The Stoka Theatre of imagination and paradoxes offers the spectator what its founder and director, Blaho Uhlár expressed as a credo: distrust towards the world, word, simply distrust. 2 I ceased to believe in the knowability of the world", it is the reason of his emotional expressions from which the spectator departs unsure, puzzled and imbalanced. And yet, as if deep beyond the surface of the observed scenes, he understood that the talk is about the present, a totally chaotic present of chaos. The naked man writhes in agony on the ground, screaming: the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer, the replete will be more replete and the hungry will be more hungry... and three women soon afterwards enter the abandoned stage in order to play a simple tune of their meditation on strange musical instruments, and one of them sings a pathetic aria. 

Pathos and depathetizing

The pathos which sneaks in the individual situations of the performance of Impasse is the SITUATION turned upside down. The basic situation is the movement of detail in the individual interpretation of personal feelings, a personal statement in stylized form. This makes the unique individual situation special: a man runs amongst the audience with a wheelbarrow, with a woman lying inside, the man plays on the woman´s body like with a bow, another man enters always wearing a different mask on his face, finally he enters with a silver mask which is peeled off by two young women who start to devour him: his face is made of fresh ham and they devour it with great appetite to the satisfaction of the surprisingly shocked man. The pathetic singing with the manners of opera stars is the element of pathos. 

The situation is a symbolic semiosis, such communication takes control of the space in which the characters emerge and disappear. They are not, however, the characters of hierarchical situations creating the story, they are isolated situations, hanging in the vacuum of loneliness. Theatre originates here in the communication situation of the characters as its product, as the magic of the unwanted in the course of a sort of fragmentary play of individuals and their confessions in space. 

Unconscious connections (synchronisations, Jung) multidimensionally sneak in the situations which are multiplied in gestural and motional invariance as situtational parallels. Their utterance is often imprinted in the monogram of the enigma of performances as telling contexts of concrete reality. 

Nox

The situation of individual characters in the performance Nox (1995) takes place in similar invariance of civilian concretization of ordinariness of individuals. 

Nox has several basic features: 1. Twilight, semi-darkness, anticipation

2. Isolation of the individual, loneliness, uncertainty

3. Ordinariness and concreteness of ordinary situations

4. Slow tempo, hesitation, thoughtfulness

5. Sudden changes, surprises, contrasts

Closeness

The immediacy of these individuals´ situations which are hierarchical are more effective as they take place in the semi-darkness and immediate closeness where the characters 2 emerge" (Nox).

Masks

Peter Brook maintains that 2 in its essence, the traditional mask is not a mask at all because it is the image of its own essence". He himself makes use of the mask in the literary meaning of expressing the substance. But the stylized theatre of alternative significance used the mask as a change of identity in a close lead of the fall of totalitarianism and in the initial period of the liberation from the grasp; the mask as the loss of identity matched directly the feeling of the present. Also for this reason masks were often anonymous, without expression, without a content of its own essence which Brook speaks about. The mask 2 as the portrait of the soul" plays that particular role about which Brook speaks as a 2 complete and sensitive mirroring of inner life". The complexity of the expression of traditional mask is, contrary to the simplicity of visual stylization, only a fragment of the inner world, a destruction of this complexity and completeness.

The masks used by the actors at the Stoka Theatre always express 2 the aspect of human situation" as Brook calls it. And this is done in a manner which surpasses the capacity of the actor.

Movement in space of intimate memory

Our experience is stirred by the past of totalitarianism and freedom, as a heavy burden which is carried with much more difficulty than we could anticipate at the time when freedom was stolen only in bits to enliven our hopes, as a live water of hope in the self-expression of 2 here and now". Thus Stoka Theatre originated in an entire antithesis to all possibilities of the period. The human body is a complicated machine which outwardly signals its inner life. The expression of the human body is the mysterious communication of the situation of the inner world. The deciphering of enigmas of the inner signals belongs to theatre and to our actual situation. The enigmatic expression of concreteness and the concreteness of enigma is the basic figure, the form of Stoka. The body of ordinariness is the bearer which mediates the relation to individual symbols and signals, which are shown in the relationship to other individuals whether they be partners on the stage or spectators. The audience relates to the form of these symbols as to the totality of the situation, the characters are delineated in their space and completeness. 

