"If ever, then it is today that we – as individuals – confront the opportunities for new activations, ways of love yet unknown. Benumbed and insane from biopolitics, we no longer know what we had to overcome with our “life empiricism” or what was provided for us by the (global) temporal fatality in the meanwhile – and the distinction between the two is no longer known to us. On coming to the bitter realisation that “culture”, “intercultural dialogue” or “the clash of civilizations” do not exist in the world as we know it – and never did – we can invent again and again new microethics to satisfy the fact that we are always naked, barefoot, yet ever so inventive in front of that “cultural” (there is still no other expression!) practise, which can be resolved only in a face-to-face relationship, thus, most often in love. Every instance of activism sooner or later bangs against the wall named state-nation. Every instance of activism eventually robs us of intimate sensations. However, only as such does it enable a new creation, this time, in twos. Benumbed and insane from a virtual public, confined to a systemic black hole, staring to miniscule screens, we distinguish the other, who is an “opposite”; but only insofar as this other inhabits “the same”. So it seems that we are approaching nearer and nearer to “cosmic love” of kindred spirits: we want to provoke, to do the same identical stuff to one another. What seemingly presents itself as new age is, as a matter of fact, a consequence of precisely the opposite process: The heroic unequivocal mind, which makes us ready and willing to be interested in, from the cradle to the grave, in other bodies, their capabilities, deceptions, hollows, outgrowths and effects, while their one-dimensional, glazed, glaring look lures us – each and every one – to think the identical thought: Strike! Caress! Run! Rip! Look! Remove! Come! Feed! In an interaction of love bites and sweet-talk, with kitsch and alternative, focuses and blurs, we heroically push toward the end, where there is no identity whatsoever, let alone sexual one. The tempting, painful, aberrant perseverance is well on the road to integrity, that is, to the “internalisation” of the revolution. And what we should be watchful of is no longer love on the stage or on the screen, but love in the stalls – its sound gurgling in the underground of a dependable machine, its look glistening through a narrow, yet bright channel."
Created and performed by: Maja Delak & Luka Prinčič
Music, video, photography: Maja Delak & Luka Prinčič
Visual design and advising: Maja Smrekar
Costumes and styling: Jelena Rusjan
Light design: Urška Vohar
Design: Mauricio Ferlin
Translation: Katja Kosi
English proof reading: Eric Dean Scott
Executive production & coordination: Sabina Potočki
Office coordination: Nina Janež
Produced by: Zavod EMANAT
Co-produced by: Delavski dom Trbovlje
In collaboration with: KUD France Prešeren
Financial support: Ministrstvo za kulturo RS, MOL – oddelek za kulturo
Media support: Mladina, Radio Študent
Sponsored by: Peko by Gacho; Georgia cuisine Zlato Runo
Special thanks to: Zoran Poznič, Slavko Glamočanin, Nenad Mušnjak, Jure Sajovic in Galerija Kapelica, Luka Dekleva, Ozren Škondrič, Damir Babič, Irena Tomažin, Barbara Krajnc, Urška Vohar, Matija Ferlin, Katja Kosi, Miha Zadnikar, Andrej Strehovec, družina Delak, Matej & Samo, Milan Gačanovič, Tamazi & Zina Nozadze.
(...) The authors go beyond the gender diformism of a relationship between a man and a woman and adopt different sexual and social roles by employing different performative means in the course of seduction and approaching one another: from DJing and movement to video and photographic image. (…) However, an intimate relationship inevitably leaves us with words or, more often, with expressed or unexpressed questions of genuine verbal or embodied answers, which cannot fill the emotional lack, with which the performance itself also ends. Besides the excellent presence of both performers, who convincingly enacted their stage potential, the multimedia performance distinguishes itself with a sensitive reflection of both the contents of the “ways of love” as well as of the modes of presentation itself.
(...) The relative concrete stage, sound and video actions open up questions about relationships, pain, power relations, and primarily touch upon many fields of betweenness and contradistinctions. Travesties thus come about in the area of sexual identities, emotional states and power relations. Explicit and symbolic articulations of violence, metaphors of the sexual, examination of positions of sexual identities are made visible between the performers – who have an exceptional presence, especially Maja Delak – on their way of love, as well as the ever significant area of contemplation – the question of power relations, which is inscribed, more or less visibly, conspicuously or subtly, in every relation and sociocultural field.
(...) Content-wise, the performance progresses from sharp pain, which is in places alienated and ironized, toward liberation, both in the intimate as well as in the sense of general morality, models, expectations. Performative actions in The Ways of Love are party intertwined; sometimes they are separated by sharp cuts or breaks. However, the internal connections between the media and thought traces, which they mediate – here we cannot forget the use of space and the costumes – are worked out to the extent that the transitions seem smooth. The performance as a whole is – despite its fragmented structure – strongly energetically charged, which is conveyed by a cutting, even punk or underground poetics. In this sense, the indicated intervention into the border between the performers and the audience proved to be successful, at least in the Delavski dom in Trbovlje, where the entire event took place on stage, behind the safety curtain, which augmented the sensation of rawness, bareness, cold, and on the other hand, strengthened the desire for liberation, appeasement.
(...) A dull sound of the bass can be heard, like when standing in front of a club in the middle of the night. We see leather and feel a tiny bit of voluptuousness and a trifle of anxiety. Neon lights below the ceiling, which move us back into the eighties or into the present, while all the details may still suggest the future. It does not matter, as we are slowly becoming immersed into the ways of love – Une façon d'aimer.
Slovene premiere:
23.02.2009 – Delavski dom Trbovlje, Slovenia
Premiere in Ljubljana:
25.02.2009 - KUD France Prešeren, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Re-runs and touring:
26.02.2009 - KUD France Prešeren, Ljubljana, Slovenia
11.03.2009 - KUD France Prešeren, Ljubljana, Slovenia
16.03.2009 - KUD France Prešeren, Ljubljana, Slovenia
20.04.2009 - KUD France Prešeren, Ljubljana, Slovenia
26.05.2009 - KUD France Prešeren, Ljubljana, Slovenia
27.05.2009 - KUD France Prešeren, Ljubljana, Slovenia
20.09.2009 - Kino Šiška, Ljubljana, Slovenia
09.10.2009 - Fabrika Trzciny, Warsaw, Poland
10.12.2009 - Kondenz 2, Stanica, Belgrade, Serbia
12.11.2009 - Temps d'image, Cluj, Romania
09.12.2009 - WEST_WHERE, Bourges, France
15.02.2010 - Mini teater, Ljubljana
26.03.2010 - Mini teater, Ljubljana
07.04.2010 - Likovni salon Celje, Galerija Račka
26.05.2010 - X-YU Festival, The Dixon Place, New York, USA
28.05.2010 - X-YU Festival, The Dixon Place, New York, USA
29.05.2010 - X-YU Festival, The Dixon Place, New York, USA
18.09.2010 - Festival Nagib, Maribor