Inheritance Will Kill You If You Do Not Reconsider It Every Day

András Visky at UTE Fest No. 18 — © István Biró

For 30 years now, András Visky (Hungarian-Romanian, born in Târgu-Mureş in 1957) has been the main dramaturg of The Hungarian Theatre of Cluj. He is a poet, playwright whose plays are staged across Europe and the USA, essayist, lecturer at academic institutions in Romania, Hungary and USA, who also coined and developed the barrack-dramaturgy[1] concept of theatre.

During the 18^th edition of The Festival of the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe, hosted by The Hungarian Theatre of Cluj at the end of November 2019, Visky was responsible for leading and moderating the post-show talks with the teams of each production. The sessions lasted about an hour and always begun with an insightful, heartfelt introduction, after which everyone was included in the conversation by asking the right questions. The post-show talks were led in such a delicate, dedicated, distinctive and delightful manner, that they quickly became for the audience and the festival guests just as expected as the performances themselves.

During the last days of the festival, Ina Doublekova met with András Visky to talk about what has been discussed and seen during the festival and what was left unsaid, as well as about the past and the future of culture and theatre and the role of transnational alliances like the UTE.

Union des Théâtres de l’Europe (UTE) was founded in 1990 – the same year when you became the dramaturg of The Hungarian State Theatre of Cluj – with the aim to establish artistic links beyond the still-standing walls after the 1989 changes. What kind of bridges do we need in Europe today?

If I try to answer this question from the point of view of UTE, I think that it has lost its identity, because its goal has been fulfilled. The idea of constructing bridges between Eastern and Western Europe to help through cultural means the European integration, in many aspects, has been achieved. Which is great! When an institution or an artistic umbrella like the UTE can declare “we achieved our goal”, this is great. But on the other hand, it creates a vacuum. If the UTE would like to survive, it would need a new definition of its mission. And this will not be easy because this is never easy. On the one hand, there is a very rich inheritance, a very important legacy, and on the other hand, the UTE has always been progressive. Now, what does it mean to be progressive? In my opinion, one of the most fragile aspects of Western culture is essentially Western inheritance.

I think that this is also true if you look at the European Union – as a political formation it has been and still is very important because it has avoided war, it has avoided the falling apart of the continent after the changes that 1989 brought, and now the question is: to expand or not. From the Western point of view, there is angst about it, from the Eastern part, there is an expectation to make brave, courageous steps.

How has the role of the dramaturg evolved over these 30 years during which you have been holding this position and what does it represent today?

I think that one of the major changes in contemporary theatre is related to the dramaturg. He is connected to the director, whose status would still maintain this classic-modernist instance of the father of the performance. This modernist legacy of fatherhood is going through major changes, which the dramaturg has already experienced on a daily basis. As I explain in the chapter ‘Barrack-dramaturgy and the captive audience’ which I wrote for The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy in 2014, the daily practice of theatre requires a dramaturg who is prepared in various ways. The Hamburgian dramaturg has now become a writer, a moderator in the devised theatre, a video editor if we consider the video as an essential part of contemporary performance, and that means that this person needs to be an expert on the digital, while also helping the press officer, moderating the post-show talks, etc, etc. I have developed, I hope, my own style of doing those sessions because I do consider that theatre is something serious.

What do you mean by serious? And how do you see the place and role of theatre in our contemporary world?

Theatre in this post-religious era that we are living in is maybe the strongest and the unique institution that can literally gather people together and offer the public a collective experience. It offers a real dialogue and understanding of ourselves. As you know, my concept of the dramaturgy is connected to the prison. My first childhood memory is that I am a prisoner in a setting[1] which is really absurdist in so many ways. It helped me realize that theatre can offer the means for individuals and groups to tell, express or reenact their own stories. So, for me, theatre as space is a prison but we enter into this prison by our own free will and the experiences we are going through in this prison can set us free. And the keyword here is freedom. And why am I saying this? Because somebody who is imprisoned lives a double life. For that person, the prison is never an immediate reality. The immediate reality is in the future or in the past– when I was free and when I will be free.

Researching this idea, I found that in our culture, which is controlled by the media, we are also imprisoned because the media creates for us a virtual life which is always in the future: if I get this, I will be happier. Or we want to live in the body of a celebrity. The media creates this kind of virtual bodies and we want to step into them. That is why we are experiencing so many changes of identities.

Our willingness to be what we are is covered by many things and theatre could be a tool to recognize ourselves as ourselves. And to accept ourselves as we are. To consider ourselves as a unique event in the life of the Universe. The theatre can give us a very special strength – to eradicate this sorrow that “I am not like the other”. You do not need to be like the other. And to understand and accept yourself with joy, because my freedom should be fulfilled by myself. Nobody else can fulfil my own freedom. And this way I can be a part of a community. If I am not a free person, I cannot be part of a community in a responsible, useful way. Because nobody needs a person who is not free and who is dependent on many things.

After 11 years of interruption, The Hungarian Theater of Cluj just hosted the 18^th edition of The Festival of the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe, presenting nineteen performances from members of this prestigious network, which has been recognized as a Cultural Ambassador by the European Commission. Four of the productions were based on contemporary playwriting – “Concord Floral” by Jordan Tannahill; “The Elephant” by Kostas Vostantzoglou; “I/FABRE” based on texts of Jan Fabre; “How to Date a Feminist” by Samantha Ellis – while the remaining fifteen were based on or were interpreting a text by established, canonic names such as Bertolt Brecht, William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg or ancient myths. Was this dramaturgical landscape of the festival surprising for you in any way?

That was not a surprise to me but with this question, you are touching the core of the inner conflict of UTE. The esthetics of this network is post-Post-Brookian, which has big masters and works only with classics. Silviu Purcarete has said it many times that he needs to work with a text which has settled down. Now the question is: is this kind of theatre updated? What would be a progressive approach to this legacy? When the inheritance is very rich, it could become a huge burden. A legacy becomes a burden when we are worshipping it. Being critical to it in a creative way is the only chance of reborn. And the members of UTE know this, that they are now in the in-betweenness of the very rich past and the future, which is not seen. And to exit it, the network will need an open dialogue and to bring in the young creators, who would approach the idea of theatre in a very contemporary way. For me, the ideal version would be to handle the progressive need for doing theatre and the big legacy without hysteria, as I am convinced that inheritance will kill you if you do not reconsider it every day.

Furthermore, the theatre lives in the present time, it is a discourse about the present time. We are living either in the past in a nostalgic way, or in the future, which is the virtuality of our existence. And I think that the theatre addresses the realm of the present time and we are living the present when we are not reflecting upon it. When we are going through a real experience, it is a transformative experience. And transformation is not something mysterious or mystical, it is the anagnorisis in the system of my society, of Europe, of the World, as we are living in an endangered world – languages are endangered, communities are endangered, nature is endangered, etc., etc. And the theater has always been the discourse about the fragility of the human being. That is not a fiction.

Yet, it feels that exactly this very contemporary fragility of humanity, the pressing global issues such as climate change, for example, often fail to be reflected in a daring way in this Post-Brookian theatre form, as you defined it, which is still the dominant form of theatre-making. And this weakens the role of theatre in society.

The inner tension here is between the metaphorical method, symbolic on the one hand, and the performative, which is so immediate, on the other hand. The question is if there is enough intellectual, spiritual, creative power to address these issues. And there is enough of it in contemporary theatre for sure, I have seen many experiments. However, this is not a mainstream theatre. The inner conflict is again that theatre is always about buildings, about architecture and architecture is about legacy. Yet, the daring contemporary theater has chosen to work in intimate spaces.

Clearly, part of the reasons for this choice is also that the politicians and funding-bodies still recognize more easily an established structure and the larger proportion of funding goes to those buildings and institutions.

The political discourse is unavoidable because speaking about the present time in a responsible way means that you are doing a political type of theatre. The politics is always included but there are many ways in which this could happen. And this is the role of organizations like UTE – to address the freedom of theatre from the political framework. I believe that art in Europe should be subsided but not to be controlled by these subventions.

Talking about politics, legacy and major current topics, the most heated debates during one of the post-show talks you moderated erupted after the performance of “Danton’s Death” of the National Theatre São João from Porto on the questions of representation of women and their role in theatre. Nuno Cardoso, the director of the performance, stated: “We cannot hide it, we live in a patriarchal society. Point. There is no discussion about that. If you take all the heritage of Western drama, you have great actresses and great female characters, maybe the best characters are female characters, but it is always tilted to a man. And it is an issue we need to deal with now.” In your opinion, how can we deal with it in a fruitful way, without falling into harmful extremes?

In the contemporary Romanian theatre there are more and more female directors. Here, at The Hungarian National Theater of Cluj, we announced a competition for young directors. And we offered all our theatre’s resources to the projects we liked. Out of five selected projects, three were submitted by women. Two of those projects are already happening, they are running, and the third one is going to have its premiere in mid-December. So, I do not want to mix my ideas of value with political issues, but I think that we have to find different ways to attract women, to gain their trust, in order to submit their projects, to be part of the image and the landscape of theatre.

I think that this competition has been very fruitful and could be a working model for many theatres. But of course, you have to take risks. Not only because of the women, but mainly because very young directors are submitting their projects, they look very well on paper but you do not know if they might reach a flop. But still, what is the problem? The flop is part of the development. And I like to be part of these processes; I always lead the open discussions between them and the audience, press, etc. We have to work to trust each other more and more.

At The Hungarian Theater of Cluj, you have a different approach to the technicians as well – the audience of the festival saw three of them playing in the opening performance of “Mother Courage and Her Children” (co-production of The Hungarian Theatre of Cluj and Staatsschauspiel Dresden, directed by Armin Petras) and one in “A Doll’s House” (production of The Hungarian Theatre of Cluj, directed by Botond Nagy). Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

I am very interested in the theory of photography, though I haven’t taken a single picture in my entire life. However, I once curated a photo-exhibition in our theatre. The photographer was Nelson Fitch, a very young American artist who came to me to make a project. So I asked him to work on this project, “The Invisible Theater”, to follow the technicians, to show how they construct and how they deconstruct, what are these invisible people. I call them “the angles of the performances”. The exhibition was very beautiful and the technicians felt honored. Afterwards, Nelson presented to all of them the photos in beautiful frames.

We invite them as actors in different performances; it has happened many, many times, so for our theatre to welcome the technicians on stage is not a special event anymore. Also, there is a very famous staging of “A Midsummer Night’s Dreams” by Alexandru Dabija (the performance opened in 2009 at the Odeon Theater in Bucharest, Romania – A/N) with the technical crew making the scene in the forest, which was amazingly beautiful, very strong and very warm, it was a big surprise.

