It took over all of LaMama with 16 productions in 10 days, March 11^-20, 2011: The Croatian Perforations Festival, produced by Zvonimir Dobrovic in collaboration with LaMama, presented the darker side of the Balkans.

Kicking off the festival on March 11 was Ivo Dimchev, a Bulgarian, presenting his signature solo “Lili Handel,” a melancholic portrayal of an aging diva at the crossroads. Wearing black high heels and a black feather coat, Lili’s clunky entrance revealed a tragicomic existence nearing its end. Her routines wore on like a routine as she vamped from one schtick to the next, looking like any number of performance art pieces of this genre. But unlike so many others, Dimchev pulled this one off by making us interested in who Lili is or was. It didn’t hurt that his mesmerizing singing voice, a tragic warble of shrill tones and overtones, hung in the air like cigar smoke at a men’s club.

When Lili seated herself center stage in a red leather armchair and disrobed down to a g-string of pearls, her gyrations and contortions enhanced her sense of ennui; and somehow piqued my interest in someone who seemed to have lost interest in telling her own story. But things shifted gears when Lili cruised the audience looking for a drinking partner. She coaxed a man out of his seat for a stroll to the lobby, luring him with a promise of a beer at the local bar. Here we experienced the actor behind the woman, the man/woman, bored with role playing but trapped in this role playing.

As Dimchev quickly returning to the stage, the act “got real,” in Lili’s words. In the ultimate act of the body as art, she extracted blood from her arm with a hypodermic needle and squirted it into a small vial; that sent a few audience members out the door. When the performer began an auction of this “art object,” the audience became electric as she slowly worked the bid up to a $40 sale, delivering the vial to a young man in one of the upper rows.

In ending the piece with the unfurling of a red banner, perhaps a stand-in for her blood, we were left with a reprise of her piercing warble that now sounded heart-wrenchingly like a lost bird or a bird that has lost it all.

“Semi-interpretations or How to Explain Contemporary Dance to an Undead Hare” by BADco from Croatia, on March 12, was staged in the Club LaMama, a smallish space cluttered with cables, light stands, black fabric, and tripods for this performance. Nikolina Pristaš, dressed in black, struggled spatially as she shared the stage with a child-sized black toy rabbit. Often cradling the rabbit like a child, she carried it around the stage, repositioning and posing it while occasionally breaking out into dance reminiscent of Trisha Brown, but also resembling a dancer trapped in a closet. All the while, texts of circular riddles, word puzzles, and Chinese fortunes were projected on one corner of the black curtain, to be quickly forgotten as they lacked relevance. As the dance wore on, I often sensed that the rabbit had it all under control and the dancer was the puppet.

On March 13, Sanja Mitrović’s “A Short History of Crying” presented a quandary. Starting by distributing a few shot of vodka to the audience, and maybe a few gulps for herself (we don’t know for sure because her vodka comes from a different flask), this Serbian performance artist claimed that she has not cried since she was two, and she’s wasn’t sure she did even then. Mitrović thought she might have cried when Tito died, surrounded by her sobbing family, but also might have imagined it.

To figure out the why of crying, Mitrović embarked on a supposed research trip examining the culture of crying. Using the Netherlands, where she lives now, and the Balkans, where her family is from, as her benchmarks, she conjectures on the how and why. My interest in her subject matter quickly waned given the lack of scientific method. Her fanciful methodology included breaking a water glass (fake) on her forehead, lighting up five cigarettes and quickly stubbing them out, and imploring an audience member to help her clear the stage of fake glass chunks with crumpled paper.

All this led up to Mitrović’s attempt to cry as a huge close-up of her face was projected in real-time video, on a screen in the background, an attempt that ended with the comment, “Maybe I should stay in America.” At which point she breaks character, the audience applauds, and she’s brought flowers (a LaMama custom). But no, there’s more. A microphone is brought onstage and Mitrović mimics speeches by Nicole Kidman, Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama that reference crying or included crying. If I thought I was confused before, this coda pushed cacophony over the edge. For crying out loud.

