Staying Alive

Staying Alive communicates different experience of vulnerability, that is present as a contrast between the loss of balance on a piled books and obsessive, repetitive, accelerating form that deals with the issue of the control over the migrant bodies in literally partnership with personal technological device - the tablet. ….Staying Alive is a funny, because Jasna Vinovrški assumes the role of soft-strict Hostess /flight stewardess in her own show, but the piece has none of cynicism, or a need to distance itself from its own exposure, neither the naive fantasy of no conflict multiculturalism. It talks about new quality of the existences’ power in motion.

Jasna Vinovrski welcomes us in neat suit and heels. She’s a bureaucrat with a difference – warm, deceptively self-deprecatory, immediately charming. As we’re informed in the opening moments of Staying Alive, Vinovrski’s chief creative collaborators on this smartly askew investigation of the meanings of migration were a book (passed around but never reaching me in time) and an iPad. The latter is both partner-like prop and time-piece as she tiptoes through genre variations in an increasingly speedy line dance. Eventually Vinovrksi ditches her heels to perch precariously atop a stack of books carefully selected for their titles (the words Moral and Revolution stuck out), and to recite in various languages words like constitution, institution, obligation and transformation. The lyrics of the Bee Gees’ famous title anthem play a key role in what shapes up into a delightfully modest, smartly conceived and topical solo.

In Staying Alive, Public in Private’s Jasna L. Vinorski and her so- called collaborators - a book and an electronic tablet - tackle the topical debate of migration. In a humble demonstration of migration and community the book is handed to the audience for us to touch, read and pass to each other. Meanwhile Vinovrski plays experimentally with the tablet, investigating the difficulties posed by maintaining and removing “eye contact” with it. What follows is a tiptoed line dance of sorts, accompanied by the bleeping device and the Bee Gees’ classic, Stayin’ Alive. With images of her b- boying in a pencil skirt and shimmying around the space Pink Panther-style, Staying Alive is both amusing and heart-felt. To quote the Bee Gees: “Whether you’re a brother or whether you’re a mother” it’s a safe bet that you’d be glad to have seen this.

Jasna L. Vinovrški’s Staying Alive, in the Experimental Theater of the Abrons Arts Center, used a migrating book – passed among the audience members – to lightly focus us on the perils of romanticized pasts and a fraught present. Near the beginning of the book, Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” is quoted: The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. Vinovrški’s welcomingly pleasant demeanor masks the underlying crisis that unfolds in her evolving tasks. And while, most audience members probably missed the Benjamin reference – many were watched by the rest of the audience while trying to fan through the pages as Vinovrški commented on the book’s border crossings from hand to hand – the framing of the performance work against this critique of historicism was pitch perfect.