Sad Sam Revisited ^{2 0 0 4}

Ferlin’s spaces are not only colonised by emotions, but also claimed through them, often generating discomfort in the audience that is confronted with an uncanny gaze. A queer pleasure inhabits new spaces, beyond scripted impressions, often private ones, ripped from the most intimate histories that would never enter official narrative. Marina Gržinić argues that Ferlin’s Sad Sam Revisited is a “performance with sharp discontinuities in the narration (that are possible as well to be seen but from very afar as references to Jérôme Bel dance performances)”, facing its viewers with a de-stratified “set of anti-actions each pushing Ferlin’s body/mind/presence/absence to and over the edge”. The author emphasizes a long, almost Deleuzian, repetitive sequence where a performer, hidden behind a big loudspeaker, with only a microphone, queering and teasing, even though he is not entirely visible to the audience, “produces a sound that forces us to think that he masturbates (what else we do these days?). When Ferlin reapers in front of us we see that he rubbed with the microphone his chest so violently that his skin is long after painfully red. He lip-synchs few old and deadly romantic pop songs in front of the public so persistently long that what was at first, during the first song just a failed karaoke encounter with the public, is soon because of his stubborn in-sistence (he lip-synchs forever!) a repetition of ex-sistence at its purest”. Even if one is not eager to interpret his solo performance in this way, an utmost insistence of repetition—either in walking patterns, endless synchronizations, or proxemic forthcomings, e.g., in different bodily announcements—is quite obvious. But this repetition only dismantles the global narrative, precisely as being global, universal, resisting every kind of social or political appropriation, and, again obviously, being immanently intimate and present. A long-term project titled Sad Sam was launched in 2004, creating a tension between Croatian version of the title (Sad Sam as Now I Am or Now Alone)—which alludes to an intimate psychological portrait of an auto-fictional character—and the implied Englishness of this title (Sad Sam as Tužni Sam). Notably, the attention to present moment, as a driving force of Ferlin’s choreo-writing, has been expressed in this performance in multiple variations. The performer comes alone on the stage—in later versions, he stands still, waiting for the audience to enter—having many clothespins on his face. This sequence of de-gesturing is, maybe, the queerest moment of the piece, because it presumes, both, a warming up exercise for an actor’s face, as well as its minus procedure, a strategy of eliminating every possibility of gesticulation by applying rigid fixation—almost in a way like classical ballet “fixates” its dancer’s body—to one’s own face. This is not theatre, because every possibility of gesturing, hence, becomes redundant. Is it, therefore, a dance? After that, the audience is confronted with a series of repetitive movements that try not to correspond with dance, whether being responsive to music, lines of narrative projected in the background, or props from everyday life. These dramaturgical devices, nevertheless, resist every kind of script, even appealing for the total deconstruction of its own narrative, re-acting to and resonating with quotidian bodily procedures, persistent in their revival, reusage, and even recycling. The only presence being represented here is a personal story from the author’s life, although in a form of continuation of a conceptual current in de-choreographing dance, with visible influences from the Dutch improvisation practice. The horizon of the stage is, therefore, transformed into pure presence, where everything that goes out of the frame, e.g., as his empty walks, his redundancy, his stage inaction, or even his ill-tunned lip-singing impro, turn into an important semantic link towards anything what is about to be transgressed, therefore, anything that does not correspond to a process of differing as such. Sad Sam Revisited encapsulates the procedures of contemporary performance and dance with an unexpected contingency, de-choreographing not only his own dancing habitus, his private embodied history, but also demanding performative stamina in a variety of non-acts of duration, of persisting in forming a bodily ascetism instead of stage dynamics, albeit never wavering to interrupt the narrative. The palette of Ferlin’s performing corpus in Sad Sam Revisited already incorporates recognisable sequences of the physical procedures he will use in later Sad Sam performances, as well as some experimental pieces that date from the same period, e.g., the video-performance 4:48, inspired by Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis, where he employs similar music patterns, repetitive bodily expressions, all “tunned” to a projected narrative, but this time in a form of subtitles. Even some motives reoccur, e.g., the one with clothespins attached to his face, the skilful shifting between disclosure and hiding, between humour and dryness. If 4:48 performatively played with the traumatic fragments by Sarah Kane, Sad Sam Revisited almost parasites on poetic fragments written by Katalina Mella, never colliding with them, never directly referring to them. A pain that is being supressed, a traumatic experience, does not extend the expressiveness of the projected verses, neither it supplements them. One can imagine a fictional, or even real narrative behind these verses, but its existence is twisted, deviated, queered somewhere on the surface of the performer’s body.

PHOTOS BY SANTIAGO SEPULVEDA