Interview: Maria Magdalena Kozłowska en Pankaj Tiwari

You two met at DAS Graduate School of the Academy of Theatre and Dance. You both came here from abroad. Can you tell a bit about your background and what made you come to Amsterdam?

Maria: ‘I was born in Zielona Góra, Western Poland, where I was part of a youth theatre group ever since I was 12. I moved to Warsaw when I was 18 and I started working in performing arts and made some video works. I’ve always seen myself as an interdisciplinary artist, on the verge of theatre, performance art and music. The human voice has always been central to my practice. I feel that it has both physical and symbolic qualities. Besides working with professional singers, I started working with choirs of people that are not professionals. I came to DAS in the Netherlands seeking a place where there was already a context and facilitation of the interdisciplinary and experimental way of thinking about theater, music and performing arts.’

Pankaj: ‘Where I come from, a city on the border of India and Nepal, there was no space for art, especially for those that are not upper-class. So, I only got involved in theater after I went to study science at the university in 2009 and there turned out to be a very active theater community. The only way for me to continue exploring theater, was by continuing my studies at university, so that’s why I did six masters, until I came to Europe in 2019. From acting and directing, I moved to performance art. At DAS I realized I also have potential to curate: I like cooperating and I am good at building structures.’

You’ve made other projects together in the past years, what brought you together?
M&P: ‘We first started working together during the pandemic, when we were forced to take our work into public spaces. Our first bigger scale collaboration was Opera to the people, where we decided to perform a sound piece from a boat. This was ‘safe’, corona wise, but less ‘safe’ in terms of the expectations of the audience. We both find it very interesting to think about spectatorship and the effects of bringing spectacle in public space. When does it stop being art and pop into other practices? To look for those borders, means to create a productive confusion. We don’t see confusion as a bad thing, it’s often the starting point of a conversation.

We come from different parts of the world, and it feels like we carry some luggage of experience and perspective with us, that we recognized in one another. We formed what we call The Academy of New Rituals. How far can we go with building realities and how can the structures that we carry from our ancestors be of use today? Our work is often a reaction to something we perceive as an existing tension or a juxtaposition in society. We find artistic answers to reality or social phenomena that almost feel like riddles. Such ‘answers’ can be an angle that we didn’t see before, or an unexpected connection between things, or between art and science. ‘

When did you first hear about Jérôme Bel and what did that mean to you?
Maria: ‘I have been familiar with the work of Jérôme Bel for a long time: when I collaborated with dancers and choreographers in Poland, they were fascinated with Bel, because he brought this wind of speculation about what dance is and how a body on stage is perceived. He questions the relationship between the audience and the bodies on stage, for example by casting nonprofessional dancers. He was the first to show that every body can be a dancing body. Very liberating!

Personally, I admire his sense of humor. He plays with the expectations of the audience by opposing the way people look, to how they dance. This is very close to how I see humor in art: it’s not just about making people laugh, but about how we negotiate what we find understandable and what stays obscure. Humor is always on the verge of what we know and don’t know: things that seem familiar combined with a strong element of surprise cause us to laugh. This is a very deep artistic philosophy, and it creates meaningful art practice.’

Pankaj: ‘The first thing I learned about Jérôme Bel, was about how he was promoting the idea that people shouldn’t travel by plane, because of the environment. When I came to Europe, this discussion about flying was going on. At first the topic made me feel angry, because when people look at things this way, they forget the different realities worldwide around flying. For me personally, flying was very liberating. I was the first in my family to fly, and now I felt judged for it. It inspired me to make the project Paper plane, that consists of fifteen thousand paper planes. It’s about the dream that flying represents to so many people.

Now I have come to understand the discussion better. It’s not so much about flying across the world to a better life, but against the mentality of flying back and forth needlessly. What I find particularly interesting about this discussion, though, are the real underlying issues, like climate justice. Ninety-five percent of pollution is caused by corporate companies, instead of individuals. How can we include that fact into this conversation, and get past individual feelings of guilt?

If I take this a step further, I see the same issues occur in the art world; most art fits into the market structure, it is sponsored and funded by festivals and companies, and so they prevent us from addressing the real issues. I aim to make art that doesn’t fit into the market structure and doesn’t talk about the subjects that big companies want the discourse to be. As artists we cannot change the world, but we can give direction to the conversation. That’s why we aim to create discourse, instead of following it.’

What was your first impression when reading this ‘Auto-bio-choreo-graphy’ that tells Jérôme Bels’ career?
M&P: ‘We wondered immediately: how will this sound like coming from our mouths? It is written for one person and yet we were asked to do it together. Also: we are not dancers or actors, but independent artists. Imagining how we would channel his work and words, has a comical effect. It is very charged: an eastern European woman and Indian man become this famous French choreographer on stage. Our bodies as carriers of this monolog, propose a certain tension. The audience can clearly see that we don’t fit into this physical and social reality we are representing. The contrast is very big. Theater is always about representation and embodiment, but in this case it’s spicy because it’s this autobiography of an artist that often does biographies of other artists, and here we are embodying him.’

What makes the contrast so big?
M&P: ‘We are in different places in time and in our career. Bel is established and summarizes his career, where we feel we are still constructing our position as artists. The way he sees himself is also representative of an older generation. In his prime, the possibilities of art seemed endless. We are more humble in that sense. He also used very different language than we would use now, such as ‘disabled theatre’ – this sounds disrespectful today. So, there is a lot of interesting tensions we found, that we like to play with. In the performance a game of identity and representation unfolds that brings up lots of interesting questions, such as: who is representing whom, and on what terms? What are the roles of Jérôme Bel, of the festival, of us, of the audience: we give a lot of thoughts to all those entanglements.’

Is this question of identity the main theme of the performance?
M&P: ‘Equally important is of course the topic of sustainability. We feel the need to take part in this conversation and raise our voices, to point out certain elements of this conversation that we feel are not vocalized loud enough yet. It is about sustainability in general, but also very specifically in the art field. It feels very urgent to take part in this conversation now, about what our field can and should become. Not just by using words, but by really facing the new challenges and needs. We really care and want to be meaningful in a practical way: what resources will the next generations have, and how do the rules of the field function? Are we able, for example, to help young artists to earn enough without having to travel?’

The idea of this piece is that it should be performed by local performers and it should be done in a sustainable way. Can you tell something about how you are staging it, and what are the biggest challenges for you?
M&P: ‘Our practice is already very sustainable, so in that sense we fit right into this concept. We are not allowed to buy any tools or costumes, but we can use what is available and that is enough. The biggest challenge is that we are together on the stage when it’s written as a monologue. As said, this is something we play with. And we have invited a third ‘performer’ on stage: the light design by Nick Verstand.
We follow the rules and the text Jérôme Bel gave us very strictly, and at the same time we really perform it in our way. By giving it intonation and musicality, we will reveal meanings that are not explicit. That’s how we really make this piece our own.’