What kind of impact do you expect this festival to have on the inner life of The Hungarian Theatre of Cluj and on its presence in the city?

I believe that this festival is very important for Cluj. Our city has grown in the past years dramatically from 120,000 thousand people to more than 600,000, it’s a big boom. So the theatre plays an important role in the life of the city and I personally have thoughts and projects to try to approach this new community of inhabitants. Because I think that theatre needs to change its policy and not to wait for the people to come into the building but to go out and reach them in the in-between spaces.

Published on 26 March 2020

Visky, András, ‘Barrack-dramaturgy and the captive audience’, in Magda Romanska (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, London; New York: Routledge, 2014
In 1958, when András Visky was 1-years-old, his father, Ferenc Visky, minister of the Hungarian Reformed Church, was sentenced to 22 years in prison by the Romanian Communist authorities. Soon after that his wife and their seven children were deported to Bărăgan setting separately. The family was released in 1964 and reunited.

Festival of the Union of Theatres of Europe in Cluj. Time for Revolutions?

Festival of the Union of Theatres of Europe in Cluj.

Time for Revolutions?

The 18^th Festival of the Union of Theatres of Europe was held in the Romanian town Cluj, Transylvania, from 19^th till 30^th November, hosted by the Hungarian Theatre in Cluj. The program consisted of the performances by the theatres that are members of UTE, one of the most influential theatre unions in Europe. UTE was founded in 1990, by the then French Minister of Culture, Jacques Lang, and Giorgio Strehler, the artistic director of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, with an idea to strengthen theatre links within Europe, i.e. to unite theatrical Europe. Today, UTE is made of thirty-four members, and the Yugoslav Drama Theatre is its only member from Serbia.

The festival presented twenty-four performances from Romania, Greece, Germany, Luxemburg, Portugal, Russia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy, and Serbia. The audience had an opportunity to see some conventional interpretations of contemporary plays (e.g. “Elephant” by the National Theatre of North Greece), more experimental expressions based on exploration of movements, visual and verbal (“The Rebellion of Objects” by Teatro di Roma, “Crazy Grass” by Sfumato Theatre Laboratory from Bulgaria), as well as some ambitious, inspirational interpretations of classics. Serbian representative was the Yugoslav Drama Theatre with its superb “Lorenzaccio”, directed by Boris Liješević. The problem of revolution, raised by “Lorenzaccio”, was one of the main topics in the festival productions. We will here single out three extraordinary performances that explore present-day possibilities of fomenting revolutions on the social and political level, but also on the personal one.

Revolution in Yellow Vests

“Danton’s Death” directed by Nuno Cardoso and performed by the National Theatre São João from Porto is a visually fascinating, poetically and choreographically playful interpretation of Büchner’s powerful reflection on the tragic character of the French Revolution (and any revolution, for that matter). Cardoso establishes a discreet parallel between revolutionary Paris of 1789 and present-day protests by yellow vests movement, first visually, in terms of costumes, but then also in terms of the content. The characters are wearing contemporary costumes, thus referring to a timeless need for political changes, which nowadays means a rebellion against new walls, populism, xenophobia, global anxiety, and terrorism.

The stage conveys emphasized symbolic meanings. The central part is gapingly empty, which puts forward the idea of aloneness and loneliness of the ones in power. A cracked background wall also bears symbolic meanings, with huge fans on it revolving in a hypnotizing rhythm. Their relentless rotation discreetly represents the tragic endurance of cyclic time, the Shakespearean wheel of history which mercilessly grinds. It can be also understood as an associative reflection of Danton’s (played by Albano Jerónimo) painfully cognitive rhetorical question: “Will this clock ever stop?” Moreover, in the context of the plot, the gigantic fan hints at the meaning of a slaughterhouse, since the history of civilization is the history of mutilated bodies, but also of mutilated ideals.

The Portuguese “Danton’s death” offers a pessimistic view of revolution, demystification of its hopes, reminding us of Drinka Gojković’s thoughts about Büchner’s play. Paraphrasing Brodsky, she wrote: “The tragedy of Büchner’s characters does not lie in the fact that they have to go down together with their ideals but, on the contrary, in the fact that they have to live without them”. Not only have the characters lost their faith in revolution, knowing that it devours its own children, just like Saturn, the Roman God of Time, thus symbolically demonstrating that whatever is born in time will also be eaten by the time, but they no longer believe neither in life nor in man. Cardoso’s interpretation of Büchner conspicuously demystifies human nature, through philosophically inspirational discussions about existence, God, nothingness.

Occasionally and discretely, the performance includes documentary black-and-white video projections of close-ups of tortured faces, which highlights the atmosphere of the play, its tragic overtones, and emphasizes the important documentary nature of Büchner’s play. The layered structure of Cardoso’s theatre language is enhanced by the introduction of grotesque scenes that tensely demonstrate the joy of existence, a party of the characters dressed as entertainers while dancing to the idyllic tones of “The Blue Danube”. The feeling of grotesque spreads throughout the entire performance, through the constantly grinning images of tragic victims of the revolution. Everyone is incessantly grinning because there’s nothing else they can do; it is a reaction to the encounter with nothingness.

Revolution and Game

In his study “The Sociology of Theatre”, Jean Duvignaud wrote that the political tragedy “Lorenzaccio” by Alfred de Musset (1834) is considered to be a play which requires great spiritual effort, that it is a play in which love and heroism in its pure form can never be seen, that Lorenzaccio is not a hero with clear intentions, but a weakling who treacherously assassins the duke. These theses serve Duvignaud to explain why the play was not performed back in the time when it was written (it was “rehabilitated” by Jean Vilar’s successful directing in Paris during the 1950s).

Using the aforementioned problems of this romantic play to its advantage, director Boris Liješević has created a successful performance based on a clever theatrical play (adapted by Fedor Šili, dramaturge Miloš Krečković). It is staged in a Brechtian manner as a work in progress, as a rehearsal open to contemporary meanings. In the centre is the play itself, toying with the revolution, which gives rise to the feeling of the ritual character of the revolution in history, a cyclic, eternal repetition of the mechanisms of tyranny, the power which exhausts people, and of the revolution that devours its own children. Very skilfully, the actors Marko Janketić, Branislav Lečić, Milan Marić, Sloboda Mićalović, Milena Vasić, Miodrag Dragičević, Petar Benčina and Joakim Tasić, resorting to various and always appropriate approaches, based on grotesque, but with occasional steps towards realism, consistently present this idea. The performance aptly brings forth philosophical dimensions of the plot too, the issues of the relationship between reason and old age, freedom and power, love and lust, good and evil, which cannot exist one without the other.

The stage illusion is shattered right from the start, in terms of stage design, with a big red crate placed onto a wide empty stage, with an inscription JDP (Yugoslav Drama Theatre, T/N), Florence, 1536 (stage design Gorčin Stojanović, costume design Maria Marković Milojev). Highly aestheticized theatre language and self-irony will be denoted throughout the performance, for example, when actors temporarily break their characters in order to announce the scenes, or when they read the text demonstrating thus that they are not characters but actors and establishing Brechtian distance which requires closer attention on the part of the audience. It is in line with the Brechtian stylistic approach that we interpret the decision that the actors play more roles too, which leads to a relativization of their position, porousness of the border between the tyrant and the benefactors, the villain and the righteous man. Songs make the loose dramatic structure even looser, as well as the elements of ironic creation of spectacle. That is what, for example, happens at the end of the performance, when the confetti creates the joy over the “new beginning” after the murder of the tyrant, suggesting an ironical, disclosing attitude to the new beginning. History, the merciless teacher of life, has taught us that it is only the names of the new leaders that change, while the essence of the power remains painfully the same, firmly rooted in corruption, serving one’s own interests, and constantly putting people in misery.

Nora in the Cyberworld

Henrik Ibsen’s “Nora” also thematizes revolution, but in the scope of private, marital life. In his analysis of this play, Predrag Kosić has written: “A conflict between two people in love, and the society has never in the world literature been private, since great artists have always created the relationship between a man and a woman in order to depict contradictions of society which has always deprived people of their right to make decisions that concern their own lives”. In other words, in Ibsen’s dramatic reflection of the world, the feminine question is just an illustration of a bigger and more relevant issue, the issue of human liberation, which makes this play particularly important in the history of theatre.

In the production of the Hungarian Theatre in Cluj, directed by the young Botond Nagy, the festival audience had an opportunity to see an extraordinarily inspiring, seductive, techno Nora. The entire performance takes place behind a transparent curtain, onto which various drawings, photographs, and animations are projected, bearing associative meanings. The entire staging is very psychedelic, the plot balances between rational and irrational, between losing and regaining one’s reason, which reflects Nora’s deep emotional distress. It begins with a mesmerizing atmosphere, Nora (played by Kinga Ötvös) is alone on stage, her costume stylized, illuminated by red lights, waiting for an online shopping delivery. As the stage gets covered in boxes, her multifaceted drama begins, revealing close links between marital and material interests, as well as the problem of Nora’s deep emotional unfulfillment, which plunged her into the depths of disorder.

Nagy’s “Nora” is truly extraordinary, because it has brought a myriad of fascinating visual solutions that are deeply rooted in Ibsen’s play. For instance, the scene which best reveals her vulnerability and essential loneliness in her marriage is the one in which she is exchanging text messages with Torvald (played by Péter Árus). Their messages are projected onto the second level of the backdrop, a transparent glass box into which Nora is cramped both literally and symbolically. Accompanied by minimalistic, melancholic, electronic music, without a single word spoken, in a tense, stifling atmosphere, we read letters which reveal Nora’s fear of life, which powerfully illustrates the horribly gaping distance between them. We should also single out the truly magnificent ending which aroused a rare aesthetic feeling linking the power of drama and a striking visually-musical performance. The scene opens with Nora lying down, almost naked, in an empty aquarium set in the middle of the stage, like a fish out of water, without the ability to survive. The scene is accompanied by a painfully melancholic Robert Burns’ song “My Heart Is in the Highlands”, performed by Arvo Pärt. Once we reach the famous scene in which Nora expresses her need to become human and to get rid of the marital chains, she decisively stands up, abandons the curled-up position, the corner she was pushed into and speaks up. She is still in the aquarium, but now in a stable, standing position, which underlines her resolve. The scene ends with her mesmerizing singing of “I Don’t Love You Anymore”. After that, Nora steps out of the aquarium, or out of the glass bell, she tears down the final, paper wall, and passes through it without looking back, symbolically demonstrating that every wall can be torn down.

written by Ana Tasić

translated from Serbian by Vesna Radovanović

Photo credits István Biró

Published on 23 December 2019

Interview with RJR – Radio Jeunes Reims

We return to the Digyparty that took place on 1^st of June with the participation of actors from a play entitled Concord Floral. With them we’ll talk about the creation of the project called Digital Natives, its progress and of course its closure during a reception organised at the Comédie de Reims.

