{"id":382,"date":"2016-03-18T17:46:00","date_gmt":"2016-03-18T17:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/7\/?p=382"},"modified":"2023-03-22T20:26:30","modified_gmt":"2023-03-22T20:26:30","slug":"the-live-digitizing-of-the-actor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/7\/the-live-digitizing-of-the-actor\/","title":{"rendered":"The Live Digitizing of the Actor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Primo\u017e Jesenko<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n

\"1377987881\"<\/p>\n

Mandi\u0107Machine, <\/em>concept and selection of extracts by Marko Mandi\u0107 and Bojan Jablanovec, performed by Marko Mandi\u0107, direction and set by Bojan Jablanovec, lighting by Igor Remeta. Costumes, props and music were, where possible, from the original performances in which Mandi\u0107 participated. Premiere 25 June, 2011; venue, Stara mestna elektrarna Ljubljana (The Old Power Station Ljubljana). Production by Via Negativa; co-production, Slovene National Theatre Drama Ljubljana.<\/p>\n

The talent of the actor is one of the most elusive phenomena. Among Slovene theatre researchers, Bla\u017e Lukan focused on this subject earlier in his contribution How to conserve the actor<\/em> presented at the symposium The elusiveness of theatre conservation<\/em> held at the Maribor Theatre Festival in 1987.[1]<\/sup><\/a> In his later texts, the emphasis shifted to selected roles from contemporary productions. Lukan makes a departure from the linear approach of theatre criticism: \u201cThe actors don’t speak through a description or psychology of sorts, but through their body and its life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Marko
Marko Mandic goes through 38 of his roles between the years 1996-2010 in his MandicMachine. \u00a9 Marcandrea<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Marko Mandi\u0107, born in 1974, graduated from the Academy for Theatre, Radio, Film and Television in Ljubljana. After his studies at the Lee Strasberg Institute in New York, he joined the ensemble at the Slovene National Theatre Drama Ljubljana in 1998, and in 2009 received the Pre\u0161eren Fund award for his theatrical roles. Mandi\u0107 also created a number of roles in the framework of Via Negativa<\/em>, a contemporary performing arts project initiated by artistic leader and director Bojan Jablanovec. Within the performance series Via Nova<\/em> in 2009, he created two solo performances, Ekstrakt Mandi\u0107<\/em> and Viva Mandi\u0107<\/em>, and in 2011, Mandi\u0107stroj <\/em>(Mandi\u0107Machine).<\/p>\n

Mandi\u0107Machine<\/em> stages 38 torsos of the roles created during the period of 1996\u20132010 in Drama Ljubljana, as well as in smaller venues such as Mini Theatre and Glej Theatre, in the structure of a collage. Every role is articulated and conserved inside the broader frame of Mandi\u0107\u2019s oeuvre, from his first professional role in The Indian Wants the Bronx<\/em> by Israel Horovitz to his Tinker in Sarah Kane\u2019s Cleansed<\/em>, and from roles in Welsh\u2019s Trainspotting, <\/em>Kureishi\u2019s Outskirts<\/em>, Barker\u2019s Europeans<\/em>, Enda Walsh\u2019s Disco Pigs<\/em>, C. Churchill\u2019s Far Away<\/em>, Ma & Al<\/em> after J. D. Salinger, to Macbeth in Heiner M\u00fcller\u2019s Macbeth after Shakespeare<\/em>, Strahlski in Kleist\u2019s Das K\u00e4tchen von Heilbronn<\/em>, Bassanio in Shakespeare\u2019s Merchant of Venice<\/em>, Chekhov\u2019s Platonov<\/em>, and many roles in Slovene national drama by Ivan Cankar or Ivo Svetina.<\/p>\n

A homo ludens in front of us plays his game, being unbound by prejudice or limitations, and does not obfuscate any of his roles. He reveals that the memory of the actor is a carbon paper, a sponge that absorbs everything, until it is \u201coverwritten\u201d, a sort of palimpsest. However, the fuel of the Mandi\u0107Machine<\/em> is not pure fragmentation.<\/p>\n

The roles make up a thread of substance regardless of their original success. Therefore the manner of staging is not ostentatious. What attracts attention in the actor\u2019s recapitulation is not the inner logic, not how the roles are put together, but the performative strength of jumping from one state of mind to another that in this flattened, televised era enables us to feel the theatre in its flesh.<\/p>\n

Mandi\u0107 takes over the attributes of a machine, of its irrational and, in a way, comical fixation on reconstruction, multiplication or the erasure of moments, images, words, and thoughts. He constructs reality as an enterprise under control, also including some unexpected adrenaline shocks. As an actor, he is fixed only on the technology of one\u2019s own self. The political strength of this excess is limited, but there is no artificial boundary left in the relationship with the spectators.<\/p>\n

