Springback Academy 2016
Review
Staying Alive
Jasna L. Vinovrski
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. Vinovrski 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 delightful work.