RJR: Could you present us the Concord Floral project?

CF: The project was carried out at European level. In the Digital Natives project there were 5 cities from all around Europe, namely Cluj, Thessaloniki, Vienna, Reims and Cologne, and together they all staged the same play, that is Concord Floral at the same time. Each and every one of us staged the play in our own language and for the Digyparty we have organised a huge videoconference where we had a chance to discuss and share experience about the project at European level.

RJR: How was this connection established with the other European countries?

CF: Well, basically this is a project of the Union of European Theatres (UTE), which has a group of cultural delegates at the EU and they have submitted this project and it was approved by the EU. In the framework of this project several European theatres received EU funds and in exchange they had to stage this play with young people who were more or less of the same age as the characters in the play. And then all directors were free to adapt the play or even create the play as they wanted. And as soon as each theatre had created its own Concord Floral we established contacts and met in Vienna for three days.

CF: I think when the auditions were held for Concord Floral we got detailed information about the play but this European aspect wasn’t apparent until much later. I think we realised this only at the opening night because two persons from Cologne and the theatre director of the Viennese Concord Floral came to see our play. And they came to meet us after the show to talk about their own projects, to ask questions and to discuss details of their performances. And this is how I fully understood the scale and importance of this European-wide project.

CF: We had a chance to watch the videos.

CF: At the Digyparty we were shown video presentations to discover the staging of the play in other countries. It was really interesting also because those versions had nothing to do with what we produced here in Reims.

CF: The Digyparty made it possible for you to see each other.

CF: We have organised flash mobs, and we have all come up with choreographies. After that I think some more or less festive events will take place on each side but we stay connected along the way. Finally, for the closing I think Cologne have organised something.

RJR: I heard that there will be a bottle spinning game and you will take an oath, am I right? And then there will be a flash mob.

CF: Yes, this bottle spinning is supposed to be international and done with phones. I think this is what they want. It’s not very clear to me at this point but this is what I understood.

RJR: You had a chance to discover others who were in the same project with you…

CF: Yes, exactly. But it is not easy to communicate all across Europe.

RJR: Well, basically I think this is very ambitious. It is good to have such ambitions to meet other Europeans but I have found that technically this is too challenging along with what the young people are required to be doing, even if there will be some really fun events, such as the flash mob, which is going to be a quite a blast. I do hope that other young people will reproduce the play in Europe and will try to meet and I think this is the trial run in a way. For instance we could watch what everyone was doing on video. Even if we only watched 3-5 minutes of their Concord Floral it was still great fun to see how they dealt with their play, how they staged it, what their costumes were like, and I think the flash mob will be hilarious. We just hope that there won’t be any bugs.

Exchanges Around Concord Floral

Exchanges around Concord Floral

Elen Riot shares some of her conversations from workshops with teenagers in Reims, France surrounding the performances of Concord Floral.

The most recent presentations of the piece took place on May 28 and 29. I have been struck by a few statements, and I will mention them briefly. A class of students at Lycée Gustave Eiffel were there before the Wednesday morning performance, and we exchanged at the Bar de la Comedie, in the company of Rénilde Gerardin and three of their teachers.

I asked the young people if certain series influenced their judgments about the risks of social networks. I mention a series, “Black Mirror”, which I have already heard about in passing in the classes. One student, who knows the series well (as many of his classmates obviously also do), evokes an infamous blackmail following the distribution of intimate photographs. The young person who talks about this series thinks that “it happens in real life, everyone sees everything…” and a young girl adds:” For example, we send our holiday pictures and immediately, the burglars get ready to come to our house”.

I am thinking of Jacqueline Ryan-Vickery’s (Ryan Vickery, J. (2017). Worried about the wrong things: Youth, risk, and opportunity in the digital world. MIT Press.) book, which refers to the prevailing climate of “moral panic”, particularly the idea that children or families fall prey to predators watching online. She says that the most popular American series present a chain of disasters that exaggerate the dangers and encourage adults to raise barriers between young people and the use of digital tools, especially for young people of modest backgrounds, as a way to give up offering them education in uses and tools that they do not naturally have access to.

A young boy picks up on the theme of rumours and photographs posted online when I ask them for their reaction when they see shocking content or when they disapprove. “A guy, for example, who gets hit, and it’s filmed…” says someone, he says again: “If the video shows the guy I know getting hit, I share.

One of the teachers: “What do you say by sharing that?”

The young person answers: “I just share…”

The teacher: “But with whom do you share?”

The young man: “With my friends, my network, first I share and then we start the conversation, we explain ourselves.”

I am surprised by this laconism. It’s as if, in the reaction, what counts is the scoop, or the enigma, it is the fact of not taking sides on shared information, of waiting to know the reaction of others, as if the spontaneous reaction of others, without influence, at the beginning, guarantees that the dialogue would then continue with detailed information. Is it a form of suspension of judgment, or simply the refusal to use words that would not necessarily be appropriate?

Alberto Casilli describes the condition of digital workers who transmit news, placing captions of photographs online, serial content.

I come back to the amusing anecdote of a young actress from Concord Floral who was astounded that her mother had the nerve not to ask her before posting pictures of her on Facebook, sharing them with her friends when “everyone can see them”. This is followed by comments on the type of photographs that may be problematic. We come to this notion full of implicitness: “embarrassing photos”. We need a reciprocal agreement, say several young people, otherwise “everyone laughs” and a young girl adds: “And then it will never stop, tomorrow, if you delete, in fact it will always be there and your boss can go and see.”

For young people, aesthetic and moral codes (what is done and what is not done) are even clearer and more demanding than for adults, because they seem to fear compromising the present but also the future. Is it the result of parental fears, teacher warnings or the culture change Sherry Turkle (Turkle, S. (2016). Reclaiming conversation: The power of talk in a digital age. Penguin Books, London.) talks about when she exalts the values of conversation, which gives a chance to explain, to nuance and which young people seem to want to avoid with their parades of text messages?

A young girl sighs, when I talk about their generation, the generation of “digital natives”: “And even then, we are not the worst, we, the mobile phone, we had it at 11 years old, now you have six-year-olds with IPhone 6s, they do it “just for the fashion effect”, not to use it.” This young girl seems like a mother worried about her children, appalled by the dangers to which the innocence of youth is exposed. Her neighbour replied: “Well, yes, they are younger than us, but it’s still the same generation as us, in short it’s the same.” This echoes Michel Serres’ (Serres, M. (2015). Petite poucette. Editions Le pommier, Paris) reflections on “Thumbelina” and this generation of the youngest whose ways of learning escape us (at the same time fascinate, worry and soften us), as if they did not live in the same world as us.

Before going to see the play, Rénilde asks them what they expect to discover, by going to see the play. First there is a long thoughtful silence from the class, then a young man answers, very seriously: “We are going to see things that we do not dare to admit.”

What is of the order of the disgraceful and which is common to both digital and theatre, I wonder at this point.

At the edge of the stage, everyone explains a little bit about their vocation, the young actors talk about their experiences, and Alexandra, who composed the music, performs it on stage and also plays, confides: “I am from the MTV generation, that’s how I started playing the guitar. »

Will these young people later say that about an online site they know?

Ferdinand replied, about roles and young people: “I was the one who distributed the roles, because this is my role.” What is the role of the role, I wonder, on the Internet, when there is no director?

At one point, a spectator asks how it feels to play “bad” characters, to which Martin answers: “In fact, you ask us if we’re not assholes? Well, no, we’re not assholes, except for one or two that I think of…”

A little later, a gentleman asked the question differently: “I am not from the social network generation, but it seems to me that this encourages harassment.” This refers to the question of “shaming” that is the subject of debate about the Internet. Is it a way of exerting a form of pressure on behaviour in addition to the official frameworks of political and legal institutions, as Antonio Casilli (Casilli, A. A. (2010). Les Liaisons numériques. Vers une nouvelle sociabilité?: Vers une nouvelle sociabilité?. Le Seuil.) and Claudine Haroche (Aubert, N., & Haroche, C. (2011). Les tyrannies de la visibilité. Editions Erès, Paris. Haroche, C. (2008). L’avenir du sensible: Les sens et les sentiments en question. Presses universitaires de France.)

suggest, or a way for the intelligence of the crowds to fight against the system and defend new ideas, for example in favour of the environment, as we are witnessing today with an enormous mobilization of young people on an international scale (Jacquet, J. (2014). Is shame necessary?. Penguin Books, London)? In the tone and manner in which these issues are addressed, there is a strong moral commitment on the part of young people, and a very strong attention to these issues insofar as, by asking the question of “is it good, is it bad?”, the question of the moral stature of the person they embody in the eyes of others is already raised for these young people.

This self-presentation (Goffman, E. (1978). The presentation of self in everyday life (p. 56). London: Harmondsworth.) may well include a new facet, that of the self-image given for viewing online (Bullingham, L., & Vasconcelos, A. C. (2013). ‘The presentation of self in the online world’: Goffman and the study of online identities. Journal of information science, 39(1), 101-112.), but in this case, when Martin answers, he asks the same question differently since he is trying to answer a question that concerns the possible confusion between his character on stage (and those of the other actors) and his personality as it appears during the debate on this “stage edge”. This diffraction of self-presentation spaces is one of the most interesting issues to question at the moment, insofar as, unlike previous generations who have rather built by successive additions, the young people we have spoken to sculpt in an already existing material, and in a way, spread out new forms of coexistence and co-presence with oneself.

Published on 13 June 2019.

Feeling at Home Between Two Worlds

About the Digital Night Festival in Cluj-Napoca: The final event of the Digital Natives cooperation project between five European theatres, through the eyes of Bea Kovács.

Imagine you are just ready with all preparations for the party that you have been planning for weeks: you have purchased all party items (glasses, plates, confetti), drinks are in the fridge, a host of mini bites are on a tray, latest hits playlist compiled and your party dress is waiting to be put on. Everything is ready, only guests are missing. But even when they arrive, they will not be there physically: This is a digital party where we will not be connected physically, only virtually.

