Matija Ferlin is a dancer, author, and choreographer living and working in Pula, Toronto, and Ljubljana. After an intense cooperation with Sasha Waltz, he created his own artistic opus, from which one should mention the most recent piece: a serious of solos under the title “Sad Sam”. A new version entitled “Sad Sam Almost Six” will be first presented early in 2009 in Ljubljana.  

For a start, I would like to ask you where you are currently based – mentally, physically, locally, in terms of work?

At the moment, I am in the phase of moving from a small project into a larger one, which has been evolving for a year now, but is not yet really functional. On 30 January, 2009 I will have a premiere of my new solo “Sad Sam Almost Six” in Ljubljana. The rehearsals have been taking place throughout the year in New York and Vienna. I have collaborated only with my dramaturge; in fact, it is the first time that I have an external collaborator, a dramaturge. I have no self-discipline of deadlines and rehearsals; what I want to say is that my stuff is created at home or other places, my reflections take place while I’m driving and I can say that I have no special working time. Inspired by this problem, I decided to take a dramaturge. I could say that I am now in that particular phase of waiting, in which one must simply decide when to enter the last phase of realizing the project. But of course, there is not a single day in which I haven’t made a written note related to the project, I’m constantly involved with it and reading. In a way, I keep accumulating the material.

Can you say something about the problem field of this new solo? What are you dealing with in this work?

So, “Sad Sam Almost Six” or “Now I Am Almost Six” is split into two languages in its very title. The very ambiguity of the title is what interests me, since I don’t want to leave the “Sad Sam” or “Now I Am” structure, it has always been the essence of my work. What I’m dealing with is actually contained in that sentence: “Sad Sam”. I opted for a series of solos, which I hope will be continued, but with one difference, namely that I intend to add various linguistic complements to that linguistic “essence”.

“Sad Sam Almost Six” deals with, or rather explores, represents, and stimulates a period of childhood and its problems, perhaps even the issue of childhood terror, or something that becomes terror with growing up. The solo seeks to evaluate the accuracy of remembering and memory. It is an ode to growing up or perhaps, since the word ode may sound somewhat new-ageish, it would be better to say that I am celebrating a certain period with a certain performance. Perhaps even celebrating sounds... hmm, sort of early Christian, but there is something in that ritual aspect of the process as such. The solo is void of all decorative elements or attempts at seeking dance or dance expression as the last refuge of communication. In that sense, dance will always remain my last option. Thus, everything that comes out earlier are things unrelated to physicality, even though the body or physique is the only medium that is present within. In the context of the “Sad Sam Series,” each solo creates a separate intuitive process as an inspiration for further work, so my wish is that they should keep coming. When I work alone, I always remain tied to the same fields and, however childish it may seem to get tied to a title, I can see that, in a title such as SAD SAM TU (NOW I AM HERE), SAD SAM VAŠ (NOW I AM YOURS), OR SAD SAM BIO (NOW I WAS)... when adding the last word, I always find it interesting to focus on or zoom a certain item or part that I wish to thematize. In these series, there is no problem with inspiration or stimulation whatsoever, since I do not start from a research problem that intrigues me although it doesn’t concern me, but then it still preoccupies me, so I do a study on it. My work in its final form is no study at all, but rather a simulation or documentation of something. Still, I can’t avoid calling it a sort of interpretation as well. I wish to emphasize that “Sad Sam” is all that concerns me, the problem I’m dealing with is always observed from the viewpoint of here and now. If the problem that I am enacting dates from 1984 or 1996, and I am enacting it now, it will not be enacted in the same way in ten years, since my attitude towards the problem will definitely change. What I meant to say is that the manner of enactment is always in an honest relationship with my current state of mind. It may sound abstract, but since I deal with rather personal topics, I need some distance. For that reason, the solos are changing depending on the amount of that distance. For example, five years – I can see it now, with “Sad Sam Revisited” that I’ve produced. After five years something has changed, certain doors have opened to irony and to manipulating the topic. That emotional link is slowly disappearing and another one is created.

Does the personal topic that you detect and take as your starting point refer to the “Sad Sam Series” or is your work generally anchored in your personal interests?

