A Speculative Love Performance in the Margins

I watched UNLOVE when I visited the Tbilisi International Festival of Theatre for the second time, in September 2023. During my first visit, it felt like an exceptional experience to try to figure out various social codes and layers of a country that I had only a minimal grasp of through theatre. However, since then, I feel I’ve developed a stronger acquaintance with theatre in Georgia. This involves a different kind of understanding, evaluation skills, and curiosity. When I saw UNLOVE, I thought it brought up love as a political issue in a way that I was not used to. Having watched the performance, I felt the urge to reach out to the director, Davit Khorbaladze, and hear what he had to say about his speculative creation on loving and unloving that hovers in the margins of crisis. Davit is one of the co-founders of Open Space and a theatre curator. UNLOVE is the second play of the UN- trilogy.

Yaşam Özlem Gülseven: Hello, Davit. First of all, thank you for agreeing to be interviewed. UNLOVE is a performance I genuinely like to think and talk about. As the founder of Open Space, could you tell us about yourself and your work?

Davit Khorbaladze: Hello there, Yaşam. Thank you for having me! Speaking about liking UNLOVE sounds like an automatic pun in itself, but I’m very glad that you enjoyed the performance. I do realize what a challenge it can be for the spectator!

I’m a co-founder and the curator of theatre at the OpenSpace, which is a center for performing and visual arts in Tbilisi. We started it in 2016 as a collective of artists pursuing social and political theatre and wishing to talk about emerging topics that were ignored or hushed by other cultural institutions. We moved into this space in an industrial district of Tbilisi in 2018 and transformed a floor of a former micromotor factory into a space where we develop and show performances, exhibitions, music, and educational events.

I graduated from Tbilisi Shota Rustaveli Film and Theatre University as a theatre director, where I started experimenting with theatre methods, which naturally took me to collective and collaborative theatre work early on. I find the strictly hierarchical and dictatorial role of the director unappealing to me in theatremaking, so creating a horizontal collective came as a natural result of this search.

Now I am mostly interested in the theatre as a connector of various people, ideologies, sexualities, and identities. This goes beyond themes and topics, but also involves the media in which they are tackled. In most of my productions, I am involved as a playwright, director, and composer, which to me seems an organic way to approach the idea from various angles. We have also managed to create a space in which creative hierarchies don’t repress individual voices and everyone is safe, which was particularly important during the work on UNLOVE. We wanted to make sure that during this challenging production, every participant remains in full control of their body, personality, and can bring their own experience to the performance. I am glad that it resonated so well with the audience who came to see it.

Yaşam: As the name suggests, OpenSpace is “open” to experimental works. You produce in a unique space in Tbilisi, relatively far from the center. When you are producing, how does the space affect your production in terms of opportunities it offers or certain limits it imposes?

Davit: I grew up in the district of Tbilisi called Nadzaladevi, which means “the place where the disobedient live” based on the imperial legal term for the construction unauthorized by central authorities. I had to change two buses to get to the “city center” where the theatre school is located. It wasn’t just about the time or distance, but about the change in the communicative style with the place that I experienced during these daily journeys, my own daily psycho-geographical drifts. So, the performativity of space became material to me.

The Isani District where OpenSpace is located is one of the areas in Tbilisi that suffered most terribly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was centered around a major aviation plant located just down the road and the micromotors factory where we are now was part of its supply chain that defined the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who lived here. After the collapse of the Soviet system, these factories became irrelevant and abandoned. People still live here, but the meaning of the place has largely become obsolete. So, in our own humble way, we aspire to be a space that creates new relevant meaning here and now in the middle of these modern ruins of concrete. It’s also our statement against the imaginary cultural hierarchies of the city and the obstacles to access culture and expression that they create. Our neighbors are a punk bar, sewing production, garages, and the homes of ordinary people, not the downtown temples of bureaucracy and establishment. This is where we feel most at home to reflect on the change and dynamic of Georgian society in the media and forms that we create, which is the purpose of OpenSpace.

Yaşam: UNLOVE is a research project and the second performance of your “UN-” trilogy. What is your starting point in this trilogy?

While following the war and progressively repressive politics of our own government on our smartphones in real-time, we strove to reconnect with what being a human was.

Davit: The starting point of the “UN-” trilogy is my personal crisis that coincided with a crisis in the world at large. It just so happened that when the world entered the COVID crisis, I experienced a major transformation in my personal life as well, and that pushed me to reflect on this condition that we all experience from time to time, the ending of something big and the beginning of a new life. To an extent, the trilogy follows the curve of this shocking resemblance between intimate experiences and global events.

The first part of the trilogy, UNMEMORY, is dedicated to the workings of human memory striving to piece together a coherent picture of the past out of disjointed and fragmented notions, acting like a person coming to what remained of their destroyed home. This was done based on real-life documentary material, not in a verbatim form, but in a way in which any memory actually works—as a collage, a series of echoes, and sensory associations without clear-cut divisions between personal and “social” reminiscences.