Encompassing five theatres from Vienna, Reims, Cologne, Thessaloniki and naturally Cluj-Napoca, the large-scale Digital Natives project organized by the Union of the Theatres of Europe (UTE) ended with a digital closing ceremony on 1 June. The event summed up and crowned this diverse initiative, bringing together theatre teams from these five cities in the virtual realm. The teams spent the last twelve months working on finding the theatrical means of discussing the broad phenomenon of digitalization and its impact on younger generations. Both individually and in a joint effort, the Volsktheater Wien, the Comédie de Reims, the Schauspiel Köln, the National Theatre of Northern Greece and the Hungarian State Theatre of Cluj-Napoca resolved to adapt Concord Floral, a drama written by a contemporary Canadian author, using teenagers with no prior stage experience as actors. The adapted versions could digress from the original text and were meant to initiate discussions about the changes triggered by global digitalization in society and in the life of individuals.

The Digital Night Festival took place in the studio room of the Hungarian State Theatre of Cluj-Napoca [KÁMsz] on Children’s Day, 1 June. In the 2018/2019 theatrical season, the same room hosted the stage performances of Concord Floral, directed by Ferenc Sinkó. The organizers converted the empty, black space of the studio room into a magic, lively place by putting up a disco globe in it: the tiny glittering lights moving round and round kept the place in motion throughout the evening.

Arriving at a digital party is an exciting experience: Partly because I never attended a digital party before, except for the regular video sessions with my friends and the usual live video streaming, and partly because no party can be fully digital. When I entered the studio, all members of the young team were already there along with the key organizers and the catering staff that provided for a smooth eating and drinking experience. It seems the analogue part of the party must be in place first to give us sufficient energy to join, virtually, the main online party. “You are the first viewer” welcomed me theatre program director Zoltán Csép who is regularly addressed by the Concord Floral cast of 9-11^th grade youngsters as “daddy”. I find myself in a cozy and homely atmosphere. In a Peter Brook-ish sense, my presence guarantees that the evening can also be enjoyed and interpreted as a theatrical performance.

I had the pleasure of seeing Concord Floral’s debut performance on 18 May and even though I am officially one generation older than the young actors and Tannahill’s characters in the play, I felt being at home and totally understood in the performance. As a teenager, I was not easy to deal with and I guess I caused more headache than necessary to my parents and teachers at the time. The night attracted me and so did restricted areas. I looked down somewhat on the theoretical education I received because I longed for far more practical experiences. During the transition-heavy grammar school years, my lasting and temporary friendships were the colourful aspect of my life: like roses of diverse colours on a black shirt, our shared adventures enabled me to emerge intact from the boring and meagre life at grammar school. Led by Ferenc Sinkó, the young team (Eszter Albert, Andor Balon-Ruff, Kristóf Dimény, Ráhel Csenge Geréb, Deborah Jenei, Ákos Kerekes, Dániel Nițu-Mányoki, Orsolya Rázmán, Bernadette Rus, Áron Sárosi, Márk Szabó, Eszter Szőllősi, Boglárka Török, Ágnes Turós) could recall for me the anxiety that I felt owing to my changing life and body 10-12 years ago. But the performance also brought me relief that the various embarrassments of one’s formative years all disappear over time, but only to be replaced by new, perhaps far more complex ones.

Nevertheless, the performance staged by the KÁMSz pointed out a huge generation difference that I consider absolutely decisive: It is about being a digital native or not. While I was 13 when I set up my first email account in an internet café and explored the joy of online chatting right around that time, these young people (who can talk about the pleasures and hazards of the world that surrounds them with respectable openness and self-criticism) were born when the internet was already a family member in many homes. Just like my contemporaries, I texted love messages on a large handheld mobile phone (my grandpa still has a phone like that: a wonderful relic from a (nearly) past era; “Today’s young people” use cutting edge technology to get closer to each other, and to nearly everything else in the digital realm. While watching the performance staged by Sinkó I could not help wondering what kind of a person I would have become if I had received a tablet instead of a handheld cell phone as a teenager. To what extent would I have been absorbed by the internet, to what extent could I have remain connected to the physical world that continues to amaze me despite all my love for the internet? What dangers would I have been exposed to if after the lights were switched off in the evening, instead of texting messages like “Good night, kisses, see you tomorrow” I would have entered a chat room also used by pedophiles?

Now that I approach my late twenties, I can see what I could not see when I was a teenager: Just because a young person seems to be an adult in terms of bodily appearance, his or her inner world is childlike in many ways. The stubbornness of adolescents that we all have been characterized by at some point may drift an individual into borderline situations where escape may be a dangerously close game. The internet simultaneously brings closer and expands the circumstances where the security of decision-making for a teenager is no longer there. Parents, however, can hardly access the relationship between a teenager and his smartphone, and often it takes only a second for a love affair to turn into bullying.

As a press worker I can see so many viable young people who become victims. Sitting at the Digital Night Festival, I am thinking we are lucky that finally a dialogue started about digitalization in Cluj-Napoca as well.

A photo appears on the screen set up on the disco studio stage, showing the Cluj-Napoca team. We are not in live connection yet. On the left side of the room (also the place of one of the most memorable mass scenes of the performance), there are a few beany bags with the team seated on or next to them. All of them wear a red top and it is not only Concord Floral that connects them: Apparently friendships and love affairs have been formed between the young participants. The fourteen grammar school students are enthusiastic and a little anxious: They can’t wait to see the actual festival to begin, to meet the four other teams, see the fruit of the work of others and presenting what they were working on at Cluj-Napoca. They are taking selfies. In the first row of the auditorium sit Zoltán and Emőke Veres, associates of the KÁMSz. They supervise the connection and obviously the team as well. Herself a youngster, too, Emőke’s patient presence can keep these high-energy teenagers under control, who are ready to spar back at any comment, and who perhaps only anticipate the actual party more than meeting the other teams online.

The first team to join online is that of Vienna’s Volkstheater, and albeit the audience at Cluj-Napoca is rather small (is there any kind of live broadcast that could make up for physical presence?), the atmosphere is tangibly becoming electrified. In an instance, we find ourselves in the main hall of Vienna’s wonderful theatre, and the building created by the architects Fellner and Helmer suddenly seems quite anachronistic: Now a team of young people are video chatting from its stage. No costumes, no set, no theatrical properties, only the openness of Austrian teenagers who rejoice when the online connection is finally up. After a brief welcome speech, we watch the video that sums up the workshop held before their rehearsals. Three young participants from each of the five teams travelled from the other European countries to Vienna in order to get the core dialogue of the Digital Natives project started through improvisation sessions, situation exercises, theatrical and non-theatrical sessions. The upbeat footage provides an insight into the workshops, also interviewing young team members who speak about their interest in theatre and acting on stage, about what it means to be an adolescent today and what research and preparation steps were taken before the rehearsals. One of the participants said that they are connected by a shared passion, and this sentence remains valid for the entire evening.

During the international team’s stay in Vienna, the Austrian capital also hosted the Digitalization & Democracy conference, featuring interdisciplinary speakers who addressed the (legal) consequences of relocating into the virtual world.

After the summary video, the teams from Cologne, Reims, Cluj-Napoca, Vienna and Thessaloniki introduced themselves one by one. Each group was dressed in “uniform” red or white tops, indicating that they consider themselves theatrical companies. While there were several common characteristics of the short videos, the most apparent shared attribute was the easiness that radiated from these teenagers. I am sure each community experienced smaller or bigger difficulties behind the scenes, yet the videos suggested they found joy in each other’s company and in working together. The second link between them was their affection for theatre; Although prior stage experience was not a requirement upon casting, it was obvious that the majority of young participants had a genuine in theatre and acting. The third link connecting the five different videos was the Tannahill drama itself: Apparently the young Canadian author’s text touched teenagers from the most diverse nationalities – a tangible proof of the universal nature of theatre performances.

Naturally, the differences I could detect related to the work methods and the nature of stage adaptations: There were contrasts in how each team used the space on stage, the set and the props. There were differences in their costumes and in their approach to the text and the interpretation choices regarding the storyline. E.g. the Cologne team adapted Tannahill’s text to a local environment, linking it to a local ghost house, incorporating own messages and additional text into the original drama. Unfortunately, owing to technical difficulties, the sound of the Reims team’s video was incomprehensible, but the video footage duly showcased their community and joyful work process that also gave room to music and dance. The Vienna team also put Concord Floral into a local framework. In the rehearsal period, they set up Instagram accounts for the actors that expanded the theatre stage by creating a universe across diverse media. Coming from a country that was worst hit by the economic crisis, the Greek team presented a video that had a more pessimistic tone and captured the downside of teenage life.

The Cluj-Napoca team was introduced by Kristóf Dimény in an impromptu speech. In easy-going, fluent English, he explained that the project was important for them as a community. He recalled that the fourteen of them worked well under the director and that the play was received well by the Cluj-Napoca audience. Since the local adaptation of Concord Floral was staged in a studio room and not in the main performance hall, the production turned out to be more intimate and personal, having a greater emotional impact on the audience, explained Kristóf. He said that their team wanted to show who they are, also adding that great friendships and loves were formed during the time that the team spent together. After that we watched an excerpt from the performance and applauded.

Understandably, after the grand introduction, the team’s attention and concentration level dropped. Some laid back on the bean bags, others went over to the foyer for food. Some others were taking selfies with their lips rounded, and others urge team members to stay put and behave respectfully towards the other communities. The atmosphere is informal, curiosity lasts and soon the music is turned on.

In the next, informal part of the Digital Night Festival, the teams asked questions from each other regarding their work process and the resulting performance. Answers from the Cluj-Napoca team revealed that they cut parts of the original text, that director Ferenc Sinkó went out of his way to help the young actors and that the audience have loved the performance. Outside twilight is approaching (although it is difficult to tell inside with the studio’s disco light), and the vivid team disassembles every now and then. At a certain point, I find myself alone in the studio room, contemplating whether it can be regarded as a theatrical situation if I am watching the other teams on the screen alone? I find no answer to my question.

The “mandatory” part of the evening is over. The cold plates, fruit juices, cookies and sodas receive the attention, and slowly friends of team members arrive. With a sort of laid-back elegance, they chose to attend the party only. The rest of the festival is all informal. The only set program point is that every 30 minutes one team comes online with a brief flash mob, one after the other. Music soon starts and the studio room of the Hungarian State Theatre of Cluj-Napoca changes its function, turning into a dance floor.