In an act of sewing up the crowd, Petra Kovačić of Croatia literally knitted her audience into Club LaMama in “Act(ing).” After herding the March 14 crowd through a small doorway and into the standing-room-only theater, Kovačić began to seal the doorway with a seemingly limitless skein of white yarn. As the doorway became more obscure, her image faded into a silhouette while the yarn began to glow in beautiful tones of red. As the weave became denser, she became a mere shadow puppet upon a screen. The visual experience was similar to watching a spider create a web from nothing in the space of a few minutes. It was remarkably rewarding, and amazing that a simple idea executed with such precision can possess a beauty all its own.

Kovačić leaves the audience trapped behind a wall where the only exit has been sealed. No one seemed to mind. After a few minutes of perplexity, a pair of scissors was slid slowly under the webbing and the audience freed itself by destroying the artwork that only moments ago intrigued them. (Review based upon the telling by William Schaffner.)

In the “Digitalization of Monumental Heritage and Its Commercial Exploitation,” the American actor, Chris Gerard Heyward, accompanied a video presentation for a company named Artless. Standing behind a lectern, Heyward presented, in corporate infomercial fashion, the strategies of Željko Zorica from Croatia. He solemnly described how Zorica creates, documents, and propagates his artwork of fake historical plaques in honor of a fictitious scholar named H. C. Zabludovsky. Given that people rarely stop and read memorial plaques, Zorica promotes the placement of these plaques in public spaces. To further this end, he recommends that video plaques, which can be updated with commercial messages, replace all historical plaques to provide more diverse content and raise money. This is interesting for only a few minutes; once we got the joke of the somber presentations of meaningless plaques and understood the message, we were done. Unfortunately the presentation droned on, trampling any sense of amusement and excitement that occurred at the beginning of the performance. It may have flown in Croatia but it never got off the ground in NYC on March 14.

At odds with the St. Patrick’s Day festivities was “Damned Be the Traitor of His Homeland” by the Mladinsko Theater of Slovenia, featuring a multi-Balkan cast. Their exploration of cultural hatred in the Balkan region was chilling. From the sobbing, the multi-tonal choral music, and the murderous shootings of the entire cast at point blank range by a deranged character with an all too real looking semi-automatic handgun, this show reached out and grabbed me by the throat. Directed by Oliver Frljić, a Croatian, and featuring Primož Bezjak, 
Olga Grad, 
Uroš Kaurin, 
Boris Kos, 
Uroš Maček,
Draga Potočnjak,
Matej Recer,
Romana Šalehar, Dario Vargas, and
Matija Vastl, “Damned Be the Traitor of His Homeland” ran the gamut of ethnic hatred, mob violence, and single-minded assassination, barely softened by tradition and liturgical music. Although this work has greater meaning for a Balkan audience, the message came through loud and clear: Tribalism will trump morality when all order has perished. In an attempt to re-create an audience-offending diatribe, near the end of the performance Primož Bezjak verbally works over the American audience, trying to foment a nationalistic rise or jingoistic response. Alas, the effort was to no avail, but I admired his attempt to make the work relevant to us. This was the most poignant and purposefully shocking presentation of the entire festival; bring us more of this.

On March 18, the Slovenian company Via Negativa presented “Out,” an event that vaguely resembled a discombobulated performance art piece from the bygone days of Theatre of Cruelty, embodied by its cruelty toward the audience. It begins with a Gregor Zorc, in black briefs sitting in a chair downstage center and ends with the entire cast, mostly naked, on their hands and knees pretending to be dogs, barking and chasing a ball that’s thrown into the audience and obligingly returned to the stage in a game of “catch or fetch” until the ball is lost.

The evening’s highlights included: Zorc pacing the stage screaming, “I need text” repeatedly while foaming at the mouth (Yes, really, he was foaming at the mouth); any number of “Get out, it’s over” and “Thank you for coming” false endings, which appeared to be the group’s hallmark line, including Uroš Kaurin using his penis as a puppet by stretching it’s opening to mimic the lines “The end, it’s over” by stretching his foreskin into a mouth-like shape; Darko Japelj smeared in a brown patina of something, using a fly swatter to conduct canned music.