Once someone said to me: “Having a childhood trauma doesn’t make you a better artist but for sure it makes you an interesting artist” (laughs). That was very funny, not because I recognized myself in that sentence, but because I see that I can’t start from conceptualizing something that doesn’t come from me. I see that my interests, even when I write of make photographs... well, I can see that one filter, which starts from me, begins with me, and deals with me. Of course, you always see problems related to such starting points and it becomes very complex if you want to remain in a sort of humility, void of egotism, while dealing only with yourself. Then it becomes a different state, which is interesting for research. So my personal topics are a major source of my work and I don’t really care about the reasons, whether they are therapeutic or fetishist (laughs)... still, I hope that I will not spend my entire life dealing with myself, although I don’t intend to stop because of some decency.

You mentioned the body as your last refuge. Does that describe the solutions to your artistic problems? I’ve made the connection because, if you reach some artistic solutions during processes that are incorporeal, it may be an indication of some solution to an artistic problem.

Well, let’s put it this way... We all tend towards some sort of authenticity or artistic autonomy. I am not especially concerned with it and I am not ashamed of copying, but I have no problems with the unseen either. When I mentioned the body as the last refuge, I was thinking about dance as an expression, dance as the last refuge. Perhaps these issues emerge from a rebellious approach, a wish to “unlearn” all that I have learned. I’m trying to find the holes that are not manifested in my work and sometimes I find myself in a situation where I’m completely void of movements or any physical manifestations of my body, and precisely that is sufficient for me to manifest what I want. But I don’t want to reduce everything to that sort of zero, to that presence-based work, although I see that to raise my left hand in the air and to swing my knee upwards must be very well justified, namely why precisely that is happening in the body. All reasons linked to the personal theme are quite casualty-based, so it is awfully difficult to find any abstraction in that. After all, I mostly start dancing in my performances when the only intention is that it should be read exclusively as dance. Then it loses all other meaning and becomes dance alone. It remains D-A-N-C-E and doesn’t go any further than that. I am not interested in transmitting certain information through the filter of an abstract body if I can say it, sing it, or write it down, since it is much easier to say it by using different methods than with the body. What remains for the dancing body are only those things which it is impossible to write down or project in any other way. In my opinion, that is dance as the last refuge of communication. And since I don’t want to contradict what I said before, that is where I eventually begin to deal with the abstract, since I leave dance for those structures that I cannot transmit in any other way. And then, with all that, there is an aesthetical aspect...

You have very clearly mapped the field in which dance functions somewhat less directly than some of the other media. There is still that myth that dance is actually “capable of almost everything.” I would say that it is a standard and somewhat tacky image of dance as being capable of everything, crossing all borders, liberating, having a social function... What do you say?

I have no idea whether it is related to coming home or I am currently in a phase where I am divided in that sense – I have divided myself between two modes of work. One regards my primordial desire, namely why I’m doing this, and I don’t think about the audience at all. I think that it is a very selfish mode of work and the “Sad Sam” series belong to that part. The other part, which I call “the commercial Matija” and which I’ve stopped being ashamed of in the past year or two – that one deals with different contexts. That Matija functions much better in Pula, let’s say, in the context of INK, than the first Matija. I’m always dealing with the same method, the same materials, only that “the selfish Matija” has the tendency of crossing the borders that he doesn’t even know, while “the commercial Matija” stays within a single principle and a simpler structure. I don’t think it is a failure or defeat if someone tells me after the show that he didn’t understand a single thing, but it is a loss in the very way of representing the work and I don’t want that. I don’t want to produce something that people will immediately reject. I want to set up a piece that is void of understanding, but has some other underline aspect that simulates you. I can look back to a Sad Sam in which I was not moving and which was very reduced, which didn’t communicate and people were getting up and leaving the show, while on the other hand I was invited to open a book fair in Istria with a performance for 800-1000 people that were coming to buy books. I decided to divide it. For example, the show that I was doing in Pula for the INK repertoire: I simply knew that it was vicious to demand that I should do it for an audience that had not witnessed any genesis of contemporary dance. Imagine me coming, standing there with some pegs and manipulating something, la-la-la... I didn’t want to do that to them, because it would have meant that I was producing a gap in a theatre evolution that could only be disturbing. For me as an artist, it was awful to admit that I functioned that way, but since I established these two parallel tracks, things have become much clearer to me. What I meant to say is that my interest is not to be understandable, but to be in a dialogue. With my last piece, I can’t be in a dialogue in a way that I can be in the INK. I don’t think that it means flattering the audience, I simply perceive it as the situation and I intuitively explore the territory, overcoming gaps in those areas in which something is emerging. To sum it up, it is about the labour division and a clear desire for what you want to do and what you’re doing. The moment I placed it in these two fields, new things and reflections opened up about how I could present something as my work, how I could communicate, yet without lying. So it is rather an essential part, while this one is sort of pre-essential...

