At Husets Teater we were led up the stairs and into a room, where chairs were placed by the walls all the way around the room, making up a square stage, where the duo Liebmann/Barkan entered from a door. Small giggles filled the room as the two performers were dressed as hybrids between clowns and robbers, with pantyhose stockings to cover their faces, which were painted in a clownish makeup aesthetic.
The work presents itself as a trivial workshop for serious people. A performance that penetrates, exposes, and ridicules the hyper-object of ECONOMY that rules our life, and threats our common future. Andreas Liebmann and Boaz Barkan continue their workshop-performance series, this time discovering the poetics of economy and is part of festival Managing Discomfort, which is continuing through March and April. Toaster and Live Art Denmark present the performance festival, which includes a number of Danish and international artists whose works have the common denominator that they all deal with discomfort but process it with care and humor.
From the very beginning it seemed as if the work wanted to place itself in-between a state of horror and uncanniness as well as trying to be almost cozy and welcoming. As the performance began, the two performers chanted in fast pace “det er så dejligt / it´s so nice”. It was more disturbing than nice to look at the freakish appearance of the clown robbers, and this dissonance was used throughout the entire performance.
The performance was made up by a choreography, where the audience were included several times, each time by being asked to write a poem that had an instruction in relation to capitalism, such as “imagine you are old and poor” or “imagine the end of capitalism”. In between these direct interactions, the two performers gave rambling lectures on economy as well as had intermezzos of playing cello and dancing with a woman from the audience.
One lecture was giving to us by Liebmann and was about where the term neo-liberalism came from. He started by telling us how every time he goes out to meet up with his friends and they sit down and discuss the problematics of the current state of the global economy, they all just rant: “neo-liberalism, neo-liberalism, neo-liberalism”. But no one really knows what it is and how it came about. When saying the words, Liebmann spoke in a high-pitched manner, sounding like a delirious child.
Liebmann continued then to deep dive into a story of how neo-liberalism was first formed in Austria as a “product” of the first world war. As he tells the story, his pace goes faster and faster, and I am lost in trying to understand the complexities as well as knowing whether he is telling me the truth or not. We are constantly flooded with information and fake news is nothing new, but also just how history has been told. I´m a fool for believing what the clown-robber is telling me or should this be exactly who I listen to?
There have been several interesting works made in the past years about capitalism and economy. Asta Olivia Nordenhof is writing a septology about the fire on the Scandinavian Star ferry, which cost many people their lives and which happened due to arson, to get insurance money. In the first book Penge på lommen (Money in the pocket), there is a section of the book, where Nordenhof steps out of the fiction, and speaks in a direct way about her need to understand capitalism as well as sensing how intertwined and confusing it actually is. The same is at stake in Don´t pay your debts where the two performers wander around the stage and try to uncuff themselves both from each other as well as the deep-rooted idea that we are free to do what we want – especially if we have enough money or perhaps enough debt.
I know what I´m a sucker for when seeing art: being moved. It´s an allusive quality and it´s hard to know just how to get “there”. Both for me as well as for art. But often it happens if intimacy arises somehow between me and the work. Was I moved by Don´t Pay your Debts? In glimpses, yes, but overall, no. But I am not sure if they wanted the audience to be moved or if they want to tickle our intellects. Perhaps both.
At one point, Barkan asked the audience:
“Who here is a capitalist?”
Only the two performers as well as few of the audience members raised their hands. I didn´t, but was caught in this naïve, yet impossible question. All of us sitting there seemed to agree upon that capitalism sucks, yet we all live in it and with it, and when are we actually able to be anti-capitalist? It was efficient and revealing: you want to say no but is it even possible?
I think it would have served the work if the two performers had leant into “the clown” even more. By that I mean that the clown is an emensively interesting character, as it represents, historically speaking, the person who with humor is able to point out the ideocracy of the society which surrounds them, but doing so by making people laugh but alsocry. It was the latter which was missing a bit for me – opening a space for us not only to laugh but also mourn the catastrophic effects of capitalism which is by now visible in every part of both our global system as well as our individual bodies.