ELIZABETA KOSTADINOVSKA :: Love is Punk not Dead :: interdisciplinary, multilingual and multimedia poetry performance with dance :: music by LAIBACH
The Artwork :: Love is Punk not Dead
The Performance :: Live stream from the Biennial of contemporary arts :: SlovoKult :: literARTour :: 23.12.20 :: ACUD-Theater Berlin :: Pictures by Peter Zach and Link to the video below
DEUTSCH
Love is Punk not Dead
When creating the artwork (From: The Deconstructed Novel) it was not planned to include the music or art of Laibach, but when I thought of a multimedia art+poetry+dance performance, Laibach immediately came to my mind and exactly these two songs… Then I thought of the cross on my work as an ingenious connection (I had worn the cross as “jewelry” on my décolleté before as well, it is not special for this performance). Then everything was adjusted in my head – I was very happy that Laibach gave me a short term permission to use the songs – then the video was put together for the background – and I did some text rehearsal with my poem to the music.
The pictures in the vide (the second part – dance) are all from the internet and describe our present, and I connected them with the word love – what is Love?
My answer – Love is Punk not Dead.
The Art
I am a daughter of Laibach, born and raised in Yugoslavia, we were lucky to experience art so freely and close, especially important, the music scene. Laibach, together with other great bands, were the shapers of our personality. Criticism has always been the most beautiful thing in art, if it is good, deep, original and significant, it has its meaning. Laibach remained faithful to their art, to which we owe a lot and this is my thanks to Laibach, for the great youth, for the original, special and critical art, which is among the best from Europe.
I am so happy that my art was able to connect with their music and I would like to say something about the art and the current situation, because there is another connection to Laibach: the last thing I was allowed to watch in the theater was „Wir sind das Volk“ – Laibach – with texts by Heiner Müller at HAU – and that is a universe of art offer in space, you can’t quite capture that with the camera. Of course you can make a great film out of it, but as a direct transmission, you can never have the whole picture. That’s high art that we have to make freely accessible again.
My performance (as the whole festival) is much smaller and simpler, a mini-production, but there you don’t see everything either – the picture is always cut, the music is not as great as in the room, and you don’t communicate with the action right away – BECAUSE YOU DON’T HAVE THE WHOLE PICTURE – and the atmosphere to go with it.
Art can’t work only on the monitor, just like concerts and many other things. To have it is a basic right. That artists survive is also a basic right. That many people survive this crisis is also a basic right. That poor people fill the intensive care units and have the bad covid-conditions is a fact, as is that children are not at risk and are not a great danger – life must go on, we must fight poverty, make vitamins mandatory for health insurance and talk about immunity instead of vaccination. That would be love. We always need to have the whole/complete picture so we can imagine a future. Half the picture isn’t even the present, it’s just a reflection from the past.
Love is Punk not Dead wants to say, love is not only what you think it is, it is much more than that… and mankind is still not so far to see the whole picture to get close to love, love is punk not dead actually says itself everything, it is ambiguous. And for this, however, you must first get to know yourself, and that is not possible in our capitalist present (which lasts a very very long time). That’s why you rebel with love – in the name of justice – but besides for family, friends, planet – and surely LGBTQ free love, we also have to slowly free love from the purely sexual, natural and spiritual (religious) forms and spiritualize it. This can only be done with art, education and social, political and human responsibility. If all this works, then love is indeed the greatest force (die größte Kraft), because everything must be redefined and made functional: for the love and sake of the human being. When you act in this way, you are also acting in the spirit of truth. This is a simple but tough term.
And there the whole picture is also connected with Julian Assange, he is the person of our time who is punished for revealing the truth – and we all watch because we lose the sense of love and justice and that is exactly what he reminds us of: one must not tolerate injustice, one must always look closer (3D not HD) and have the whole picture in front of one’s eyes – not only partial picture or half or pieces, the whole picture including oneself in it. But all the images become incomplete and one makes them even more unclear and absurd, whereby we again face a catastrophe. Not so clear, but these things are in the experimental bilingual text – the very personal love asks questions and the person understands self and understands the love at the same time … that it is exactly Punk and not Dead, as you should be yourself – to be just, you often have to be disobedient, to understand love, you have to be disobedient – because ultimately to know yourself, you have to be disobedient.
Dance is a kind of disobedience and freedom, you communicate on other levels, and if there is a text/lyrics on the music, even better, but depends on the performance. I have different spectrum of feelings, I can transport through the dance, it connects to the poetry and to the moment of reality – I don’t have any special choreography, I don’t practice or do rehearsals, I just dance to the video I make (for the background) and the music (loud) I chose for the performance and enjoy the feeling. But I choose songs I have special connection to. Laibach is a very special one, as I described – I had only few dance performances till now with music by X-mal Deutschland, and one with 13 song pieces connected to „Love declaration“), but also multimedia poetry performances with music by WSR, Iver Ask Overgaard, CNM… to be continued … One of my Collages (Die Störung) with text and performance ends with the words: Dance out of Now ::
Video on Youtube ::