Lucia Repašská (* 1985) is a theatre director, artistic director of the experimental platform DʼEpog and a researcher at the Cabinet for Theatre and Drama Research at the Theatre Faculty of JAMU.

She studied theatre directing at the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts in Brno in the studio of Arnošt Goldflam. During her studies, she completed internships in Poland (PWST Krakow) and Denmark (Odin Teatret), where she worked with prominent figures of European theatre such as Krystian Lupa, Bogdan Hussakowski and Eugenio Barba. Lucie Repašská's key theme is that of audience reception, which has fascinated her since she began to express herself artistically. In 2010, she founded the D’Epog Theatre, which now functions as an experimental platform exploring the reception mechanisms of contemporary audiences and the limits of theatrical language. Lucia Repašská and her ensemble have developed a system of exercises that help to improve acting skills and also serve to build their theatrical performances. The work of D’Epog strongly emphasizes the role of the spectator, the degree of their interpretive freedom and their contribution to the meaning of the performance. D’Epog coherently develops the line of the so-called "dramaturgy of space". With the aim of attacking the limits of audience perception, it programmatically experiments with various models of the organisation of stage space - especially the auditorium-stage relationship. D’Epog situates its projects in non-theatrical urban spaces, on which it draws thematically, ideologically and conceptually. DʼEpog's work integrates elements of site specific projects, movement theatre, drama and performance. An important part of it is actor training focused on the work with energies, the research of actor expressiveness and energy radiation. However, Lucia Repašská points out that although she has been doing research work with performers for eleven years, she is not interested in craft research of performance work, but she wants to investigate how we perceive and decode meanings. Through a form of artistic research, she focuses on the limits of audience perception in contemporary audiences.

In 2015, she published a book entitled Decompositional Principles in Stage Production, based on her PhD thesis. She formed an interdisciplinary team with experts in cognitive science and biomedical engineering, and together they tested an objective energy training parameter, the so-called autopoietic feedback loop. The research team used biometric data to test what it means to communicate, to have a dialogue, and arrived at a psychological theory of persuasion. The outcome of the research is a joint publication, but that was not the main goal, according to Lucie Repašská. The goal was to verify in an exact way whether it is possible to objectify and name essentially metaphysical mental processes, to find out their functionality and to ask whether they are codifiable and trainable, and whether it is possible to work with them conceptually and pass them on.

I first registered that artistic research existed as a codified academic discipline and methodological approach during my internship at Odin Teatret in Denmark. There I often came into contact with students and teachers from Aarhus University. They came to the theatre as part of practically oriented courses, because the arts are studied there more on an analytical basis. They were theoretically equipped people who had done practical internships. I actually came across the term artistic research at that time, through the teacher Annelis Kuhlmann.

I didn't care at all. I came from a school that was very much focused on practice and - you could say - craft. For a long time - we're actually talking about when I was an undergraduate - I thought, "What good is this?" I took it as a coin of the realm that you just have to master the principles of craft, the art of composition, and that's where the whole science begins and ends. But there were a lot of people coming to Odin Teatret who were doing neuro-aesthetic research. They were exploring possible ways of perceiving theatre using anthropology, neuroaesthetics, cognitive science or behavioural psychology. And I thought, "Oh! There must be something in this!" After all, practical art grounded in action, such as theatre and performance, can also be viewed in a broader and more scientific way. It was only at that moment that I became interested. Give or take sometime around the "Bachelor's degree".

Not really... I only started to feel the impulse in a certain way due to my own artistic frustration. I saw that artists often approached things that I thought were working on objectivist principles too vaguely. It seemed to me that they were disregarding in a certain way the principles of composition, which are (dare I say) from a neuro-aesthetic point of view universally valid modes of communication. I began to wonder how it was that we were all still bandying about metaphysics when there was probably something tangible behind the functionality of some of the patterns. I said to myself: Let's look at it through the prism of today! Why do we still have metaphysics when we have exact science and technology that allows us to measure things? We're not in the 19th century anymore. We don't have to guess. That's what acted as a trigger for my way of thinking. The alibistic vagueness of artists - pardon my French - pissed me off. The fact that the creator hides his own incompetence and inability to articulate his intention behind subjectivism irritated me a lot. I told myself that certain principles had to be provable, that they had to be graspable, and that we already had an apparatus for this, namely the apparatus of science. So I began to feel the need to connect these worlds... At least partly this was reflected in my later research, especially from my PhD studies onwards. 