Attitudes

The possible interpretations are linked by treating the situations in regard to the attitudes of individuals and their characters. Here 2 the being on stage" in the sense of the actor´s authenticity replaces the actor with a poet (in the meaning as given by K. Brown to the poet on stage). Instead of imitation or transformation in traditional acting, of creating (characters), this acting focuses on the creation of statement as an attitude of 2 individual freedom". 

Nox

Night is the space of secrets, the twilight of subconscience, of relations and the mysterious wandering in situations we do not want to know about in the morning because they are situations of failures. Nox takes place in twilight, in the bloom of a common lodging house 2 At the Bottom", where a mixture of strange individuals, the homeless with the faces of well-known archetypes, find refuge. Simply we are familiar with them, it is not Eden, not even the purgatory, it is almost Hell, but not the hell 2 it is the others", but the hell 2 are we ourselves inside". The torments of hell, of ordinariness and banality. 
 
 

Conclusion?

The conclusive pathos of ordinariness as a counterpoint

Situation: Two young women dance together in semi-darkness. Gently and slowly the film unfolds, and in the background the body of a man tosses about in a sleeping bag; we can only see his head and the chaos of his tenacious inside is reminiscent of the taboo of sexuality closed in the intimacy of the invisible and the unbounded. The sleeping bag moves on the stage, the man cannot free himself, but he sighs in delight in an acceptable exertion in order to finally stand up, still with the sleeping bag on his body, inside the 2 other being" he is tossed about and suddenly from the unknown mystery emerges a hat and then a briefcase. The sleeping bag falls to his legs and he crosses over it, sceaming outfront his ode:

2 It is not necessary to go there,

neither early,

but nor too late.

And then when? When?

Tears do not help,

but one does not have to laugh too much.

And how then? How?

Stupid, you are stupid! (laughter)

Who will guess the name of the tax-collector? Who?"

Music roars and the light appears. Bows. 

A peculiar worm (a striped sleeping bag) is tossed about on the floor of the common lodging house, and when the tax-collector emerges from his shell, the pointe nails the story of Night (Nox).

Rhythm

The overall rhythm of the form of staging and partial individual rhythm of elements of staging, and finally the rhythms of the characters as individual partial entities, all this determines the basic time and space of the spectators´ perception. The time and space of the spectators´ perception is equally important as the time and space of the actors´ action. 

Ideologeme

Pavis´ notions and his theory of vectorization allow to record the forces and energies of the performance in movement. Space, time, action and physicality come to terms with the inner movement of significances through concrete relations and their inner signalling of the meaning. 

An open work, as was determined in the 1960´s by Umberto Eco, has remained until now a topical part of global theatre culture unlimited by restrictive interpretations but taking into account the context and its movement. 

The vectorization of the performance and the movement of meanings and energies is the essence of analysis, and its determination is its goal. It is a diagnosis of the performance, not its interpretation. 

Body language

Stoka Theatre and body language as style

In the staging of Nox, the body language, that is articulation and clear communication of the body and physicality itself expressed in gesture, movement and mimetic-gestural representations, appear as the essence of expression through the universality of the body. 

If the body expresses...

If the body clearly expresses itself in behaviour, then its language remains the language of expression and context, and this is a strong aspect of Stoka. Here the expression is created by ordinariness in its essence. High stylization of the theatre of movement, as known from Postmodernist productions by R. Wilson and Pina Bausch, has no place here. Stoka is rather close to the German expression of Marthaler, where the concreteness of civilian banalities blend with the context of ordinariness as a symbol and condensation of essential movement (final part of La vie parisienne, 1998).

Slowing down, concentration, pointes and gags, all of them are basic requirements.

Ideograms, sonograms, videograms

Condensed language

The concentrated representation of the situation is expressed in the principle of condensation. We do not need the subtext or psychology, we do not need the characters´ development, but the movement of the situation, whose central theme is the archetype and the encounters of archetype with its fatal feeling, its loneliness amidst the situation and with itself. 
 
 

Zuzana Bakošová-Hlavenková, Academy of Performing Arts, Bratislava

/ Canterbury, University of Kent, XIII.th World Congress IFTR/FIRT UK l998, júl 1998 UK, Working group Performance Analyses, Main theme of Congress: Theatre researche:Exploring of Limits/