At each false ending, I was hoping that it really was over. This form of theater has been over and done with for 30 years and I don’t miss it.

On March 19, Via Negativa presented pieces in a three-act format that lasted three hours. It opens with “Game With Toothpicks,” the re-enactment of Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 10, in which five knives, sized from paring to chefs, are plunged, repeatedly, between the splayed fingers of an outstretched hand. The actors, Boris Kadin and Kristian Al Droubi, take turns using the knives, one at a time, in an overhand hammer-like fashion, to stab between the fingers of the other. As each knife is used, the next larger one replaces it. This process continues until both have used all five knives. First we watched snippets of a video of the game in progress, interspersed with commentary by performers Kristian Al Droubi and Boris Kadin that refer to the accidental cutting and bloodletting during the creation of the video. Then we watched the game live. Needless to say, some blood was shed, and some audience members left the room. For a complete description as to how the game is played, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knife_game, check the European version. If the point of the piece—pun intended—was to create tension, it succeeded.

In the second piece, performer Primož Bezjak uses a knee injury as the starting point for a post-modern dance solo, like an awkward Steve Paxton or clumsy Dana Reitz. After each run of a short, maybe two-minute routine, Bezjak has an audience member tape up one of his limbs, and then dances the solo again. His clever use of a now “missing limb” reveals an intriguing element of dance and the fluidity of motion that transcends certain limitations. Eventually, Bezjak has all of his limbs bound, and yet he’s still able to convey the grace and charm of the phases. Thoughts of the war-wounded were immediate and the sense of struggle versus achievement flooded my eyes with tears. Bravo, Bezjak.

The evening concluded with “Tonight I Celebrate,” featuring the innocent looking, devil-in-disguise singer and performer Uroš Kaurin and contrabass by Tomaž Grom, backed by canned music. The piece began as a parody of torch singers, but quickly morphed into an earnest attempt to captivate. Nonetheless, the darker side of Kaurin appeared, disappeared and re-appeared, this time naked with a bouquet of roses. His boy-like persona was juxtaposed by his efforts to force-vomit and urinate (neither very successful) in an attempt to “test our love.” Nonetheless, the audience did love him by reveling in his final song, a punk-rock version of “What a Wonderful World”, a great closer to a mischievously mixed-message act.

Finally, on March 20, the Ivica Buljan/Mini Teater from Croatia/Slovenia presented “Ma and Al,” a study of the loves and hates of a dysfunctional couple. The piece, directed by Ivica Buljan and featuring Senka Bulic and Marko Mandic, with Mitja Vhronik-Smrekar on guitar, was inspired by texts of J.D. Salinger. This George and Martha actually kicked and beat each other with their fists instead of confining themselves to simple verbal abuse, all the while gulping down real red wine. In a room sparsely furnished with a small table, a few chairs, and a plain brown carpet, the couple staggered in from somewhere and the love/hate began.

With wet, full-mouth kisses and bombastic proclamations, this pair found plenty of room for violent disagreement, often initiated by Al. The unsettling mood established by their lack of cohesion and outright repellant natures made me want to scurry away from this domestic mismatch. And I am sure that was the point, to make the audience uncomfortable as unwilling voyeurs into the tragic nature of abuse and victimhood.

In the end, after an unsuspecting audience member was lured onstage for a bacchanal only to be trapped when the fighting resurfaced, the couple donned their wedding outfits and Al carried Ma up to the balcony of LaMama’s Ellen Stewart Theater and away; perhaps to wedded bliss or more likely to more of the hell that we had spent 75 minutes experiencing.

Thus ended the Croatian takeover of LaMama. Maybe next time they will bring a brighter vision of the newly freed Balkan States, and celebrate their bright future instead of fixating on their dark past.

For more Times Square articles like Perforations Festival at LaMama March 11-30, 2011 please visit the Stage reviews Section of TimesSquare.com