That was definitely when I started my PhD studies. It was only then that I thought that what I was trying to do needed to be grounded in something, to be methodically grasped. I don't know... I felt like it couldn't just be analysing a project that I did myself and digging into my own self-interpretations. I told myself that by comparing the individual projects, I would focus my work on the problem of how the audience perceives them. And that already started to show the parameters of artistic research. The focus on the self was replaced by a focus on the communication of the work with the recipient. I think it was only in the first, maybe second year of my PhD studies.

No, they weren't. Certainly not... but I am a person who is used to the idea that if there is no path, there is no problem to make one, to find one or to break through. I often take it as a rule of thumb. The fact that - let's say - the absolute majority of my classmates didn't take that path was no obstacle for me. I told myself that I would just give it a try, because the way I was beginning to think about things at the time defied the traditional humanities. And at the same time, I told myself it was okay. I'm pursuing the theory: "What you make it, you get it." And it was no problem. At least nobody was blocking me, nobody was blocking the path I wanted to take. It was unexplored, but there was no sign saying FORBIDDEN. 

In the beginning it was absolutely based on intuition, I won't lie. The first literature recommended to me was the book Artistic Research by Mika Hannula. The Finns generally have it pretty well covered and elaborated... The topic of artistic research later started to be dissected at the IFTR international theatre conferences. There are working groups for that, which I got into. It was interesting to be confronted with the Scandinavian environment where the concept is already established. Suddenly one is relieved... Maybe it sounds pompous and I don't want to blaspheme here, but one is somehow calmed down there. He has a comparison of how he is doing in his research, he compares his methodology with how people a few hundred kilometres further north are doing it... and he thinks, "It's all legitimate, it's all right! I'm not doing anything wrong." Sometimes I even felt that I grasped a lot of things more clearly than my colleagues. I was more or less reassured and inspired at the same time.

For me, the initial look is purely artistic. I always resort to a fusion of science and art when I am forced to conceptualize my artistic background. And this happens mainly in the context of my work commitments. It's utilitarian. It's knowledge that can be applied to a wider group. But for me, the basic theme is the human being. I'm interested in the human being. The person I work with - the performer, but also the person who is then in direct communication with the performer, the recipient. And when I think about these two things, I think primarily as a person about a person. I think more artistically. The analytical reflection of one's own work and the ability to extract from it more than just the artistic reality is added later. That's a secondary level. I don't do art projects to research something. On the contrary.

It rather legitimizes my tactics in the creation of the work itself. It stems from a very simple thing: I often feel that when I present my work, our work (!) - because I create mostly in a collective - I meet a very abstract reception. It is often polarized, either absolute acceptance or absolute rejection. An argument I have often heard is: "I don't understand, I don't get it!" It was a leitmotif that kept ringing in my ears. And I would say, "Okay, let's look at why the person doesn't understand and what they don't understand."

Exactly. I don't create anywhere else. That's basically my principle... my personal manifesto. I create within this group. (That is, when we're not talking about graphic design, for example, but we're talking about my artistic base in the performing arts...) The moment you start to meet the demands of the recipient and say, "Okay, let's look at why you don't understand me, how communication patterns work for you, or why they don't work, or why they work for somebody and they don't work for you..." When you start asking: "What can I do differently? What should I do differently? And how is it that something is encoded in the viewer this way or that way?", you're actually getting into research on reception. So actually, yes... My motivation for research is to ask why a certain person will receive something, how they will receive it, and why another person won't. And how to help them do that.

I think that a professional artist should be able to create in the way he chooses. Not that he's dependent on something just by what he knows. He should have a wide range of means of expression and he should choose one or another means of expression depending on what he wants to articulate. That's what I think... 

And with this premise in mind, I think it is my duty to broaden the spectrum of my own expressiveness. That is why I explore how a particular situation works, on whom it works... It is a kind of challenge to my own professional competences. If I find out how a certain code communicates and master it, I can then negate it, I can develop it... So it's a way of expanding my own expressive apparatus.

I describe my own practice. The starting point is a theme... I mean, something that hurts me, that bothers me... I always say that the theme is something that keeps you up at night, but at the same time what makes you wake up in the morning. It's something of inner urgency. For the first six years - the first six seasons of DʼEpog - we articulated the themes very much within the dramaturgy of the space. We made a virtue out of scarcity. We didnʼt have our own theatre space, so we set our stuff in specific urban outdoor spaces, sometimes indoors, industrial zones... Anyway, it wasnʼt site specific in the sense of "letʼs find an interesting location and light it up!" On the contrary. We first had a specific theme and then the directorial concept found its reflection in the spatial interface, namely in the auditorium-stage relationship. I started experimenting with the layout of the space: where the audience sits and from what angle they look determines what they see. And what you see determines what you put together and how you interpret it. It determines the work itself. When experimenting with space, my working ground is basically sketches. Visual things. I could call it a director's book, but it's a downright visual thing, with lots of bullet points, notes, quotes, plus countless sketches, drawings... It looks like a hand-drawn comic book. That's my way of thinking about time and space...

