Popular Culture and Ethics Research Group
Reviews
Fake Porno: An interactive cabaret-multi-media happening
Original script in Serbian by Milena Bogavac, Jelena Bogavac and Filip Vujošević
(First performed in London in 2005)
Translated, adapted and directed by Bojana Novaković
Produced by Pia Johnson
Presented by Lupa/art and ride on theatre
Reviewed by Slobodanka M Vladiv-Glover
Artistic pornography erupted as a force liberating European culture from the ideals of Humanism in the prose of the Marquis de Sade at the time of the French Revolution. In his 120 Days of Sodom, de Sade unleashed the flow of language as an elemental force whose mainspring was in human sexuality and the drives of the unconscious – sex, death and sadomasochism. These negative drives were the new groundless ground on which post-Enlightenment European Man had to find his bearings in a universe without God (both de Sade and Voltaire were atheists) and where transgression was the only means by which meaning could be constituted. The 19th century regarded De Sade as a proscribed author, to be read only in secret, although major writers, such as Dostoevsky, knew his artistic value. It was through the French Existentialists of the 20th century, led by Simone de Beauvoir’s question “Must we burn de Sade?” (1955) that artistic pornography found its proper place among the genres of European literature of Modernity.
Fake Porno is a polyphonic dramatic monologue which appears to be well aware of its literary genealogy. While it is staged and thus a little more immediately present to its audience than de Sade’s stylized narratives in which pornographic acts are pure representations, the virtual reality of the theatre imposes a similar restraint on Fake Porno. Despite its immediacy, Fake Porno is a narrative like any other narrative, with pornography as one – albeit prominent – element of its structure. Hence the “fake” in the title. If one comes to Fake Porno for simple amusement and titillation of the senses, one would have to ask for one’s money back.
Pornography in Fake Porno functions – unlike in its Sadean model – as social and cultural critique. This critique is directed at a post-Communist post-1990s-wars Serbian civil society, stripped of all earlier value systems and functioning in a kind of existential “stone-age,” in which all relations reduce to a demand addressed to an unresponsive ‘Other’ who is either absent or deaf or mute. This ‘autistic’ or retarded ‘Other’ is the only object of desire left to a civil population stripped of all civil support systems and of a nation-building state structure. The desparate search for individual and collective identity or community is reflected in the facile copying of models of mass and popular culture from abroad, which range from old icons such as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, to the contemporary idols of rap, rock and pop. Young Serbia in search of its own voice finds it in the slang of American black urban culture. One of the female characters – Little Kim – even speaks with a Southern black accent and uses gestures and body language of black rap art and black ghetto English. (The Serbian original manages a similar stylization).
In this urban cultural desert, in which remnants of Serbian folk culture are reduced to the same aesthetic level as Western mass pop culture and are consumed only as a virtual reality on screen and the airwaves, remnants of the old patriarchal society of Communism remain extant in the exploitative patronage system of small business enterprises (such as bars and taxi services), and manifest themselves in family violence (the taxi driver is going to jail for abusing his wife), petty juvenile crime (Gypsy’s friend who steals Nike shoes in serial raids on shopping malls) and prostitution (all the female characters refer to themselves as “whores” in one context or another).
The most memorable aspect of this polyphonic dramatic monologue-dialogue is its explosive energy of gesture, word and mime. It is a riot of expressivity. It places great physical demands on its actors: the girls have to be very athletic to manage the gyrations around the strip-bar pole, and all actors are taxed with protracted facial and gestural performances in enduring monologues – in themselves all mini-monodramas. The voices and mimicry are supported by virtual voices and on-screen projections. These are made up of discontinuous and random footage of Belgrade street scenes (alluding, perhaps, to Dziga Vertov’s kinoglaz documentaries in revolutionary Leningrad), or of bands playing popular Serbian and Croatian songs, representing the last vestiges of the former “Bratstvo-Jedinstvo” [Brotherhood and Unity] of the multi-ethnic Third Yugoslavia of which Young Serbia of Fake Porno appears barely cognisant. The only structurally motivated segments of on-screen projections are the scenes ‘taped’ by the Taxi-Driver in his taxi, explained by him in terms of social research but in fact constituting his voyeuristic desire. The Taxi-Driver’s tapes appear to punctuate the dramatic monologue-dialogue in the manner of musical staves without creating a rupture that would separate the flow of speech of Fake Porno into dramatic acts.
The expressivity of Fake Porno is the fitting formless form for what amounts to the message of this dramatic work. It is a cry – a cry of heart-felt pain by all the characters who together and separately represent the excluded. All the characters feel excluded – whether they have money or celebrity status or not. It is as if Serbia’s exile from Europe and the world since its descent into pariah status as a result of its perceived or actual infamy during the Balkan conflict of the 1990s resulted in a mass psychosis, coming to expression as the destruction of community and mass alienation inside the Serbian social fabric. The final image of alienation and destruction of national identity comes in the final scene in which a young bride – played by a cross-dressed male actor – jumps off the old Central Committee Building, which has been defunct since the bombing of Belgrade by the Americans in 1999. It is new Serbia committing suicide on the ruins of old Communist Serbia. The transvestite bride, while a symbol of a new sexual and social freedom, evident also in the monologue of Little Kim, is left with an absent bridegroom and a ‘history’ constructed in 12 SMS messages on her mobile phone – the size of the phone’s memory. Without a future and with a memory of the past that is atrophied and blacked-out by gadgetry and pop culture idolatry, the only way out of despair is self-annihilation.
This seems an overly pessimistic message but to have optimism at the end of Fake Porno would render it into a socialist realist play. True optimism does not have to assume declarative and triumphal form. True optimism is there, in the critique which makes the spectators of the play think with and feel empathy for the characters. The interactive structure of the play, which is staged as a cabaret performance with free interaction between actors and audience, even to the point of members of the audience being invited to dance with the actors, assists the creation of community which serves as a direct and immediate response to the cry of the Taxi-Driver: “I need a friend!” Thus Fake Porno as performance becomes an exercise in community building. And to build community is the first step towards re-building the (Serbian) nation.
Fake Porno originated in a society in crisis – the new Serbia of the 21st century. Its staging in Melbourne, in English, transposes the theme of crisis into a different social context. At first, a Melbourne audience not particularly attune to Serbia’s recent history (although it would have been hard to ignore due to extensive media coverage in the 1990s) or Serbia’s culture, would perhaps feel somewhat alienated by the intensity of it all. This is where the team of producer, director and actors have performed a wonderful intercultural service for the Australian community at large. For the production team – with its translator and adaptor at the head - have rendered a regional theme into a universal theme which can address any audience, in any society since what is represented is an actuality in the form of a potentiality. Art is always a hypothesis, and Fake Porno is art. As art, it presents audiences of the world with concrete human situations in hypothetical or potential form. These potentialities have force, they are potent and they are also portents. As portents, they announce a better future irrespective of the gravity of the stated problem. This future is in the expression and consciousness of the problem which, once given form and analysed, disappears like the Freudian symptom.