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HALKA TŘEŠŇÁKOVÁ: I HAVE AN AVERSION TO PATRIOTISM01.08. 2014
Artists and theorists in the field of dance and the performing arts lack opportunities for research. Living from one grant to the next propels everyone towards the final production. Such opportunities, however, are essential to the development of creative work and theoretical reflection.
This is one of the motives that led to the creation of the Identity.Move! project, a transnational platform for theoretical and artistic research in the field of contemporary dance and related arts. It was put together by fourteen European countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia. The project is funded by the European Union’s Culture Program and coordinated by the Goethe Institute in Warsaw in cooperation with the Centre for Culture in Lublin, Motus o.s. in Prague, and the National School of Dance in Athens. The Identity.Move! project will run artistic residencies or ‘Labs’ between June and October of this year, in which 24 artists will take part. Selected artists include dancers, choreographers, performance artists, architects, theorists, critics and video artists. The Czech Republic is represented by Halka Třešňáková, and Petra Tejnorová, another Czech participant, will be working with Jaro Viňarský of Slovakia. The Labs will take place in Prague, Poznań, Essen, and Greece. A Symposium was held in Lublin in March, where all the project’s participants assembled for a program of discussions, creative work, performances and lectures, and the next big meeting will be the Bazaar, which will be held in Prague in March 2015. Program and details? Coming soon! In the meantime, we’re offering a look inside the project in an interview with Halka Třešňáková, who is spending her one-month residency at Stary Browar in Poznań. We met with Halka just before the Symposium.
What appealed to you about the subject of the Identity.Move! project and motivated you to apply to it?
I draw on experience in my work, whether personal or historical. What appealed to me is that that the project involves people of various ages from fourteen countries, and that the subject of identity is approached as a dialogue. I’m always spurred on by being able to work with people I’ve never met before. In the Czech Republic I tend to work with a stable circle of artists, Mirek Bambušek, Petr Krušelnický and Apolena Vanišová, Honza Bárta, and I cherish that. We all have a good understanding of each other’s conception of art or theatre.
I was also interested in Identity.Move! because it provides time for research. I usually work on grant projects, and the funding in recent years has been so tight that from the outset I have to focus on the final production, and everything is moving towards the ‘end-product’. Whereas this time I have an opportunity to examine the subject of identity from various angles. I also find it extremely important that I’ll be able to do my research away from Prague, in Poznań, where I’ll be cut off from my every-day, routine life. So perhaps ‘Move!’ also means having to leave your place, and then also the fact that here we’re dealing with the sphere of movement, dance theatre. Movement and the body are tools well suited to an international project that can’t be built very much on language.
You mention research as a strong point of Identity.Move! There is much discussion in the project as to what is to come out of the residency, some artists object to the ‘end-product’ interpretation of their work, while with others it is apparent that the ‘end-product’ interpretation often encouraged by grant systems has such a strong influence on their artistic reality that it is very difficult for them to contemplate just research.
Maybe it has to do with age. Of the selected artists I’m one of the older ones. I have no ambition to represent myself through a piece of work because I’ve already done quite a lot. What I’m mainly in need of is time and peace and quiet so that I can work on my own themes. Even if the outcome isn’t a performance, I’m confident that this kind of research will have a positive impact on me and my future work.
In the title of the project ‘Move!’ also expresses the notion that identity is not something fixed, that it changes. And not just at a personal level, but at the level of individual countries. Most of the countries in the project have a past marked by oppression. For them, the political changes of the late 1980s and early 1990s and the new conditions of freedom triggered a need to re-explore their identity. What is your understanding of the concept of identity in relation to stability and change?
I chose the nomad, the refugee, as the identity for my Identity.Move! project. Someone who, for political or economic reasons, or out of the pure longing to travel, changes location. I’m interested in that transition. I wanted to travel by train to the Lublin Symposium that’s part of the project. I’m fascinated by train stations, places in motion, where people are travelling, or where they’re caught in the space in between one route and another.
