The dance of the looked-down-upon

Sclavi portrays the exile of generations of displaced Slavic people and the scorn they endure in their adopted countries, the…

Sclavi portrays the exile of generations of displaced Slavic people and the scorn they endure in their adopted countries, the director tells Peter Crawley

'Actually," announces Viliam Docolomansky, just as the interview appears to be winding up, "I should give you the question." The Slovakian director of the Czech Republic's much garlanded dance-theatre company, Farm in the Cave, is clearly fond of probing questions. We have been discussing the themes his company's extraordinary piece Sclavi/The Song of an Emigrant, which portrays the agony and exile of generations of displaced Slavic people through movement and music. Now Docolomansky decides to turn the tables.

"You are in Ireland," he states, uncontentiously, although something provocative has crept into his tone. "If there is a shop assistant - I don't know, a Polish girl or whatever - do you feel something? Don't you look a little bit [ down] on that person?" Before a defence can be properly spluttered, Docolomansky's thoughts have galloped ahead. "Because we do somehow. Here in Prague there are many Ukrainians cleaning toilets and doing dishes and this kind of work. I think [ a feeling] is generally spreading inside of people; this kind of scorning of those people who have lived all their lives without any social security, who are in this kind of difficult situation."

This scorning, as Docolomansky portrays it, is a complicated phenomenon, one that he believes can exist even among different generations of the same family of migrant workers as each age group seeks to distance itself from exploitation and victimhood. Slavery may strike us as a severe term for the experience of the migrant worker. But when that word shares its origin with that of the Slavs themselves (the Latin sclavus) it is clear that Docolomansky is contending with the idea of an ethnicity defined by subjugation. Or, as he puts it, "why are we still this cheap source of labour?". The roots of Sclavi, a poundingly physical production of impassioned song and frenetic motion, are in an expedition that Docolomansky and his company undertook to various villages in eastern Slovakia, his homeland. There they interviewed countless villagers, found old letters from several Slovak emigrants, and collected the Ruthenian and Ukrainian folk songs that form the musical and narrative substance of the piece.

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"We heard the songs which anonymous migrant workers composed during their stay in the United States," explains Docolomansky. "This was the basic inspiration to make a performance about emigration, which is a very universal human topic."

Though also based on the novel Hordubal by Czech writer Karel Capek (who, incidentally, gave the world the word "robot"), in which a man discovers his life has been irrevocably changed upon returning to his Czechoslovakian farm from the US, Sclavi is not indebted to traditional narrative. "Basically, our company works in such a way that we try [ to construct performance] straight from reality," Docolomansky explains. How the company communicates such reality, however, tends to transcend the literal, favouring an abstract vocabulary of music and dance.

"Of course, I would a little bit disagree that the language of body is abstract," Docolomansky counters. In fact, he considers it the most direct form of communication possible. "We try to communicate through vibration," he says, "through the [ immediate] impact of the energy of the movement, of the voice, of the whole presence and performance. So this is the basic communication we are trying to approach wherever we are, and it's not really important what kind of nationalities the audience are." Nor does Docolomansky consider the nationalities within his ensemble important, although - at a quick tally - their members hail from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Serbia, Poland, South Korea, Argentina, Germany and Italy.

If such a broad panoply has informed Farm in the Cave's performance methods, leading them away from productions with "one true interpretation" towards "a poetry on the stage", Docolomansky downplays its significance. "It was not [ the] intention," he says about the company's multicultural make-up. "I think it came rather spontaneously from the fact that we are travelling quite a lot."

The company, he explains, operates a rather inclusive apprenticeship system, accruing international members every couple of years wherever they happen to be.

Where this places the rather nomadic Farm in the Cave (which takes its name from the family home of Frederico García Lorca) in the tradition of Czech theatre is anyone's guess. As a Slovak in Prague, Docolomansky had no particular intention to "continue a specific historical line in Czech theatre". If the company has inherited the political charge of Václav Havel, it is because Docolomansky cannot conceive of any performance without social relevance. Significantly, though he trained as a theatre director, his biography emphasises his achievements in musical composition, and Docolomansky takes quiet pride in comparisons made between his work and that of Emil Burian, the late Czech author, director and composer. As he discusses Sclavi, it is clear that the songs are foremost in his mind. "The real human message is hidden in the songs," he says, explaining that, as bodies leap, entangle and crash in Sclavi, the performers are embodying the music: "These feverish beats, this feverish rhythm, is like the beating heart of an emigrant - a migrant worker."

THIS MAY ACCOUNT for the numerous awards and rapt reviews that have trailed Sclavi from country to country and festival to festival, the responses forming a curious blend of rhapsody and warning. British reviewers have highlighted a show that "can cut you with the agony of its longing" and a "complicated, defiant polyphony", which is "the saddest, purest, most arresting sound" on the stage. Another rave, unlikely to make the posters of either the Clonmel Junction Festival or Earagail Arts Festival in Letterkenny, where Sclavi will be performed next week, opines that the show's themes are like "a dirty grand stream, tearing bodies, hearts, hands, eyes, livers, tongues and consciences".

Anyone can say a production is heart-rending, but how many shows are actually hard on your liver? Sclavi, in the mind of its creator, is certainly shot through with suffering, but it is not without something more redemptive. "If you share some songs of your own culture," he says, "it's like you're sharing part of your body. It's quite intimate in a way."

The contacts the company members made with Slovakian villagers developed into warm relationships. "Somehow this connection was very natural," he continues, "and in the end all of them were very grateful that we had respected their culture, the beauty and the depth inside their culture. In the end they were proud." It is particularly poignant to renew contact with those villagers, Docolomansky admits, and discover that some of their contacts have died. On a recent visit, a number of company members accompanied an elderly villager to the grave of his wife, who they had interviewed a couple of years earlier. "All of us, you and me, we are living in a privileged culture," says Docolomansky. "When you go to these kinds of places and meet these kinds of people, you find yourself a little bit dead. Suddenly you feel that these people are more alive. The way they live, how they love and how they are able to die is very inspiring." There is, Docolomansky admits, a Czech humour in Sclavi - a dry capacity for self-irony - that balances the pain and aggression of the performance.

He is amused at the suggestion that this extremely successful and endlessly touring production may turn the company into migrant workers of the art world. "Well," he considers, "international festivals give us good working conditions. They treat us respectfully. So it wouldn't be a parallel." He begins to chuckle, however, as he is taken with an idea of artistic servitude. "Actually this kind of work is a way of serving something bigger than you are," he concludes. "So it makes us happy if we feel its resonation with the audience. And we, as Slavs, are very good at serving."

Sclavi is at the Clonmel Junction Festival (www.junctionfestival.com) on July 10 and 11 and the Earagail Arts Festival (www.eaf.ie) on July 13, 14 and 15. Both festivals start today