"NAVINKI- 2008": Performance as a way of life (Photo)

The annual International Performance Festival “NAVINKI – 2008” was held for the tenth time in Minsk. Apart from the demonstration of the art performances prepared by artists, “NAVINKI – 2008” presented open master-classes. The four-day Festival closed with an outing at the lake Viacha, where other performances took place in the open air.

The Performance Festival was not meant for the people with conservative views on life. Its title once emerged as an analogy with the psychiatric dispenser located in the district of the capital of Minsk bearing the same name. It is not that those who stage performances are only the ill people. It is all about the performers demonstrating a non-standard view on common things. The initiator of the Festival, Viktor Petrov, explained the difference of the art of performance in comparison with other types of arts.

“Performance means, first of all, openness. No other type of art has such an “open equivalent”, when the link between the artist and the viewer is very direct. There is an interactive link between them. Due to its open nature, the Performance art becomes more popular in the rest of the world. Unfortunately, a viewer has an opportunity to meet with an artist very rarely”…

Another interesting bit about performance is that it gives an artist no chances to correct his or her mistakes.

“While a painter may take a break and leave what he or she was doing for a while and then look at his or her creation with a fresh look and re-make something, the performance will make no allowances for that. A creator in the latter case is working for a certain period of time and what he or she is doing will be the result, nothing can be re-done. It is not a simple type of art”.

Not simple indeed. How can a performer be confident that the audience “will get in to a contact”? In the meantime, the Minsk audience was fully ‘prepared’ psychologically. The viewers were becoming participants of the artistic process with great pleasure, which is obvious from the photos.

Not simple indeed. How can a performer be confident that the audience “will get in to a contact”? In the meantime, the Minsk audience was fully ‘prepared’ psychologically. The viewers were becoming participants of the artistic process with great pleasure, which is obvious from the photos.

“I admire the  Art of Performance for it helps to distract from the day to day problems and issues and think about ‘eternal values’ that artists demonstrate in a very original way. For instance, one performance was about different people taking their shoes off and exchanging them with others, some perhaps did not understand anything however in my view that was an excellent demonstration of how easy it is to ‘walk in other people’s shoes’ when there is a will”, shared his impressions a 17-year old Mikhas.

The Performance art brings people from various countries closer without using the language skills. In this year’s “NAVINKI – 2008” took part 18 foreign artists and 14 Belarusian. Switzerland, Japan, Australia, USA, Poland… the geography of the countries where the art of performance is developing and becoming more popular is expanding.

In the view of an ‘experienced’ participant of “NAVINKI”, Juras Barysevich, an artist and an art expert, the Belarusian performance has reached a high level. “At the moment it is much better developed here than, let’s say, in Ukraine or even in Russia. A serious rise of the performance movement in Russia was in the first half of the 90s. However later on criminal cases were initiated against those people due to the fact that Russian Performance art was extremely politicized and rather radical…”

Over 200 performance artists took part in the Festival in the course of the past 10 years and they have staged over 300 performances.

Ludmila Korsak

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Photos by Julia Darashkevich