradigmatic”, perfect result. I am not sure if it is possible, or even necessary, to be ironic about this urge. In spite of its repressiveness, the effort put into its realization greatly improves the person who undertakes it. Although virtuosity was historically related to circus (acrobatic) arts, in parallel with the development of different virtuosities in dance and music, it has become clear that we are dealing with a conscious attempt to go beyond the existing limits; with a Faustian courage to unlock the mystery of the “forbidden” insight by sacrificing one’s own safety (blood or sweat or, in the case of the castrates – the genitals).
However, B. M. is not sure that she wants to sacrifice herself on the altar of Art. I quote from the show: “B. M. realizes that she has neither endurance nor discipline to continue working all by herself.” Remember the translation of the Latin word “virtus”: endurance…discipline…courage… Virility. Self-abnegation. The coronation of the champion with laurel leafs. Our heroine becomes less interested in dance, and more in the virtuality of computer games, where she can perform in form of this or that avatar. Gain and loss are measured in points. Stress diminishes and the imagined identification is more comfortable, but we still didn’t escape the big social arena and its battles for the first and most important places. B. M. is no longer interested in personally achieving the absolute equilibrium through the orphic exaltation of the corporal performance – now she has chosen a different kind of control over performance, transforming herself into the virtuality of a computer simulation on the one hand, and into a “living” teaching point on the other.
Barbara Matijevic’s eccentric uniform (red turtle-neck top, turquoise skirt) seems to contain some of the former need for unconventional action, but the hair gathered in a strict bun and an unrelenting, measured voice throughout the fifty-minute performance, with constant drawing on the whiteboard and the instructions such as “let’s write it down”, point to theory as a sort of perversion of the artistic discipline. This monstrously dry theoretician (another big brother variation on the stage) is at the same time a parody of all those arts that deal with the description and analysis of artistic processes, such as criticism and theory. I am 1984 seems to say that when a performer “comes down” to this, his or her’s career becomes a kind of trading with virtual computer game points. The only birds singing to the theoretical virtuosos are, alas, the “electronic” ones – and they are singing David Bowie. This conceptual virtuosity is as lethal as the “dilated time” of the ecstatic mastery of the art of dance.
B.M. is very much conscious of all these risks and, through humor, dramaturgical precision and the merciless self-exposure, she displays great virtuosity (or feminosity?) in elaborating the dangers coming from any kind of virtuosity (…)
After all, our entire society developed ideals according to which everyone can operate in the public space and live of his or her’s dilettante performance, so why bother and try to deal the cards out differently? I think that here it would be worth while to put back into focus something that B. M. states with a lot of intelligence and measure at the beginning of the performance: years back, we use to think about jumping into a TV box and the figure skating competitions where the international jury handed in an unanimous perfect score. How about keeping some of this virtuosity of the “leap” into the impossible, some of the outrageous urge for the “total” experiment?”

Natasa Govedic