Who are today’s young people and who are young people at any given time? How does it feel to be a teenager in 2019 and what will it be like ten years from now? Will our human needs change with our technological development? We feel being close to our German, Austrian, Greek and French friends (after all, we are only a click away from them) and then we enjoy a truly unique experience: Thanks to the internet, we can create a community that could hardly have been created in real life without massive expenditure. We are forming a team digitally, in a one-off situation under non-repeatable circumstances, the same way as ad-hoc theatre audiences do evening by evening. But can virtual connectedness replace physical presence? I don’t think so, but as a genuine Y-generation person balancing between digital worlds, I am aware that all that is digital actually makes up a large part of our reality. I think the path to joy and fulfilment is in finding a balance: Partying digitally with others while also having fun through reaching a common wavelength with those physically present around us, enjoying each other’s presence.

Although I took a French leave from the Digital Night Festival very soon after the party started (after all, I attended in the capacity of a viewer), I think the team managed to enjoy a pleasant fusion of real and virtual partying on Saturday night.

Published on 19 June 2019

Ghosts In Virtual Spaces

UTE’s cooperative education project Digital Natives 2nd part “Digi /topia“ and „Digi / love“ premiered in Cologne

Here is what Ana Tasic, part of UTE’s journalist network Conflict Zones, based in Belgrad experienced.

As a part of the “Digital Natives” project, created by Union des Théâtres de l’Europe, “Digi/topia” directed by Bassam Ghazi, premiered at Schauspiel Köln on May 17, 2019. The starting point of “Digital Natives”, which started in June 2018 and was closed in June 2019, was to explore the balance between the digital and analogue world. “Digi/topia” was an explorative performance and visionary lab, in which thirty performers aged 13 to 78 took part. They explored utopian and dystopian meanings of living in our digital world and present their investigations in a performative experiment.

Director Ghazi explained in an interview the circumstances of the creative process: ”During the rehearsals, we were mostly talking about the changes in everyday life. Some were saying: Thank God for these changes, while the others were at the opposite side, thinking about wanting to free themselves from the technological progress, close their eyes and die. Some young people were critical towards technological changes, without any difference in regards to the older generations.” This production represents the continuation of Ghazi’s research on social changes in the context of new media: “Before we did “Digi/topia and “Concord Floral”, we had a play which was called “Real Fake”. There was a lot about what’s going in the Internet, how it creates new identities. We are creating new identities to show the outside world what we are like, while we move away from reality. So the question was: how much real and how much fake is in my identity, and in the end, what’s going to make me more human?”

“Digi/topia” is an interactive and ambient play, performed in procession, in different spaces of the construction site of the Cologne theatre, in the halls, little rooms, spacious cellars, but also on the stage (under construction). Each group of about a dozen spectators follows the performers through different fragments of the play. From the first scene with a VR-goggle mask for seeing robots play, through the survey in which we had to answer about our digital and online routines, (and) the scene where we got security clothes and helmets to make a tour of the impressive theatre site under construction. In the last scene of the performance, every spectator got a tablet and had to choose a character, to generate the profile of his own avatar. The performance illustrated challenging fragments of the bright and dark sides of our fast-changing world.

In the fifteenth scene of the play, we followed the performer who was playing the lover, overjoyfully speaking about his virtual love: „My love is perfect. Her algorithms are perfect. Perfect for me. I can do without physicality because everything else is right. It is perfect. I don’t need a body, no flesh and blood. I can finally be me.” The motivation to include the scene in the performance has been, as Ghazi said: “He just speaks with her, nothing more, and that’s enough for him.” Ghazi also explained that the group have been talking a lot about love during rehearsals: the fear of changing the essence of relationships in the future was dominant: “The Tinder and other dating apps phenomenon was present as well as the question about how we meet nowadays. The first contact happens more and more via Internet. This is different than twenty years ago. Young people today consider that their digital identity very important, even if fake moments are widespread. They somehow create a new person… Young people are afraid of how love will look like in the future. They seem to be lost, as relationships change rapidly. Looking at Netflix, one can find many series and movies where people fall in love with robots and artificial intelligence. That is one of the scenarios of the future, where human relationships will not anymore be in the focus. Mixed relationships between humans and machines will be central.”

A day after the “Digi/ topia”-premiere, the conference “Digi/love” was held, as another part of the “Digital Natives” project. The aim of the conference was to explore the changes of love relationships in the digital era: What will tomorrow’s love look like? How do social media change our relationships and our view of sex, body and community? The idea for having a conference was inspired by the creative process of “Digi/topia”, as assistant director Saliha Shagasi explained: “During our first rehearsals, we noticed that the subject of love is a subject that probably preoccupies everybody, whether in a good way or in a bad, who knows, but it is a subject which comes up, again and again. And in the play we couldn’t give that much space to it. There is a scene which explicitly deals with the subject of love, but that doesn’t mean that the entire play deals explicitly with love. That’s why we thought, we should organise a conference precisely on this subject, and because we have so many generations involved, it is exciting to see how loving and love have changed, and how different generations regard these matters, but also how each generation condemns or judges each other in this context.”

The first input was given by Stephan Porombka, professor at Freie Universtität Berlin, author of several books about changes in contemporary love relationships. He spoke about new circumstances in everyday life, in terms of being permanently online, in constant connection with each other: „This is a state only we know, unexperienced to former generations, which throws us, and that’s important, into a state of permanent experimentation… Regarding love or romantic relationship, it is absolutely clear: if we can be permanently online, we can be permanently connected. In other words, romantic relationships are permanently under the presence shock, problems occur due to this unique “fabrication” of presence. By developing something that is called spacing in psychology in romantic relationships, we tend to solve it. That means, we are trying to establish roles within which we are moving.”

Psychological relationship aspects in the digital world are in the focus of Sherry Turkle’s books. In “Alone Together” (2011), she writes: “These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time. This can happen when one is finding one’s way through a blizzard of text messages; it can happen when interacting with a robot. I feel witness for a third time to a turning point in our expectations of technology and ourselves. We bend to the inanimate with new solicitude. We fear the risks and disappointments of relationships with our fellow humans. We expect more from technology and less from each other.” Technology is indeed seductive when facing our own vulnerabilities. We are lonely but we fear intimacy. Digital connections and robots offer illusion of companionship without the real demands. We are more and more connected to each other, but essentially more and more alone, without true love.

This real and dystopic image at the same time, the mirror of our world, is a kind of radicalization of Fromm’s critical discussions about love in the Western civilization. In his seminal book „The Art of Loving“ (1956), Fromm claimed that our Western capitalism does not encourage true love: „No objective observer of our Western life can doubt that love is a relatively rare phenomenon, and that its place is taken by a number of forms of pseudo-love which are in reality so many forms of the disintegration of love.“ He also wrote that modern man was alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature: „While everybody tries to be as close as possible to the rest, everybody remains utterly alone, pervaded by the deep sense of insecurity, anxiety and guilt which always results when human separateness cannot be overcome. Our civilization offers many palliatives which help people to be consciously unaware of this aloneness.“. Related to this, we can conclude that the relationships between men and robots, as well as the virtual substitutions of real love relationships of our times, could be regarded as the Fromm’s palliatives which alienate us from our beings. If they are not mere platforms for building real love, true connections in the material world, virtual relationships are nothing but the shadows of the real ones. They are forms of pseudo-love that Fromm wrote about. Captured ghosts in virtual spaces.

Published on 18 June 2019

Teenagers, theatre lovers, and ‘digital natives’

Teenagers, theatre lovers, and ‘digital natives’

Thessaloniki’s teenagers became ‘digital natives’ and presented their views and the problems they face to young people from other countries through theatre. The programme, which is entitled “Digital Natives” and co-funded by the EU’s Creative Europe programme, was implemented by the National Theatre of Northern Greece within the framework of the activities of the Union of the Theatres of Europe.

Teens from five European countries took part in the project, presenting the fruit of their joint labours, exchanging views on the things that matter to them, and enjoyed themselves at an interactive party broadcast live online to and from five European cities: Vienna, Rennes, Cluj, Cologne and Thessaloniki.

The teenagers from Vienna, Reims in France, Cluj in Romania, Cologne and Thessaloniki interacted online, expressing their relationship with contemporary technology and speaking about their concerns and interests. Their inspiration was provided by Concord Floral, a play by the young Canadian writer Jordan Tannahil. The NTNG participated in the program with a series of theatre workshops for teens: guided by the theatre educator Komno Krikelikou and in collaboration with the psychologist / drama therapist Foteini Papacharalambous, two groups of teenagers—30 individuals in all—began work on the play’s key themes back in October 2018. Using theatre-game techniques and drama, the groups set out to formulate questions, to tackle issues stemming from online communication, and to achieve a deeper understanding of both the Internet’s potential and its potential traps.

ETHNOS, 4 June 2019

Online party at the NTNG

The online party thrown on Saturday 1 June brought to a close the “Digital Natives” programme, which was co-funded by the EU’s Creative Europe programme. The programme, in which the National Theatre of Northern Greece took part, was run within the framework of the activities of the Union of the Theatres of Europe. Teens from five European countries took part in the project, presenting the results of their joint labours, exchanging views on the issues that concern them and, of course, enjoying themselves together at a party that was broadcast live online to and from five European cities (Vienna, Reims, Cluj, Cologne and Thessaloniki).

TYPOS TIS THESSALONIKI, 4 June 2019

“I Share, Therefore I Am”

How to think about digital and analogue communication on European stages in the future. What kind of intergenerational dialogue will be made possible. Notes from the UTE-Conference on Digitisation «Digitization and young people» at the Comédie de Reims, as part of «Digital Natives», a transnational educational UTE-project, from Elena Galanopoulou.

“I share therefore I am.” The phrase takes me pleasantly aback for a moment as it leaves the lips of French sociologist Elen Riot. I’m in the Bar de la Comédie in Reims, where UTE, the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe is staging a conference on «Digitization and young people». A few minutes earlier, I’d uploaded a photo of the panel to my social media accounts. I had already announced my being there… so I really was here, I thought with a smile before sinking back into the speakers’ interesting takes on the subject.

Most of them are no longer in the first blush of youth. They are using their academic tool kits to try and monitor, understand and predict trends relating to an enormously dynamic phenomenon-in-progress: digital living. And with a focus on an age group every bit as volatile: young people.

However, they are still the most suitable to help us better understand of this subject. Patrice Flichy, a researcher and professor of sociology at Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, is up first. He talks about the internet over the last three decades, dedicating a little time to the broader historical framework and a great deal more to the changes since. There is a huge semantic gulf between the Nineties’ view of the Net as a wonderful tool for democratizing public discourse and the suspicion which we might have towards it today.