And then I thought, well, let's look at how reception works not just for one work, but for multiple works. I did three projects as part of my PhD research and they all had the same theme. We recycled it, but each time we created different spatial situations for it and explored what effect they had. Di sein, it was a performance form that dealt with the disappearance of theatre. It was based on testing Artaud, or the negation of the arena. Ten performers surrounded the audience, who were in the middle on a kind of pagoda. There were no chairs in the space. No one had a clear code beforehand on how to behave in the huge, hundred-square-meter hall... and we were exploring how it worked. No spectator had a chance to see what anyone else was seeing. Everyone was putting together their own montage.
Later we negated this shape and instead of a shape where the auditorium was missing, we made a shape where the stage was missing. Ninivea was a production set in the city swimming pool Za Lužánkami. The main stage was the auditorium, a huge grandstand. You went there with some expectations: "Hm, there's going to be a big drama on that water surface!" And we ignored the water surface, where everybody automatically projected the stage. And that was until the final situation, when a computer mouse fell into the empty pool and created circles on the surface. This actually illustrated the metaphor of "drawing attention to oneself". We tested what it's like to be without a stage.

And then came the shape 121, which we placed in the former railway depot Malá Amerika. There I compiled motifs, situations and literal recyclates from the first and second shapes side by side in identical form. I just put them in a traditional, peephole model. So the viewer was looking at the same things, only they were served to him explicitly. There was no escaping them. The perceptual focus was clear. The emphasis on the stage was also clear... and suddenly this production turned out to be the one that irritated people the most. It was perceived as the most radical. I thought, How is that possible? And based on that, one actually comes to understand that if the audience has a clear focus from the creator, one simply cannot escape a certain interpretation.

Where there is spatial freedom, there is also interpretive freedom. But each of us chooses the easier path and chooses the more pleasant interpretative variant. Situations that were latently present in Di_sein and in Nineveh resonated and became significantly polarized only in 121. And put together side by side in this comparative way, these case studies began to make sense to me. I started comparing them, I started coding it in behavioural psychology and cognitive science. That was the first part of the research. But it still seemed pretty vague to me. Not ungrounded, but vague! It only became clearer when I was a few years after my PhD studies, thanks to my colleague Honza Motal. He gave me a very nice tip! He put us in touch with the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the BUT, i.e. with people who are engaged in developing algorithms and have properly equipped laboratories, at least when it comes to monitoring brain functions and biosignals...

At the same time, we also partnered with HUMELab - which is actually a laboratory for experimental psychology. I thought, "Okay! Let's try to measure exactly what effect certain information has on the recipient. Let's create laboratory conditions, let's connect the performer to a biosignal meter, let's connect the recipient, let's create a clean laboratory situation where we don't have sound and movement, and let these two people interact... (We started without text.) Just interact! Energetically. And let's see if and on what basis there is a symbiosis in their communication." And this is how the energetic training of the DʼEpog performers was verified. This is something that we had developed for the duration of the ensemble for about nine years. It's related to Michail Tchekhov's techniques, it's related to the concept of the actor as an athlete of the soul prophesied by Artaud... It's a training in which the performer tries to work with his or her radiation and emotions as precisely as a choreographer works with the musculature and the musculoskeletal system. In DʼEpog, we basically have an established set of associations and physical centres for this. Each centre is assigned a certain quality, a certain colour and a certain form of radiation, which, as it became clear in the testing room, generates a certain behaviour. All of these intangible metaphysical processes have, one could say, an almost tangible basis in us. We verbalize all these "abstract" things in our imagination and attribute particular qualities to them. This is how a set of exercises was created, thanks to which the performers were able, after four or five years, to control their energetic radiation at any time, at the snap of their fingers. It became the basis of our work. Working with energies is the way we generate situations. It didn't seem to me to be something shaky, so I thought, "Let's check that it is really so!" And out of that came further research, where we actually measured and compared the biometric data of four performers while they were performing the same code. And it turned out that there was a huge synchronicity... that it was just so. That just as we can objectify the contractions of muscles or the speed of movement of our legs, we can likewise objectify the way energy radiates. That was the first step. In this we confirmed that energy training is not a pseudoscience, but let's say a method that can be learned and passed on to someone else. Then came the second step, where I thought, "Let's look at the extent to which this works in terms of communication. Does it hold true that if I use one code to communicate with five viewers, will I get similar feedback from them?" And that's when we took a big detour to trying to validate the biosignal-based autopoietic feedback loop, a term that Erika Fischer-Lichte started using. It is a kind of a basic premise of theatrical communication based on identification.