Can you predict whether the audience will progress, evolve? Will there be time for the essential Matija in those parameters? I suppose that in Zagreb the problem is not as pregnant as in Pula, for that what we call contemporary dance has been on stage for the past, well, let’s say, seventy years (depending where we start our counting), although there is still a part of our audience to which this essential need of the artist to reach his or her limits somehow doesn’t communicate a thing...

I think that in Zagreb everyone can cover that essential field, but in Pula you’re alone and you can’t cover the entire territory by yourself. My “essential Matija” can be a comment on the “commercial Matija”, but it is difficult to comment on contemporary art without neglecting that other part.

Yes, it is about the additional production of context.

Yes, and one should offer some sort of variety, but also a variety in the evolution of one’s work, yet not through something else, in which I am not interested in. For example, I am fully supporting the INK project that deals with the Croatian culture and Croatian musical ties to the festival in ‘89. Other projects are rather referential, so I think that the evolution of this other field is inevitable, it must happen, so that means that if you want to be a B or a C, you must be enough of an A and be consistent in your working methodology.

Now I would like to ask you something specifically linked to the body and the process. Do you practice certain rituals of maintenance? How would you describe your body in terms of process?

The maximum of maintenance and functioning of my body is the fact that I eat and it doesn’t go much further than that. Simply, the self-discipline that was supposed to become some sort of a subject, something that should be present in anyone who is in this field, has somehow bypassed me and my work, so it rather comes to the foreground in that actor’s manner, like “address your body when it’s needed”; before the show, for example. I find it very difficult to speak about self-discipline and about the body as a tool that I am taking care of because I need it for my work. No, there is no such division... Probably if I were a writer, I would not appreciate that typewriter, that keyboard, or a ball-pen. For me, giving importance to the body as a tool is an almost utopian way of working, since I have always wanted to present myself in the way in which I am, in complete sincerity and with all that is happening around me: with a cold, with the arm that I broke in the childhood, etc. Therefore, any definition or workout that I would do on an everyday basis would express a certain hidden wish to maintain my body permanently fit and ready, and that sort of body wouldn’t interest me. I am not interested in a body that is ready for everything, that cannot be surprised, and I’m not interested in a body that is ready for virtuosity. There is something in that living naturalness of an unmodified body. For example, when you tell someone to “stretch his hand”, I appreciate the hand that has not learned it, that has no definition like the hand of a dancer. It is precisely that definition of the body that is created through self-discipline and constant work on yourself, but in my opinion it is detached from the body that interests me. I’m interested, for example, in the body that stands on the stage as a medium and doesn’t do anything. It is a pure body as a zero point from which you start, which means that, as soon you see it, you conclude that it is not a dancing body. There is something in those codes that you want to run away from, even though it is impossible in certain cases. On the other hand, there are dancers who train every day and they can erase it or delete it at any moment, they can stand on the stage with their name and family name and then shift to that sphere of virtuosity with no problem whatsoever. Therefore, in that context I rather behave as a writer who trains his writing. I do not do it for the body and... (knocks three times against a wooden table)... God forbid some sort of handicap should happen and prevent me from doing everything I can do now, but still I doubt that it would stop me from going further. What interests me is the imprinted body. The greatest absurdity is that I teach technique, even a highly energetic class of it, but something has gone wrong with the self-discipline and the working method, perhaps I might call it somewhat... rebellious. First I wanted to go in the direction of extreme physicality. It was more attractive to me than studying the interior of the body or anything else, but now I realize that in that aspect the body is of no interest to me.

What you have just described shows interest for a body that hasn’t been traumatised in terms of vocabulary, so to say. There is an ideological shift there. How would you comment on it? Not only concerning the ideology of creation, but also that of perception.

For example, when I watch Ballet Frankfurt, I cannot ignore that “look what they can do!”

Exactly. So how can we communicate that ideological shift in order to make it happen consciously, over an entire period of reflecting upon virtuosity, and not only by accident – as if it were only an excess within the field of high virtuosity.

Yes, but I hope that it is not all a matter of fashion, that we are not dealing with stylism here! (laughs) I’m using something for which I believe that it communicates better and more directly, but then again, I don’t do it consciously or because of some ideology. Still, I think that people are now increasingly decoding the methods, or should we say disciplines, in dance. When someone asks me to say something about a dance performance, I sometimes find myself in a situation to say that for me, it is just another type of sport (laughs). I’m watching it, enjoying it, and I appreciate the way in which they move, but that’s just another type of sport! We play with the same ball, only they play to score a goal and we play basketball. But then again, how can I explain it to someone who is not that experienced in terms of perception...