The second part of the trilogy, UNLOVE, was originally prototyped as an audio play at the time of the pandemic when all of us were trying to explore the available form of performativity and presence. However, I always meant it to be a real-life performance based on my personal documentary material surrounding the loss of love and the identity crisis that ensued. Just like in the case of UNMEMORY, its production coincided with a global crisis, which this time was the beginning of the full-scale aggression of Russia against Ukraine on 24 February 2022 that shook everyone in the team to the core. The onset of this new crisis was followed by some political moves undertaken by the Georgian government that required performative commentary. Thus, the performance naturally incorporated various political meanings, creating jarring rhymes between the unfolding humanitarian and political catastrophe on the one hand and the personal catastrophes of cut-off connections, abuse, and broken trust on the other.

It was one of the most emotionally challenging productions for everyone in the team. While following the war and progressively repressive politics of our own government on our smartphones in real-time, we strove to reconnect with what being a human was. I think it brought in that poignancy with which we spoke about all the things that seem to come from some utopian world right now, such as bodily freedom, love, sex, identity, polyamory, etc. We just thought it was vital to bring these colors into this black-and-white brutality of the present moment, to keep in touch with our humanities. So, on top of the documentary text, we put the personal experience of the performers themselves, which is exactly the kind of documentary theatre I am passionate about.

I see the last part of the trilogy as the documentation of the aftermath of this meltdown. Again, it will be a combination of personal experience and the historical backdrop. I can’t delve into too much detail right now, but what I will try to capture is the experience of dehumanization inherent to war and the challenges posed to the human condition by the emergent non-human intelligence.

Yaşam: UNLOVE is a play about love. The show had a convulsive language that deals with many versions of love: exuberant, destructive, erotic, full of contradictions. It showed a type of love that moves within us as a form of existence, that unfolds as an effort to survive or as a desire to disperse. How do you position the concept of “love” in this performance?

Davit: If only I knew! I looked at love from all these various angles precisely to avoid the definition of it—apophatically, as a theologian would say. This also explains the title of the performance. I think it’s simply pointless to speak of love in an imaginary pure form because love is always distorted by social and political structures. In UNLOVE, its presence—an integral concept of the trilogy and of my artistic approach in general—is manifested by its profound absence, the experience of losing it, dreaming of it, it’s just a step beyond, but it’s never there. As soon as somebody touches it, it vanishes.

It doesn’t mean a light, dreamy experience at all at the same time. We live in a world of inhuman intensity and constant scrolling, so sometimes this touch is like a flash or a car that whizzes by and disappears. The frequency and inconclusiveness of these momentary experiences puts us in a permanent liminal state that raises painful questions, such as “what am I beyond this expectation of that big thing they call love?”

Yaşam: The performance creates a universe for itself, in which we encounter leitmotifs that are established with certain repetitions. We wander around a promise, a criticism of today’s world. How does UNLOVE relate to the age we live in?

Davit: The universe of the performance, as you call it, is the state after the end of all things but before the beginning of the new world. UNLOVE exists entirely in this space, and this is how it is related to the world in which we live today. I mentioned how during the pandemic there was a hope that that crisis would reveal the inequalities and injustices on various social levels, but when the war and political crisis came, matters only got worse. Paradoxically, at the same time we are caught in the discussion of such archaic things as territories, collective responsibilities, heroism on the one hand, while grappling with such things like artificial intelligence (AI) that promise us a better world and better life on the other. In both its form and meaning, the performance explores this liminal state.

Yaşam: UNLOVE is a performance that can be considered experimental both in comparison with the other plays in the festival and in itself. How was the play received during the Georgian Showcase as well as by the local audience throughout the season?

My intention has always been to stand with the audience against common enemies—namely the political oppression of us and our bodies, senses, and the right to love.

Davit: Yes, UNLOVE is an experimental work that endeavors to establish a universal sensory language, but it is still grounded in the current social and cultural context of Georgian life. We did receive some international interest from visitors at the showcase, and we hope to be able to take it on tour at some point, which would be amazing. However, I am even more excited about the way it was perceived by the local audience taking in such an explicit and intense experience, both in terms of visual form and spoken words—including topics such as nudity, religion, and inevitably, the hallowed topic of love that unites all these themes.

Once again, the performance takes place in a peripheral district of Tbilisi, so I am positively surprised by the acceptance of this extremely risqué artistic enterprise and the resonance that it produced. Personally, it inspires a great deal of hope and further artistic exploration in me. The last thing I wanted to achieve was putting myself against the audience by creating something disrespectful and divisive. My intention has always been to stand with the audience against common enemies—namely the political oppression of us and our bodies, senses, and the right to love.