These and other aspects of digital life are also rendered transparent in Concord Floral, the play which provided both the impetus for—and fundamental axis of—this meeting and public discussion. Written in 2015, the play was first staged in Canada, where it was a serious success, garnering particular praise for its handling of burning issues such as youth, democracy and the impact of new technologies and social networks on modes of socialization.

Its French première, which features a local amateur cast of young people aged 13 to 17, is to be staged that night. The Comédie de Reims is one of five member theatres participating in this educational and transnational UTE-project. The other four—Thessaloniki’s State Theatre of Northern Greece, Vienna’s Volkstheater, Cologne’s Schauspiel and the Hungarian Theatre in Cluj—have also undertaken to stage either the play itself or workshops and lectures relating to it. Ultimately, simultaneous project parts will unite the five cities and theatres involved via the… Internet, in a celebration which is surely one of most positive ways in which the Internet has impacted our lives. But what about data: all the information which, having been stealthily collected from users, ends up in the hands of powerful commercial giants? Flichy referred to the example of Housing. It started with people who simply wanted to share their sofas with guests, and ended up with platforms like AirBnB dictating the market’s rules.

In her lecture, Géraldine Taillandier, director of Centre Saint-Ex, Reims, dedicated to new ICT technologies, stresses that the Centre educates people aged 6 and up in using digital tools. Young people attending the Centre find themselves in a welcoming and free environment being encouraged to think “outside the box”. Their philosophy is so wide-ranging, it doesn’t even rule out hacking as a concept.

Olivier Nocent, professor of Computer Science at Crestic Laboratory, Reims, praises the work being done at Saint-Ex Centre, before going on to mention the algorithms which, having identified our preferences, undertake to inform and influence us by both redirecting our desires and attempting to foresee them. Simultaneously, the algorithms group us with other users with similar tastes and behaviours.

Jean-Pierre Cahier, professor at Université Technologique, Troyes, speaks about his collaboration project between engineers, systems designers, hackers and creatives. Each of them brings a different point of view. He also describes a project running in rural areas, where tools are brought together for the agro-ecological transition.

In the following public discussion, in answer to a question posed to Cahier about creativity, he uses the example of Wim Wenders’ 3D-movie about Pina Bausch. It is just one hour long, but required thousands of hours of filming. A number of other issues are raised by the fifty or so young people in the audience from YPAL (Young Performing Art Lovers), who previously attended the workshop in question.

How much do we really know about the tools we use on a daily basis? Are we aware of what they can and cannot do? To what extent are we really free in terms of online media and platforms? What sort of abilities and knowledge do we need to enjoy freedom of information and exercise freedom of expression? What are the differences between online practices of different digital generations, especially generations which are and are not “digital natives”? Is it possible to provide an education in new media? And if so, what might be the rules?

In conclusion, I tend to agree with what Elen Riot already noted in her introduction; that we are really mistaken if we think that the “digital natives” can instinctively manage the new technologies that extend everywhere before them (from school through the workplace). Taking everything into consideration, it is clear that only by observing what is really happening into our lives as daily practice we can help and encourage democratic knowledge.

Panel participants:

Jean-Pierre Cahier

Roland Flichy

Olivier Nocent

Géraldine Taillandier

Moderator: Elen Riot

Published on 7 May 2019

Translation from Greek into English: Michael Eleftheriou

Electrotheatre of one author or «However wonderful staying in the USSR might be, I prefer to live in Europe.»

On the 18th of February at the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre a presentation of a book by Anne Hartmann titled I Came, Saw, I Will Write. Lion Feuchtwanger in Moscow in 1937 (Wallstein Verlag, 2017) took place. The event was held in commemoration of the recent 60th anniversary of the death of the famous writer. It was made possible thanks to the support of the Goethe Institut, the Embassy of the State of Israel in Moscow and the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library of the University of Southern California. And it unexpectedly resulted in exposing all the soreness of the contemporary Russian society permeated with intolerance and hostility, as well as its disposition to not so much appreciate the legacy of Feuchtwanger the writer, as to appraise his estate, fees and royalties.

The event was facilitated by consecutive interpretation of the German speakers’ addresses into Russian. The arrangement proved fortunate since it allowed some remarks from the public escape translation — and therefore ever being heard by the guests of the event. As for the latter Herwig Lewy, theatre critic by whom the event was conceived and chaired, and Ian Wallace, the Chair of the International Feuchtwanger Society, delivered short and sketchy pieces fleshing out Feuchtwanger’s biography. It was quite illuminating to learn about the writer’s high productivity (a novel in two years), as well as about the fact that all his early works were written with a pencil, or dictated. Those present also heard about the death of Feuchtwanger’s baby — event that emerged in many of his novels. Details of Feuchtwanger’s short creative collaboration with Bertold Brecht were covered by Avraham Oz, theorist of literature and playwright, who enlarged on Brecht’s frustration over Feuchtwanger’s infatuation with historic background and his being true to fact instead of focusing on Brecht’s epic theatre (“dialectical theatre”), defamiliarization, and class approach. Brecht, Feuchtwanger and Willi Bredel also worked together as the editorial staff of the monthly periodical Das Wort (Word) (issue 1 July 1936 – issue 3 March 1939), the very existence of which periodical a member of the public loudly questioned, accusing the speaker of distorting facts.

Anne Hartmann’s book, that aimed at placing Feuchtwanger’s text back into its historical context, became, as Herwig Lewy put it, a sort of «archeology of knowledge», marked by profound literary analyses and most careful treatment of the sources. It is particularly obvious in the case of the reports by Dora Karavkina, the interpretor who was appointed to take care of the writer’s needs, which she wrote on regular basis. Those reports were passed over to Nikolay Yezhov, the Comissioner-General of the State Security at the time, and from him directly to Josef Stalin. For example, here is a fragment from the report dated 27.12.1936: «Today was a difficult day, as Feuchtwanger at once gave vent to his indignation over the Pravda demanding that he make some changes in his article about Gide (André Gide, a French author). Now, says he, here is substantiation to Gide’s claim that we have no freedom of opinion, that one can’t express one’s thoughts, etc.» Or this fragment of a special memorandum made by the 4th Department of the Head Directorate for State Security that reads: «Generally the impression I get {…} is that you have neither the freedom of speech, nor the freedom of press.»

«You cannot clean the mess in history with a pencil eraser», said, and wrote, Feuchnwanger, yet he himself fell victim to self-censorship. A photo of a page from his manuscript was demonstrated, that showed many introduced amendments, corrections and scratched out words, all done upon having been insistently advised to. A point was made — all admiring remarks addressed to Trotsky that the first version of the book featured, the author, in the aftermath of, among other things, a visit paid to him by Mikhail Koltsov, re-addressed to Stalin. Nevertheless, the final version of the book that was published in the USSR, still had 124 references to Trotsky, which made the book most embarrassing. The phrase characterizing Stalin: «It is obvious that Stalin, prey to the feeling of his own inferiority, lust for power, and boundless vindictiveness, desires to take revenge upon all who has insulted him, and eliminate those who may turn out dangerous in any way» also remained.

The first run of 250 copies of the book that bore mark «NKVD» (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) later boosted to a 200 000 run rigged with an introduction of «the publisher» – of, in fact, the unofficial editor of the book, Stalin — in which it was said that «The book contains a number of mistakes and faulty judgments. All these mistakes will be easy for the Soviet reader to make out. Still the book is of certain interest and some significance as an attempt to study the Soviet Union in a fair and conscientious manner.» The whole run was sold out in a week. Feuchtwanger’s travel notes, or, as he chose to call the book himself, «report on my voyage for my friends», was approved for print and distribution, yet it never earned official acclaim. There were rumors that the book was to be banned, yet there was never uttered anything like an official ban. A fragment from memoirs of a woman who was contemporary to the events was read: the woman recalled how she, then a student, introduced into her school essay a quotation from Feuchtwanger, to be later summoned to the headmaster of the school and strongly advised to rewrite the essay, leaving the quotation of the unreliable writer out.

Moscau 1937 as well as the thorny path that lead to the publication of the book, prove that Feuchtwanger was neither blind, nor naive. His gift of a historian and penchant for accuracy, that Bertold Brecht was so quick to discern, undoubtedly helped him see through the staged tableaux and arranged events so far from the true Soviet life, that were offered to him «from above» in order to «cultivate the right views». He was aware and he understood, even if he was protected from communications with unwelcome parties, like Pasternak or Pilnyak, for example, who were believed to have «influenced negatively» Andre Gide. But he was also aware of the other thing which was infinitely more terrible not only for the USSR, but for the whole world — of fascism in its numerous manifestations. Tactically that which Feuchtwanger did was perhaps a deal with his own conscience, and yet nobody has a right to cast stones at him for that. Moscau 1937 never became a book to straddle the fence and please all on whatever side of it, on the contrary, it turned out to displease everybody irrespective of their fence-relative position — and this makes the paradoxical honesty of the book. Strategically Feuchtwanger intended his book to become a means of uniting the émigré circles, and an attempt to support the image of the Soviet Union in the eyes of the world by presenting it as the main stronghold in the confrontation with Hitler. Whether ends justify means is an eternal question, and there is no satisfactory answer to it.

What path to choose — Feuchtwanger’s, or Andre Gide’s who described the USSR with bitter honesty, or to follow Brecht who visited the USSR but never wrote anything about it — everyone chooses for himself. One thing is obvious — if Feuchtwanger’s book did do any harm at all, it harmed only himself, yet it never shadowed or distorted his image of a brilliant novelist, a master of historical novel and psychological portrait, whose books made a considerable contribution to the golden fund of the world literary legacy.

Unfortunately the public that came to the presentation of the book I came, saw, I will write. Lion Feuchtwanger in Moscow in 1937 learned little about Feuchtwanger the man of letters. Presumably the organizers of the event, just like Feuchtwanger before them, naively overestimated our public, assuming that their audience would be prepared for serious conversation and was well acquainted with the works of the writer. Actually it turned out that the part of the audience which was drawn to the event by incentives other than professional interest — let’s call them incidental, casual visitors — formed their own opinion of Feuchtwanger as of basically a traitor. For the woman sitting next to me the highlight of the event was the slide featuring Feuchtwanger’s mansion in the USA, and detailed, almost fit for an advertising booklet, description of the beautiful place in California where that house is located. «Living in style indeed! Now why all cads turn out living so well?» said she loudly, addressing other members of the audience.