I don’t want to speak much about politics in my refugee theme, to make political theatre out of it. I want to talk about simple principles. I want to see, say, if at events like the Symposium people always sit in the same place, and whether they’ll feel bad if someone takes their seat because they consider it their spot. Even little things like that can then be extrapolated into an international or intercontinental context. But I’d like to start out with small principles, when people feel that something belongs to them, or that they themselves belong somewhere – whether it’s a chair, a table, a plate, the most personal things. And then go further: does my country belong to me, or even my street? Do I look at someone sitting in my chair or at my table as an interloper who’s taken my spot? I’m interested in exploring this.
You talk about nomads and also about how people define their place. You experienced emigration. How do you feel about where your place is now?
That’s the personal aspect for me. A long-term documentary was made about me, Liebe Indigo, using the diaries I sometimes wrote in from the age of twelve to sixteen. I still keep a diary. Only once I saw the film did I realize how much this is my theme. It had never occurred to me before.
I’m absolutely anti-national. I have an aversion to patriotism of any kind. My feeling is that where you live, that’s where you belong, whether you’ve been there for a day, fifty years, or you entire life. And you should concern yourself with what’s around you. I don’t mean that we shouldn’t be helping out in India or Africa, but lately I’ve had the feeling that people send donations to these places, yet they can then go and kick a Roma outside their house. It’s a huge alibi – I help, but I don’t want to see it. Wherever you are at a given moment, you can help there. And by helping, living, sitting, cooking there, you’re at home there. That’s where you belong.
I was just in Israel. There are strict ultra-orthodox Jews there who, during the period of purification before Passover, burn everything they own. This means that you can’t accumulate property, everything you have is temporary. A person is free because it’s possible at any moment to abandon everything and move on. This is something that relates to the very opposite of nomadism – when people have a lot of property they’re prevented from going anywhere. They defend their place, their territory. And that territory is also what interests me. For me identity is also associated with power.
In what sense?
When we’re working for the month in Poznań, where we’ll be six artists altogether, will we be guests there or will we be at home? How will we get on with each other? When does one person begin to exert power over the others? This is often connected to some ideal – you think you know what’s right, that you do everything the right way, and everyone should do it that way too, because it’s in everyone’s welfare. And that welfare requires a sacrifice from the others. People feel an entitlement to power based on a desire to assert their own ways of doing things, which they think are right. And once they’ve got power they abuse it. I notice when I myself am exerting power over others, when I’ve got the feeling that I know best. I try to resist this in ordinary life. Then there are the powers above us – laws, for instance. How do we go about yielding to them? Do we do so just on the face of it without actually believing in them? Do we do it to make a good impression, for a sense of relief?
I’ve always been interested in the possibility of exploring a subject from the outside and from the inside. You get the best understanding of everything external when you start to reflect on yourself. Where do laws come from and how does this subject resonate with the individual? Then you can do an exhaustive, credible exploration of the subject. I’m interested in the moments when suppression manifests itself in little ways, in every-day life, in a gesture. Power, powerlessness. Take, for instance, the gesture that someone surrendering makes – they raise their hands. They show that their hands are empty.
When I think about identity, various parasitic thoughts spring to mind with it. I was contemplating what would happen if a person were to lose their identity, if someone took it from them. Could that person take this it as a challenge and begin a new, different life? Would they lose their bad habits? Could they start out from nothing?
When I returned to Czechoslovakia in 1990 and began to work in theatre, everyone was always comparing me to my father. They’d introduce me as ‘the daughter of Vlasta Třešňák’, or ‘the step-daughter of Karol Sidon’, or ‘the granddaughter of Jiřina Třebická’. It used to make me really angry. When I started out in theatre in Germany, where no one knew me and for them I was just some refugee, I felt a greater freedom. They only considered what I was doing at that moment, without knowing my story. That’s the approach I’d like, and that’s why it’s liberating for me to work somewhere else, where people don’t know me. They aren’t considering the past, so I can start afresh, not worry about my style or defend myself.
What do you regard as the firm pillars of your identity?
Through Identity.Move! I started to think about that a lot. Who am I, and what part is just me reacting to an environment, a situation? That’s a big question. I think morals are the pillar. A person should be good. I imagine a terrible situation, where someone’s aiming at me or aiming at my child, they put a gun in my hand and say ‘shoot’. But you mustn’t shoot. Because in that moment you yourself would be an agent of wrong. There’s humanity, human goodness, in there somewhere. You fear for yourself, for your children, but you still can’t take the life of someone else.