That there are even more sports now that he should differentiate between...

Yes. But then again, I think that we can’t avoid the globalization of dance as art, where everything is fitted into a single scheme. Especially because dance is still defined through that complement of incomprehensibility. Because it has never been linear in the first place, never literal, and even when it was lyrical – it had a programme booklet! (laughs). In fact, there was a need to understand it... In principle, if you pay attention, you will see that those people who claim that they “don’t understand us” – have abstract paintings in their houses! (laughs) Maybe it is all about a historical click that hasn’t happened yet. So you have a black canvas with three dots hanging there and that works very well. That is something you understand. I have no problem with someone perceiving me only through the notion of beauty, but there is also a general aspect of incomprehensibility of dance, which is by no means helped by those things that, when they become understandable within dance, become a sort of analogy. “Dance with the Stars”, or something like that. I will illustrate it with the help of a specific situation: I am teaching at the faculty in Pula and my course is called “The Body and Dance”. It’s intended for people at the Pedagogical Academy, studying to become kindergarten nurses and primary school teachers. I was considering what would be the easiest way to bring it closer to them, so I called it urban style. But that caused a misunderstanding and a girl came to me after a contact improvisation, saying that she thought we would dance and not just touch each other (laughs). So I stopped the entire class, made them sit down and asked the group of sixty people why they came to the course and what it meant to them. And that sort of clarified it for me: why I was doing it at all and what I was doing. And here is a crazy example: I simplified the dance sequence that I was doing with them to the maximum with respect to one that I would do, for example, with a professional company, but after the first choice of music, which we might call contemporary dance music, I decided to changed it. I played some Lil’ Mama, Lil’ Kim, or whatever – and that made a click. Because they encountered the medium that they could recognize – regardless of the fact that they were doing absolutely the same thing with that first kind of music.

How does your residential topography Pula-Toronto-Ljubljana function?

Canada is a place where I work for others, I contextualize my work and I teach. I spend a lot of time there and I can say that I belong to that scene. It is interesting to belong to a transatlantic scene as a performer and lecturer, from this year also as an author. But that is only one segment. In Toronto, I also have friends that are outside of the dance world, so I can say that I have a sort of sociological aspect there as well. But I can’t consider Toronto my home. Pula is my home. It is the point of return and whenever I encounter some gaps or voids, I always return to Pula. And Ljubljana is linked to Maja Delak, with whom I am intensely collaborating. I used to teach there for a while, they are producing my new solo, and certain fields are opening up on that production level as well. The triangle Pula-Ljubljana-Toronto I see as three permanent starting points where I’m present as an artist.

And finally, tell me something about your focus in the future: wishes, needs, plans?

If I look at the time until 2010 that is already planned, all that I see are things related to the theatre and performance. But on the other hand, if someone asked me about my plans, I would not list anything related to art. (laughs) Professionally, my wish is to found P.E.T.I. Dom in a few years. It is a structure desired by every larger town in which dance, performance, and theatre are present as a medium. P.E.T.I. Dom is a working title for production, education, theory, and performance, but it is still in its beginnings. Our wish is to incorporate Pula and its audience into a broader context. My other wish is to “throw an anchor” somewhere. However much I claim that I’ve returned to Pula, I still haven’t settled down, and it is as if I were floating in the air. I think that an affiliation or default of some sort opens up many doors that wouldn’t open in a nomadic way of life. There is a strange fact: when you throw a coin into the sea in a local setting, the circles or resonances that occur involve a huge circle of people in Pula, although that would be of minor significance in Zagreb. Generally, I can say that I see myself of a part of a larger plan and I see that I am evolving through something. My choices are more or less intuitive, but in most cases they find a good resonance and that creates security in reflection with no demand of planning in some further sphere. All in all, I would like to materialize my experience and my knowledge through P.E.T.I. Dom, although I don’t necessarily mean any financial gain. Sometimes it is hard to deal with the fact that all that remains after a performance is experience, a poster, and a programme booklet. I would like to have some sort of communication that would influence the surrounding, I would like to change that surrounding with what I am doing and reach a level of credibility that would give a broader sense to it all, more than just one year of self-exploration.

www.myspace.com/mferlin