Savva Zaremba: Post-Actor and Post-Performer
The performing arts in the 21st century are experiencing both a renaissance and a deep crisis. This is because the 20th century conducted a deep and comprehensive revision/deconstruction of the basic foundations of performativity. On the one hand, this allowed for the demythologisation and democratisation of this industry, but on the other hand, it forced each individual performer to be concerned with inventing personal approaches to inventing their own self in the profession. Where the masters of modernism in the last century could discard tradition and invent post-minimalism or decolonise Butoh, our contemporaries have to look back more on the previous experience of denial, synthesis, and accumulation of the instrumental baggage of the generation that denied, burnt bridges, and destroyed, as well as keep in mind the millennia-old traditions of unreflected craft heritage.
Savva Zaremba is our outstanding contemporary, boldly inventing his unique professional trajectory, fusing together physical theatre, post-anthropic performance, and bodily autofiction. Savva received a brilliant European theatrical education and is currently actively participating in major performative projects in the UK and the European Union. He can be called a universal performer, masterfully wielding both all the knowledge, skills, and abilities of a classical theatre actor and contemporary avant-garde practices and techniques of expanded voice and body control. However, unlike most performers, he does not hide his individuality but consciously uses his identity spectrum as a set of expressive tools. In his stage works, Savva Zaremba professes a unique approach that allows the performer to artificially split consciousness and reduce their body to non-human entities: animals, natural objects, natural phenomena, sounds, and non-existent beings.
The talent, professionalism, and unique creative method of Zaremba were most vividly revealed in the large-scale performance “WHILE THIS LEAF FALLS,” which was recently performed in London. As a post-actor and post-performer, Savva Zaremba became a performative mediator between written stories and traditional strategies of audience perception. Using a limited set of media and an extremely concentrated method of performative existence, Savva revealed the apotheosis and total reduction of stage being, realising an abstract, imaginative flow of micro-movements and micro-mimicry. In this sense, the post-performer is a person who has brought their bodily resemblance to the limits of non-objectivity. However, Savva’s art is important in the category of textuality, and in this sense, the post-body of the post-performer is a radical experience of prioritising one’s own physicality as a text that cannot be written.
Zaremba’s Physical Theatre is a hymn to paradox and impossibility, an attempt to devalue all possible limits of the human and non-human. With each of his performances, Savva seems to ironise and sentence various aspects of existence to abandon their own demarcation lines. However, the performer’s manner can by no means be called excessive or hypertrophied; his manner of being exists according to some elusive, ultra-precise laws that are read as personally agonised but protected by a conscious refusal to articulate them.
I highly recommend that you someday attend a performance by Savva Zaremba. It is a stunning experience that will turn your perceptions of the possibilities of the body, theatre, and the human being upside down.
