Who tells the story?

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During rehearsals for the play The book of my life (Book of my life), which is based on an exceptional book of autobiographical essays by Aleksandar Hemon, director performances Ivana Đilas, obviously delighted with what the dancers and musicians were performing on stage at that moment, turned to me, who plays the role of a dramatist in that play, and said "Theater will outlive even artificial intelligence!".

I couldn't disagree with Ivan because I was well aware of the liveliness of the theater, which we missed immensely during the pandemic. In those two dark years, we understood, or at least remembered, the magical power possessed by the man who tells the story. Live, at close range, eye to eye. The only thing older than stories is storytelling, I often used to think. Because stories didn't exist until someone told them. Newly told stories have become stories.

In the case of our play, it's a bit more complicated. Our story is told through the movements of the dancers, the sounds produced on stage, music and video, and only now and then with words. The story is told by two dancers, one dancer and one musician respectively beat boxer, all with the help of image and sound. At the same time, the story is told by the writer Aleksandar Hemon, because it is his story and because occasionally his voice is heard from the speakers, and the author of this play, the director Ivana Đilas, also tells the story. The story of leaving home and emigrating to a foreign country is also her story, so with the help of Hemon and his book, she tells her own story in a way.

But in the end, the story is told by all of us who participate in the play in one way or another, from Aleksandar and Ivana to Jernej who imperceptibly turns our scenography, a large cube that can be both an American skyscraper and a space of Sarajevo memories. In the film, in the closing credits, you can read who told you the story, and after the premiere, we will go on stage and bow to the audience, thereby telling them: We told you this story.

Before, I didn't think that way about bowing to the audience after the end of the performance, I didn't even try to explain that ritual to myself. I took it as a way for actors or musicians to end their performances, break the illusion and allow the audience to close the book they were just reading. Bowing and clapping are there, I believed, to wake us up from sleep, like when a hypnotist snaps his fingers and ends the hypnosis. The question "Who tells the story?" it was unimportant to me then. I was only interested in how the story was told.

About the question Who tells the story? I began, paradoxically, to think more seriously only after the performance without a bow. In the wonderful monodrama Man in the Sea (Man in the Sea), the actor and sailor Lotos Šparovec tells the audience how almost thirty years ago in the middle of the Atlantic, dozens of miles away from the West African coast, he fell from the deck into the sea and how he was looking for a ship that was slowly disappearing behind horizon. Every seventh ocean wave, Lotus explained, is a big wave and lifts you above the others so you can see to all corners of the world, but the seventh waves came and lifted him, and all he could see was the sea. The great, endless sea.

"I don't know what I'm performing and whether it's theater at all," he admitted to me after the Lotus performance, and it seemed to me that it couldn't be anything else. A man who tells his life story to known and unknown people, a man who confesses to another or others, is probably the original form of theater.

In the nearly two-hour-long performance, Lotus talks about his life, about how something drew him to the ship and how he found something he was missing on the ship, he talks about life and the people on the ship, about sailors who were not made for life on land and who on land are just counting down the days until the new sailing. Lotus also talks about the community on a big ship, without big words and without showing emotions, but with a much stronger awareness of the fateful connection of all crew members. A story about unwritten codes and strict hierarchy, about strange ship nights and the peace you feel while looking at the starry sky over the ocean. And finally, almost towards the end of the play, there is a story about falling into the sea, about disbelief that it really happened, about fear and prayers, about saying goodbye to life and fighting for it, about the life that goes through your head before imminent death, about delusions and unfulfilled dreams, and a little more about senseless and slightly crazy attempts to save yourself by swimming. At the end, Lotus also talks about the ship that came back for him, about the difference between "going to look for someone" and "going to find someone", the difference that saved him and changed his life forever. He talks about the silence that reigned among the sailors after they pulled him out of the water, about the words that they could not say at the time and therefore were not spoken, and about the fact that they saved not one but two lives that day; because the captain of the ship was already ready to throw himself into the sea after him and thus solve the question of his own responsibility for Lotus's fall.

When Lotus tells all this, he toasts the sailors and life, thanks the audience and leaves. To the back exit. No bow. And why would he bow, I thought later. Lotus's audience does not dive into some other, imaginary world to emerge from it after the end of the story, it does not need an alarm clock at the end. The story that Lotus tells belongs to our reality, it is true, so to speak, at least as true as a story can be. No, it's not a classical play and Lotos and his collaborators tried hard not to look like a classical play. But it is certainly theater. A theater where it is clear from the beginning who is telling the story, so it doesn't have to be revealed at the end.

Fascinated by Lotus's story, I was surprised that such plays are rare, almost non-existent in modern theater. Because there is certainly an audience. In a little more than a year, Lotos has already played almost a hundred shows, and interest is not waning. It is practically impossible to get a ticket for Man in the Sea. Which is not unusual.

In literature, autobiographical and autofictional stories are irresistibly attractive, and in films, fiction and documentary, there have recently been more and more films in which their authors tell their stories (for example, the Croatian film A safe place Juraj Lerotić's story is about the suicide of the director's brother, and Šterkijad by Igor Šterk is a story about the Šterk family and the disappearance of the director's father, the famous sailor Jure Šterk).

I still think that the popularity of those stories is due, among other things, to the voyeurism of people who like to peek into other people's lives and the general misunderstanding and underestimation of the power of fiction. More and more often you can hear the opinion - to me personally stupid and meaningless - that writers should only tell their own stories. Inventing stories is their alienation, they say, because it is known who claims the right to the story and who can or is allowed to tell it. Or to prevent it from being told.

But after the play Man in the Sea, I thought for the first time that people just want to know who is telling them the story. Because the question "Who tells the story?" it has become a key issue of our time. If once six people were looking for an author, today we all who want to survive in this frenzied time of misinformation, fake news and propaganda, in a time when we often do not know who is telling us stories and why and in which stories are fictional or true, are searching for him obsessively. , abused day and night for some higher or, rather, lower goals.

World War III is a war of stories. If you look only at Ukraine, Gaza or Syria, the question immediately arises which story about Ukraine, Gaza or Syria do you believe. Do you know who is telling you that story? Do you know why you are talking? Do you know who is the one telling you the story and what is his hidden agenda? What is he really trying to tell you? What does he want to achieve with this story?

Stories have become just one of the weapons of mass destruction, which is why all of us whose profession it is to tell stories have ended up as suspects for participating in crimes against humanity. We are all potential manipulators and seducers, we all invent and twist, and all with some hidden, unclear goal of lies and deception. Or worse, with the aim of influencing public opinion.

And that's why when after the premiere of the show The book of my life we will stand on the stage, people will applaud us, but at the same time they may also recognize in us fraudsters who distort the truth with their story to serve their interests. Of course, we believe that we create a better world with our stories, but fewer and fewer people are ready to believe us. Because distrust is contagious and the epidemic of distrust has long since turned into a pandemic. And when one day we who tell stories and stand behind them lose the trust of those who read, watch or listen to our stories, our stories will become unnecessary to this world.

Therefore, it is not artificial intelligence that the theater - or art in general - needs to survive, but rather the power that abusers of stories got first with the internet, then with social networks, and finally with artificial intelligence; we need to survive the mistrust that the propagandists irresistibly spread with the help of the Internet, social networks and artificial intelligence.

The good news is that our enemy has actually remained the same and that art has always somehow managed to fight it and survive. The bad news, however, is that this same enemy has never been more powerful and will surely become even more powerful in the future. Because artificial intelligence is not the last chapter in the story of its weaponization.

The author is a writer and director from Ljubljana