The Talking Car – Agnieszka Polska | #performing arts

The Talking Car – Agnieszka Polska

The world designed by Polska is reminiscent of the construction of J. G. Ballard’s post-apocalyptic texts, in which being-in-waiting is a modality and the car is not so much a machine as a situation or vehicle of desire.

The Talking Car is Agnieszka Polska’s first theatrical work, but traces of the poetics of performativity could already be seen in her earlier works, such as, for example, in the video I Am the Mouth. Made a decade ago, it refers to Samuel Beckett’s short play Not I from 1972, conceived as a monologue of lips emerging from darkness and uttering ragged, rachitic phrases separated by ellipses. In Polska’s animation, luminous coral lips – half submerged in azure, slightly rippling water – utter sentences that refer to the physical properties of speech. The artist was then revealing the mechanical dimension of words as sound waves, transmitters of pressure. In the animation created three years later, The New Sun, in a half-speaking and half-singing monologue, the viewer is addressed by a baby-faced Sun with huge pupils, speaking from the position of an observer of a global catastrophe. In 2015, a mountain also ‘talked’ to Polska – we are referring to the video The Talking Mountain, depicting an attempt to find a massif to talk to (the conversation, however, took place in a dream). The artist’s work shows a consistent focus on the embodied speech act as a tool for establishing relationships, as well as an interest in various forms of word-based expression. In The Talking Car, dialogues are combined with poetry and songs, storytelling accompanies references to novels.

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A scene from the performance 'The Talking Car', written and directed by Agnieszka Polska, 2024. © Bruno Simão / BoCA – Biennial of Contemporary Arts (Lisbon).

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Like the aforementioned mountain, the car is presented by Polska as a ‘she’ – in the show, the 1990s Opel Astra is named Marlene, which establishes the vehicle’s subjectivity as a person. Naming is an inclusive gesture, and addressing someone in this way lays the foundations of an intimate relationship. The car is driven by three people – a woman, a man and, we think at first, their son, Bully (played by Bartosz Bielenia). The woman, as we think up to a certain point, is pregnant, so the passengers rush to the hospital. The effect of speed is created by the animation on the big screen in the background: an empty expressway, misty landscapes, looming hills and chimneys. The simple constellation of a nuclear family just about to expand, however, begins to unravel. As viewers, we lose track of what the world we are looking at is. In one of the pre-premiere interviews, Polska said that the key affective level of the play is confusion and disorientation. It turns out that the family story was only meant to be a cover. But a cover for what? Who are these people and what relationships do they have? Are we, as the dialogue suggests at one point, simply watching a BlaBlaCar ride together? And if so, why do the characters seem to be running from someone and mention the border guards?

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A scene from the performance 'The Talking Car', written and directed by Agnieszka Polska, 2024. © Bruno Simão / BoCA – Biennial of Contemporary Arts (Lisbon).

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Tired and frustrated by playing the roles of parent and child, the characters abandon the familial mimicry fairly early on, and the plot devolves into a chaotic rush, erupting every now and then with more quirks, one of which is, for example, a psychoactive mince with fentanyl seasoned with ketamine-infused sriracha. A ghostly Beckettian nimbus hovers over the plot, aptly captured in Don Poldon’s W Tej Chwili (‘I was supposed to do something here, I can’t remember what at the moment / I was supposed to call somewhere, I can’t remember where at the moment / I’ve got holes in my head like dolphins’). The vector, however, remains towards the hospital with its maternity ward, to which Marlene is led. But in the meantime, the journey extends from the planned 57 minutes to almost six hours. Time is thus subject to diffraction, and the protagonists’ journey begins to resemble the interiors of the chimneys described by Bully: full of curves, kinks, horizontal and vertical lines intersecting at different angles. Or the riddle posed by the car: If the day before the day that’s two days after the day that’s before tomorrow was yesterday, what day is it today? The fact that a woman is driven to the maternity hospital by a car speaking in a human voice (giving, incidentally, statistical information on the percentage of patients who die there during childbirth) brings Polska’s image closer to the concept of the Internet of Bodies, a dense network of relationships between the organic body and information technology and its devices. For the experience of the soft, physiological dimension of childbirth is mediated here by a technohybrid, a machine-person who also becomes a peculiar midwife.

The world designed by Polska resembles the construction of J.G. Ballard’s post-apocalyptic texts, in which being-in-waiting is a modality and the car is not so much a machine as a situation (as in The Island) or a vehicle of desire (as in Crash). However, while Ballard’s prose is dystopian, the vision of Marlene and her passengers’ rush through dark precipitous roads is saved from nihilistic immersion by – perhaps surprisingly – a messianic imaginary. The expectation of a child is personified in The Talking Car in the form of Futurebaby. The performer embodying this figure appears on stage with instrumentation used to translate her facial expressions into an animated face projected onto the screen. The red face – similar in its childlikeness to the talking Sun from the aforementioned video work – has been described by the creator as a ‘digital puppet’. By bringing a character onto the stage in a double relationship with an animated marionette, the artist translates her characteristic means from the realm of visual arts into the language of theatre, emphasising the bodily simultaneity emblematic of this medium.

A scene from the performance The Talking Car, written and directed by Agnieszka Polska, 2024. © Bruno Simão / BoCA – Biennial of Contemporary Arts (Lisbon).

The interpretation of the figure of Futurebaby, as well as the position of waiting itself, leads along at least two paths. The first – self-asserting – would be to regard this vision as conservative, because it is based on human reproduction as making it possible to save the world from catastrophe and equating hope with repetition and continuity. However, this interpretation is shattered and challenged in the course of the play, opening the viewer to a different (and queer) perspective. When it becomes apparent that there is no baby in the character’s belly at all, a reading emerges that directs attention to potentiality and hybridity; to what the subject is yet to become. Futurebaby is somewhere else and is something else, but we may not yet know what. Polska thus creates not a dystopia but an allotopia – a different place, on the one hand marked by widespread catastrophe, on the other pulsating with a vague hope fuelled by a conviction of the necessity of the expected coming. But Polska seems to encourage thinking beyond strictly human categories and hard binaries – to consider different forms of embodiment right up to the limits of imagination.

'The Talking Car', directed by Agnieszka Polska, co-produced by BoCA – Biennial of Contemporary Arts (Lisbon), deSingel, Nowy Teatr. Performed by Albano Jerónimo, Bartosz Bielenia, Iris Cayatte, Vera Mantero, Nina Guo. Voice-off: Jaśmina Polak, dramaturgy: Olga Drygas, composition, music: Igor Kłaczyński, lighting: Pedro Guimarães, lighting operation: Teresa Antunes, video and sound: André Teixeira, digital marionette animation: Jeremy Coubrough, stage film animation: Ewa Polska. Polish premiere: 6th September 2024. International premiere: 14th September 2023, Lisbon.