That is correct.

Exactly. I was primarily interested in the quality of my performers [laughter]. And at the same time, the way they can communicate and if they can awaken something in the viewer... And we were at persuasion. And my colleagues became interested in the mechanisms of communication. And that led to a book, an electronic handbook, which is about how to cultivate all that. It's called The Art of Persuasion, which is the effect of convincing. It's something that my colleagues who are psychologists, but also in the biomedical engineering field, have found useful in terms of, for example, applying it to training managers, executives, people who need to communicate with a team and convey an opinion to somebody that is transferable, communicable, and so on. The handbook is not focused on theatre, but it is focused on ways of training persuasion competencies. It's for people who are in management positions, for example.

No. No... It was very interesting to see how sceptical the colleagues from the field of psychology, but also the engineers from the BUT, were about the whole thing. They had no idea what I was telling them. They couldn't imagine that someone could activate his mental equipment at the snap of his fingers and influence the person sitting opposite him without saying anything or moving in any way, and somehow evoke the desired emotion in him. It was very strange... First it had to be proved that it was possible at all. The research was preceded by a year of experiments. We invited these people to the rehearsal room and they came to see what our energy training looked like. And then we did a series of measurements in a performative situation. The actors and the audience were hooked up to portable devices for the evening performance. We weren't in lab conditions and we were trying to compare the synchronicity of the data we were measuring. Or asynchronicity... That is, when the stimuli are common, when there is an ambivalent relationship and so on. So we were doing a series of preliminary measurements and figuring out what was communicating, what wasn't communicating, what was communicating with what and why. We went into the laboratory conditions afterwards because there was a lot of mistrust on their part at the beginning. For our colleagues outside the theatre, these things were too abstract, too elusive. And they were all the more surprised when it started to generate certain patterns.

So, obviously I don't have a large sample size. I have five performers in my set, of which only four were chosen as a sample to measure. I simply don't have any more performers, so there was no one else to test on. And on top of that, the last phase of the research took place during the pandemic. So even if we wanted to, we couldn't test it on a large audience. It was an awfully small sample each time. So yes... there are some anomalies. But there were a few parameters that are objectively observable: breath synchronicity, the way the aggression code is emitted... There were simply too many common denominators to be considered a coincidence.

Absolutely. I feel like everyone, absolutely everyone, is saying that art is there to change something... that it MUST change something... I don't think it has to change something, I think it has to have that ambition. The imperative that art must change something already stinks of violence and a totalitarian model of manipulation. I don't want to get into it. I do the things so that one day I can say that I didn't waste the time I had... that I tried to make a difference. In myself. Primarily. And then in the people I associate with in the rehearsal room - my co-workers, the people I'm closest to, through whom I articulate myself. This, by the way, is the absurd paradox of directing: a person who uses other people to articulate their ideas, and through them actually acts within the world. (It's absolutely on the ethical line for me, but I've come to terms with it.) I'm somehow trying to change reality by creating my own reality. I'm not trying to change what is, but to offer an alternative. An alternative. That's my way of existing... utopian, perhaps, but it works for us. I keep saying that DʼEpog is not a theatre, or a performance group, or a job, but it is a way of life and existence of seven people who decided to construct reality. I donʼt compete with the one that exists - in a way I let it flow and offer my own solutions. And if one wants to work outwards, one must first of all understand how and if it is possible. That's where the measurements helped us a lot. I, for example, was able to detect the quality of the energy settings of the performers in the energy training and somehow grade their weaknesses. Suppose if three performers were equally excited at a certain frequency and one person was energetically lower, I could see it. It was actually immediately reflected in the biosignals of the performer, and these would then inevitably be reflected in the recipient... So the measurement gave me a very important message that I was on the right track, but I could see where we had some reserves. 