Even when leaving the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre one could still hear derisive remarks and nasty sniggering that accompanied discussions of the «Jewish core» of the writer, which was innocently but inconsiderately emphasized by Ian Wallace, who remarked that Lion, who was never even mildly interested in his father’s margarine factories, must have nevertheless inherited from his family the knack of haggling well, which helped him to secure very favorable terms for himself when dealing with publishing houses. This ordinary half-joking remark became a litmus paper, which sadly showed that our society is far from having purged itself of household antisemitism. «A Jew, and what a Jewish Jew!» came from the audience, when a fragment from Feuchtwanger’s letter was read, where he with perfect sincerity expressed the pleasure he took in the long runs of his books in the USSR, in being generously welcomed, in the gifts meant to win his favor. For the Russian public the photograph of the mansion completely eclipsed a rather rare photo of Feuchtwanger standing behind the barbed wire fencing at Les Milles, in the concentration camp where he was interned when France was occupied. Much was said about the long runs and his passionate infatuation with those runs, about the fur-coat and caviar, receptions and banquets, ovations and lucrative proposals, about «massaging ego», maybe even slightly too much, yet deprivations and defranchisement, his experiences in the camp, horrible time on the move, insults the fascists subjected him to were hardly mentioned. It must have been assumed that people that are likely to come to such a presentation have all read The Devil in France. My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940, but it was one mighty wrong assumption. The public was impressed not by the fact that Feuchtwanger’s library (10 000 volumes and his own manuscripts) was burned, nor by burning and banning his published books, declared degenerate in Germany, but by the size of his royalties, and also by the phrase said by the German visitor: «However wonderful staying in the USSR might be, I prefer to live in Europe.» Well, just like The Magic Mountain running at the Electrotheatre showed the viscera of the public, the today’s event, this «coming face to face with the reader», also proved an interesting social experiment.

In one of Karavkina’s reports a certain incident is mentioned: when Lion Feuchtwanger agreed to introduce the corrections suggested by Maria Osten (a German writer and Mikhail Koltsov’s life-long partner) into his manuscript, «with the exception of the phrase about «tolerance», which he absolutely refused to scratch out». Well, if it was «Moscau 2019» Feuchtwanger was writing, the word «tolerance» wouldn’t be in the manuscript to begin with.

Published on 6 March 2019

Article originaly written in Russian

AUSTRIA’S (CULTURAL) WEALTH

When juxtaposed with the theatre systems of Eastern European countries at the UTE Conference on Theatre Structures in Belgrade, Austria’s situation seems nothing short of luxurious. In every way. Andrea Ruis of the Arts and Culture Division of the Federal Chancellery of Austria and Anna Badora, artistic director of the Volkstheater in Vienna, gave in-depth talks that powerfully demonstrated the significance and prosperity of theatre in Austria.

The Volkstheater in Vienna © www.lupispuma.at

6.09 million tickets were sold in more than 15,000 performances in the 2014/2015 season. With just over eight and a half million inhabitants, this is categorical evidence of Austria’s obsession with theatre. The great theatres of Vienna sold more than 3.8 million tickets, with a population of just 1.8 million inhabitants. In 2016, the Republic of Austria gave an impressive 200 million euros in funding to its theatres. With such a high level of the Austrian “theatrical obsession,” it’s no wonder the federal government passed legislation (Kunstförderungsgesetz) in 1988, making it mandatory to perpetually fund the arts.

It’s no surprise that Austria incorporates all forms of theatres in their national repertoire; everything from the internationally renowned National Theatre to countless cabarets, intimate cellar theatres along with an array of independent artist performances occurring on professional or impromptu stages. With regards to the large theatre institutions, there are state, regional, municipal and private theatres; which together employ more than 5,000 actors, directors and administrative staff that work almost year-round to put on acclaimed works. The terms for these different theatrical institutions have developed historically, and allude to the financial structure behind them.

State theatres evolved from the former Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Royal Court Theatres (k.u.k. Hoftheater). Some of the most recognized names in this imperial branch of theatre include the world-renowned Wiener Staatsoper, the Volksoper, and the Burgtheater, which is the second oldest straight theatre in Europe. In 1999, the Austrian parliament passed the Federal Theatres Organisation Act (Bundestheaterorganisationsgesetz), which required state theatres to be removed from the federal administration. Thus resulting in the creation of the Bundestheater-Holding company (Federal Theatres Holding).

The Bundestheater-Holding group is owned by the Republic of Austria. Its purpose is to facilitate the contact between its four subsidiaries and political players in the cultural field, the business community and the public. The holding company is furthermore responsible for strategic management and operations of its subsidiaries. This includes everything from financial and legal support to contract handling and upkeep of the historical theatre buildings. In addition to three independent theatres (Wiener Staatsoper, Volksoper, Burgtheater; all of them are in Vienna), the Bundestheater Holding also incorporates an association called “ART FOR ART,” which provides creative shops and ticketing, building management and IT services. With a budget of 246.2 Million euros and 2,400 employees, the Bundestheater-Holding is the largest theatre corporation in the world. Its three member theatres attract an impressive 1.3 million spectators every year. Lending such comprehensive support in business management to its subsidiaries, the Bundestheater-Holding allows its theatres to focus on the core of their work: creating high-quality theatre productions.

The second category of theatres includes regional and municipal theatres, which are the main stages in the federal states and its cities, respectively. Federal states also have holding companies, such as the Vereinigte Bühnen in Vienna (Vienna is not only the capital but a federal state of its own), which is composed of the Theater an der Wien, the Ronacher and the Raimund Theater. These three theatres primarily offer different forms of musical theatre in its three venues of 1070, 1040, and 1255 seats. With a combined 644 performances each year, the Vereinigte Bühnen reaches a sizeable audience of musical lovers. In the Styrian province, which is home to Austria’s second largest city, Graz, the Theater Holding Steiermark unites the opera house (including the ballet), the municipal theatre and the children’s theatre and is financed at 50% by the state and at 50% by the city.

Eight out of the nine federal states have a regional or municipal theatre, most of which are former court theaters and date back to the 18^th and 19^th century. (Court theatres used to be funded and managed by the court, as opposed to the people’s theatres, which were privately funded and publicly accessible). More often than not they are so-called “multi-branch” theatres, which usually comprise opera, drama, ballet and children’s theatre. They are primarily financed by the federal state and the municipality. These theatres are part of the Society of Theatres of the Austrian Federal States and Municipalities. Its purpose is to protect the interests of its members, as well as to propose how to divide federal government funding of 18.7 million euros over the course of five years. Its members, which include the Salzburger Landestheater, the Oper Graz, the Tiroler Landestheater and the Stadttheater Klagenfurt, offer more than 3,000 performances a year to over one million spectators. Altogether, these theatres receive collective subsidies of 136 million euros.

In the 19^th century, municipal theatres were flourishing and inspired the architects Fellner & Helmer to specialise in representative buildings for municipal theatres, which they erected in various cities across Central and Eastern Europe. In Austria alone, they designed the opera house in Graz, the Landestheater Salzburg, the Stadttheater Baden bei Wien, the Stadttheater Klagenfurt, the Akadmietheater (part of the Burgtheater), the Konzerthaus, the Ronacher, and the Volkstheater in Vienna. With countless enthusiastic audience members flocked in front of these architectural landmarks each night, municipal theatres prove to be the central theatrical institutions in Austria’s state capitals to this day.

In a third category, there are the so-called private theatres, such as the Volkstheater, the Theater in der Josefstadt and the Theater der Jugend. They collectively show more than 1,500 performances a year for more than 600,000 spectators. Broadly speaking, the Volkstheater offers more innovative approaches to critical spectators, while the Theater in der Josefstadt caters to a more conservative and traditional audience. Meanwhile, the Theater der Jugend shows ambitious literature for young people.

The private theatres were originally founded by benefactors as an antithesis to the court theatre. However, today their money no longer comes from benefactors but from the municipality and the federal government (approximately 60% and 40%, respectively), which effectively renders the term ‘private theatre’ obsolete in Austria. From a legal perspective, private theatres have been transformed from private corporate entities into foundations, associations, or limited liability companies.

Since, the majority of funding for these theatres comes from the federal government and the municipality, the artistic directors are nominated by the culture secretary (as of 18 December 2017 it’s Gernot Blümel) and the city councillor for cultural affairs (currently Andreas Mailath-Pokorny). One of the major benefits of having these private theatres registered as limited liability companies is that legally the artistic and managing directors are entitled to make independent decisions. That means they can manage their budget completely freely; they can autonomously hire and fire their staff; and they have complete control over their programme. As Anna Badora, Artistic Director of the Volkstheater in Vienna stated, “I may be as bold as to argue that this is the best system for theatres in the world.” Indeed, the Volkstheater’s strong financial position coupled with vast managerial and artistic independence is a privilege most theatres in the world would envy her for.

However, the seemingly ideal Austrian theatre system comes with understated flaws. Subsidies for theatre institutions remain the same every year, while fixed costs, such as rent, electricity or fees and salaries increase every year. Each theatre has to cover this gap in costs with money from their own pocket, usually through ticket sales. However, most of them already reach a high percentage of seats sold. Theatres therefore have to come up with new ways of generating money—which can easily become a distraction from fulfilling their original purpose.

Furthermore, the competition amongst theatres is big, especially in the capital, and relations amongst each other as well as with political stake holders need to be carefully handled. Subtle ambiguity and scheming happen of course, like anywhere else, inhibiting the productivity of theatre managers.

From an employee perspective, theatre contracts, although decent by international standards, are still not perfect. Actors, especially young ones, have little protection, much less so than stagehands, for example. It is customary that a change in directorship goes hand in hand with an exchange of the permanent acting company, thus customarily leaving actors, especially newcomers, without a job whenever a new artistic director takes over. Nonetheless, even young actors have a privileged situation in Austria in comparison to a lot of the countries present at the conference in Belgrade, where a permanent contract for an actor is something you can only dream of.

Back to Austria’s theatres, though. Vienna is, of course, the centre of the country’s diverse and compact theatre landscape. The capital’s culture budget amounts to 84 million euros, which far exceeds the rest of the federal states. Its main three theatres alone attract more than 1.3 million people a year. Vienna has more than 90 theatres, and an estimated 500 independent groups. It is home to the most prestigious theatres of the country and has multiple theatres that are considered as highly significant.

Often simply referred to as “Die Burg” (the fortress), the Burgtheater is a unique cultural phenomenon. Under the reign of Josef II, the theatre world in Vienna flourished, and he declared the Burgtheater “the German National Theatre”. Instead of opera and ballet, drama was now put into the limelight, with a particular emphasis on European literature. Austria’s National Theatre is the largest and one of the most prestigious theatres in the German theatre realm: the Burgtheater employs approximately 550 people, 74 of which are permanent actors. Additionally it regularly hires 38 guest actors. For comparative purposes, Germany’s largest theatre—the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg—has 47 permanent actors, and approximately half the Burgtheater’s budget.