\"Marko
Marko Mandic in close contact with his audience during MandicMachine. \u00a9 Marcandrea<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\""Marko
“Marko Mandic in close contact with his audience during MandicMachine. \u00a9 Marcandrea<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Marko
Marko Mandic in close contact with his audience during MandicMachine. \u00a9 Marcandrea<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The performance involves the continuous inclusion of the spectators: Mandi\u0107 is distributing some of his props (caps or crowns) among spectators in order to invite them later onto the stage in a most subtle way: he asks them to jump into a supporting role with their body and presence. The accidental visitors enable him to evolve his role anew. In this way, Mandi\u0107 crowns the spectator: he acts to reach him\/her and thus moves away from narcissism, at the same time tempting the spectator into the sphere of the imaginary. The audience\u2019s identification with the fragile, numb individuals on stage, who are guarded by the star\/actor, offers an extraordinary experience. Mandi\u0107stroj<\/em> and Mandi\u0107 himself become unique in this presence whose essence is pure theatrical playfulness.<\/p>\n

\"Marko
Marko Mandic goes through 38 of his roles between the years 1996-2010 in his MandicMachine. \u00a9 Marcandrea<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is how Marin Bla\u017eevi\u0107 and Bojan Jablanovec accompany the performance essay Mandi\u0107? What the fuck is Mandi\u0107?<\/em> (2011): \u201cOwing to digital technologies which allow us to virtualize, archive, transmit, mediate and network all kinds of data, nowadays it is possible to endlessly restore and reproduce, share and show, edit or delete the moments, images, words, thoughts of our life without a risky contact of two bodies, a suspense about reaction of somebody else. Our digital apparitions may be exposed and observed in the virtual world, yet our coexistence with others is becoming quite conservative\u2014an interaction without a real risk. (\u2026) It seems that insistence on the body and live presence is nowadays, and already, an anachronism of liveness; that live experience, as \u201cthe subject of the work\u201d of contemporary performance art, is simply no longer real without digitalization of presence.<\/em>\u201d (Performance Studies International Conference 17<\/em> in Utrecht<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Mandi\u0107stroj<\/em> plays with roles at the meta-level, simulates them, already \u201cwithdrawn\u201d from them, re-enacts them, as if the actor had never left and will never leave their trajectory (the relation between the \u201coriginal\u201d and \u201crepetition\u201d has often been dealt with in various performances of Via Negativa<\/em>). Actually he has the freedom to play with copies of his live presence; to list and arrange his \u201cportrait of the actor as a young man.\u201d The auditorium is not faced with dead historical matters through which the actor would point out that he still masters them. Mandi\u0107 tries out a new form of conservation of past acting material. In a way, he digitizes his own presence live.<\/p>\n

Mandi\u0107 jumps over the reductions of the written records and reduces himself on his own. He does not really want to get conserved and shows a different form of (auto)archiving. A live encounter can do more. As Vasja Predan said at the 1987 symposium, even a spectator\u2019s memory of a single role reveals more than anything that can be read about the actor, and in a different way. It is as simple as that: physical experience gets recognized by a subjective gaze more easily. When the experience exceeds pure memory, the actor ceases to be an archeological fossil. The spectator catches the essence of Mandi\u0107 in the live confrontation with him, this is what makes the actor paradoxically (instantly) eternal in the secret of his art, not tied to anecdotes or handy fables.<\/p>\n

The original text on Mandi\u0107stroj<\/em> was published as an editorial in Dialogi, year 2012, no. 3-4: http:\/\/www.eurozine.com\/articles\/2012-08-28-jesenko-sl.html<\/a><\/p>\n

Translated by Helena Pivec, Jean McCollister and Primo\u017e Jesenko<\/p>\n

\n

Endnote<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n<\/a>[1] Papers from the symposium were published in Maske, no. 10\/11, vol. 4 (1988\/89), p. 77\u221296<\/p>\n

\n

\"1377987881\"<\/p>\n

<\/a>*Primo\u017e Jesenko<\/strong> (*1975) is a dramaturg, theatre critic and researcher, with particular focus on experimental theatre tendencies. He received his M.A. in Theatre Studies at the Academy of Theatre, Film, Radio and Television at the University of Ljubljana; his book Dramaturgical Concepts in Slovene Theatre 1950-1970<\/em> was published in 2008. He is editor of the journal Dialogi<\/em>‘s performing arts section. He has participated in various research projects (i. e. TACE\u2014Occupying Spaces: Experimental Theatre in Central Europe<\/em>, National Theatre Museum of Slovenia; Performing Visuality, Performing Life<\/em>, Maska Ljubljana) and numerous international festivals, exhibitions and colloquia (i. e. Exodos Festival, Ljubljana, 2006-2008; Performing Revolution<\/em>, New York, 2009). Since 2012 he has worked at the National Theatre Museum of Slovenia. In 2010, Jesenko served as chair of the conference on Intercriticism<\/em> at the Maribor Theatre Festival, co-organised with IATC\/AICT.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9<\/strong> 2012 Primo\u017e Jesenko
\nCritical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em> e-ISSN: 2409-7411<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This work is licensed under the
\nCreative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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