That's a good question. I don't know if I can answer it. I stopped reading scholarly books at one point, two years ago. I used to be immersed in neuroaesthetics, cognitive psychology, etc. Nowadays I more or less read fiction. It may be sad, but it's true. And I don't feel guilty about it. I even think it's okay. I guess now it's just time to draw again, let's say, from reality or the way other artists around me, especially writers or artists, reflect on reality. These are great sources of inspiration for me. And who knows, maybe then I'll think of a way to ground what I've drawn from them in my own scientific research. But I don't feel like a scholar in the first place. I don't feel like a researcher. I feel like a creator, but one who wants to be conscious enough to know how he creates, why he creates, and who is aware of how his work can affect the outside world. This means that I explore my own work so that I am not ignorant, so that I am not just guided by intuition. I feel that the procedures offered by the contemporary science are something I can reach for to know how the art of time-space composition works. It teaches me to work with the living material... because my material is a living person. I'm de facto shaping five performers so that they can shape the viewer. I don’t say the audience! Not crowd... I say "spectator", that is, an individual. To me, the scientific approach gives a kind of competence. I can't imagine anything more trivial than a director who is an industrial illiterate, a director who is a blind (perhaps one-eyed?) leader of the blind. That's awfully little! To me, that's just an ethical collapse. An unacceptable thing. When I ask something of someone, I must be sure to demand two or three times more of myself! That's why the research question is an ethical one for me. I need to check things, to get to know things, to know things. Otherwise, I have no right to demand them from someone else. And I certainly don't have the right to experiment on another living adult just casually without any expertise. That's why I try to ground in theory and analysis any dangerous areas we venture into in the testing room (we often work with extremes, and significant extremes at that). In doing so, I anticipate both the worst and best possible scenarios. I learn from the history of performance art. I simply look at how people before me did things, and when I exhaust this material, I can call on the help of, say, neuroscience.

It always has a very strong connection to the pedagogical direction of a particular art, a particular medium. But it's hard for me to generalize. Usually, with art, people are trying to be helpful to each other. Whether it's a question of using it in community work, or whether it's art on the edge of activism... but that's not my case. I don't think I belong there. At least for now. Not that what I've produced as a "researcher" (and what seems useful for people who need to be persuasive in what they say to others, for team leaders, for marketing, for managers, for executives) is of personal interest to me, but it turns out that there is some applicability on that trajectory. Recently, colleagues in TAČR research pointed out to me that our publication is a pretty good guide for people who have, say, political ambitions and need to communicate their agenda towards voters or people in the party. It is, of course, a powerful tool of power. Persuasion is linked to power. Directing is also linked to power. So the parallels are not accidental. That seems to be the result of the last two or three years of my research work. I don't know if it's useful to society, but at least it appears to be working. For me, as I answered in the previous question, it's an ethical commitment to the people I work with. These people are not guinea pigs and I need to know what I'm doing with them. I need to guarantee them some safety, guarantee them some base... If I want so much from them, I want them to know why and where it's likely to lead us. In the context of DʼEpog, it also makes us better educators. We try to push the belief that we have no method and that what we do is no sectarian procedures. It's an absolutely objective, cool composition of time and space. We teach it in workshops, we have different master-classes on it... The outcomes of my research have shown us where it works, where it doesn't work and where we have the possibility to go further. It has grounded our pedagogical work.

I don't want to oversimplify it too much, but I will. The scientific point of view is always a bit of a sulking gesture. When something makes me as an artist downright angry, annoyed, and I don't have a sufficiently articulate response to it, which I articulate within the framework of art, I get upset, offended, and angry. And then I think, "How come not?! I can prove it to you on a different basis!" Because I think that a work of art has to justify itself immediately in the space and within the time of its duration. Otherwise there is no point in discussing it anymore. If it is not justified within the time of its duration, it is simply not justified at all. And then the creator is called upon in debates to explain the work, to legitimize it, to justify it, and he or she is often aggressively attacked by his or her audience, which is calling for some kind of meaning and its verbalization... so these are exactly the situations that make you say: Okay, I'll give it to you then! Let's look at this more explicitly, in the context of parallel research. I'll give you the proof. But not in art, because art cannot be contaminated by such things. (Or at least I don't think it deserves to be.) Artistic research is not a forward or aposteriori line of work. It is a parallel line. Artistic research occurs alongside the work. And so I will offer those answers to the invective and over-aroused questions of the audience as a sort of tongue in cheek.

That's right. I'm not saying it's a supplement, or that one proves the other and the other supports the first. But these things are intertwined and parallel. Through the output of the artistic research that the art work was the basis of, people who may not even be interested in art, and for whom art may be irrelevant, can perceive certain values and gain access to insights and unexpected connections.