Based on the sheer volume of its permanent actors and budget, the Burgtheater has the largest company and is the most well-funded theatre in the world. Specifically, this goliath received more than 46 million euros in public funding during the 2015 season. It attracts the highest number of spectators in continental Europe with an average of 850 performances a year on four different stages (one of these stages is located in a different theatre building altogether). After the Comédie Française, it is the second oldest straight theatre in Europe, and the largest German speaking one. Currently, Karin Bergmann is the artistic director of the Burgtheater, and will be followed by Martin Kušej in 2019.

Stefan Bachmann, Andrea Breth, Roland Schimmelpfennig and Michael Thalheimer are just a few of the renowned directors to work at the Burgtheater in the past. Paula Wessely, Attila Hörbiger, Josef Meinrad and Paul Hörbiger were once some of the most famous names to perform at the Burgtheater. Today, Kirsten Dene, Maria Happel, Klaus Maria Brandauer, or Peter Simonischek must be mentioned when talking about the prominent cast members of the “Burg”. The highest honour for an actor in the Austrian theatre world is to be called a “Burgschauspieler,” which solely connotes that you are a permanent actor at the Burgtheater. In fact, Thomas Bernhard dedicated one of his most famous novels, “Woodcutters”, to the high social status of the “Burgschauspieler.”

Demand to see the creme de la creme of Austrian theatre live on stage is extremely high, and there’s usually a long line meandering from the ticket booth inside all the way to the front of the building. While the Burgtheater was once only frequented by the aristocracy, today it is accessible to anyone, with a standing ticket as cheap as €3,50.

Historically, the Volkstheater was founded with the mission of being the exact opposite of the Burgtheater. Its name says it all: “People’s Theatre.” Its purpose, as Mrs. Badora pointed out during the UTE conference in Belgrade, “is to bring theatre to the people on its main stage as well as on its second stage and its 19 theatres in the districts.” The Volkstheater includes both entertainment in its repertory but also, and most importantly, innovative theatre that is critical of socio-political developments.

Complementing the two biggest straight theatres in Vienna, there are other important institutions that also need to be briefly considered. These theatres offer different content and aesthetics than the Burgtheater or the Volkstheater, and partially cater to a different audience altogether. The Theater in der Josefstadt, which opened in 1788, is the oldest theatre in Vienna to continuously have been in use since its founding. Its focus, as suggested earlier, is on classical Austrian theatre, including contemporary literature and light comedy. Since 2006, Herbert Föttinger has been the theatre’s artistic director.

The Theater der Jugend, with Thomas Birkmeir as its artistic director, has two stages, the Theater im Zentrum and the Renaissancetheater. It mainly produces plays for children and adolescents, although the theatre has also had the responsibility of generating audiences for other theatres.

Next to theatres that have a greater focus on music theatre (Theater an der Wien, Ronacher, Raimundtheater), there are numerous other theatres in Vienna, such as the Schauspielhaus Wien and the Rabenhof Theater, to only name two famous ones. Smaller stages are also very frequented by Austrian theatre goers. One of the most highly respected and popular types is the socio-politically charged cabaret genre. The most renowned stage is the Kabarett Simpl, the only cabaret that dates back to the 19^th century that is still open today.

The diversity of Austria’s theatrical institutions delineated here demonstrates the high demand of Austria’s adept theatre audience that enjoys this art form in all its shapes and sizes. Accordingly, Austrians also highly value their independent theatre scene. Since the 1990s, the scene has boomed tremendously, especially due to the high influx of students of theatre who opt to stay in Austria after graduation. Even though Austria’s most prestigious drama school, the Reinhardt Seminar, only accepts 3-12 students a year, there are still more than 50 drama and music schools which attract a high number of students from abroad. The (former) students’ sundry backgrounds, and their offbeat and experimental approaches, make the independent scene particularly attractive to the versed spectator.

Federal and municipal funding for the independent scene occurs in three ways: for a year-long programme, a specific project, or for production exchanges or tours abroad. An external advisory committee is made up of individuals who are active in the arts. The committee members’ primary responsibility is to select viable applicants from the countless proposals that come in every year. This committee studies all incoming applications based on a series of rigid criteria (quality, target audience, innovation, new forms of theatrical creation, realistic budgeting, etc.), reaching an exclusive selection of productions and projects that promise the highest artistic quality and greatest sustainability. In 2016, these projects were funded with approximately 1.5 million euros. Roughly 400,000 euros were used for fourteen one-year long projects and a little over one million euros was awarded to 120 troupes. Additionally, the city of Vienna funded the independent scene with four million euros.

Vienna offers “co-production locations” to the independent scene, which are companies that don’t produce themselves but offer their premises to independent artists. The most famous of these are the Tanzquartier, the brut, and the Dschungel Wien (the latter being for children’s theatre). While rehearsals often last up to six weeks, “productions frequently aren’t performed more than two or three times”, Ms. Ruis lamented at the conference in Belgrade. This is why the federal government encourages independent artists to take their shows abroad, as tours can be granted additional funding.

Many independent artists are members of the IGFT, the League of Independent Artists, which was founded in 1989. It’s a network of more than 1,600 independent theatre and dance artists that lobbies for the independent scene. The IGFT covers cultural politics, consulting, public relations, infrastructure, networking, and controlling of funding and social security allowances, as well as general services to independent theatre makers (taxes, dues, etc.) The league receives funding of 300,000 euros from the federal government.

For theatre institutions, funding is tied to the principle of subsidiarity. That is to say that a theatre must receive subsidies from the municipality and the state in order to receive funding from the federal government. This way of financing is firmly established in the federal constitution, and aims at decentralizing accountability and forwarding it to those closest to the subsidized institution. Therefore, the main responsibility when it comes to theatres lies with the state and/or the city, and only to a lesser extent with the federal government; thus granting more freedom to the local institutions themselves. The subsidies for state theatres, regional and municipal theatres, the Vereinigte Bühnen Wien and the Viennese private theatres amounted to around 353 million euros in the 2014/2015 season.

To receive federal funding, theatres are held accountable for their cultural responsibility. Tending to classics of the German language and of international theatre as well as fostering contemporary and innovative art are amongst their core responsibilities. Furthermore, the Federal Theatres Organisation Act states that theatres should embrace artistically risque productions; should transmit art and theatre to the young generation; should enable a vast variety of people to have access to theatre; should fight for international collaboration; should be active year-round; and should offer a repertoire based on having a permanent company of actors.

This funding system does go a long way, as Austria proves to have a high number of new openings each season: the Burgtheater alone started the season with a programmed 21 premieres on top of its regular repertoire, the Volkstheater will have 18 opening nights, the Schauspielhaus Graz 22, the Stadttheater Klagenfurt 10 and the youth theatre of Graz, Next Liberty, has 15 scheduled. This productive output is definitely only possible thanks to the theatres’ high and effective public funding.

Each year, the theatres’ efforts are rewarded when their artistic contributions and creative minds are nominated for a “Nestroy”—the Austrian theatre prize. Inspired by the Parisian theatre award “Molière”, the “Nestroy” aims at highlighting Austria’s artistic ability by honouring the most creative and innovative actors, directors and playwrights as well as in-house productions by festivals.

Festival season is what makes the culture-loving Austrian survive the summer, when theatres are generally on a break. That’s why the majority of festivals take place in the spring and summer. With Austria being a country known for its rich musical tradition as well, a lot of these festivals combine the disciplines of music and theatre, such as the world-renowned Salzburger Festspiele.

Salzburg almost triples its population during the six weeks of its festival, which takes place every year in July and August. More than 250,000 people flock to the city to see the legendary festival’s 200 events. Max Reinhardt and Hugo von Hofmannsthal are the forefathers of what is today considered one of the world’s most relevant festivals for music and contemporary art. At its foundation in 1920, Reinhardt and Hofmannsthal envisioned a festival that would contrast the renowned Bayreuth festival by not only celebrating one single artist, but a myriad of artists from opera, orchestra music and drama. Ever since the very first edition of the Salzburger Festspiele, the festival has opened with its flagship production: Hofmannsthal’s “Everyman”. Today, the festival’s artistic direction is in the hands of Markus Hinterhäuser.

Since 1946, the Bregenzer Festspiele, artistically directed by Elisabeth Sobotka, has offered a vast variety of productions in five venues, drawing in roughly 200,000 people every year in July and August. It is most famous for its floating stage on Lake Constance, where a larger-than-life set that usually incorporates the lake in one way or another is the backdrop for a massive operatic undertaking. Drama performances and concerts are held in nearby venues.

Another highlight of the festival season is the Wiener Festwochen festival, which attracts 180,000 people with a programme of drama, opera and dance during the course of five weeks in May and June. Tomas Zierhofer-Kin, artistic director of the festival, and his team manage around 175 performances and 70 concerts each year.

Innovation is the first concept that comes to mind when thinking of the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, whose artistic direction is in the hands of Gerfried Stocker. The festival is at the interface between art, technology and society. It is one of the world’s most important media art festivals that attracts around 35,000 visitors each year.

The steirischer herbst is another internationally acclaimed festival for contemporary art. Founded in 1968, the festival brings together all forms of art, from theatre to visual arts, film, literature, dance, music, architecture, performance and new media. The programme of the steirischer herbst exclusively shows original works, world premieres and commissioned works. Since 2006, Veronica Kaup-Hasler has managed this renowned festival, but will pass the baton to Ekaterina Degot next year.

Other relevant but smaller festivals include La Strada (street art festival in Graz), ImPuls Tanz (Vienna’s prestigious dance festival), the Festspiele Reichenau, Sommerszene Salzburg, SCHÄXPIR and spleen*graz (the international theatre festivals for children and youth theatre in Linz and Graz). The list of festivals goes on and on. What would otherwise be a theatrical dry spell in the summer turns into a sea of artistic events to quench Austrians’ thirst for theatre.

Since the Baroque age, and in particular since the era of Joseph II, theatre has been a central cultural institution in Austria. But it’s the combination of tremendous respect for this art form as well as a happy financial position that allows for the continued prosperity of Austria’s creatively (and otherwise) rich theatre landscape—a privileged situation that everybody at the Conference on Theatre Structures seemed to long for. That became blatantly obvious when Alexandru Darie of the Bulandra Theatre in Romania asked, “Can we all move to Austria?”

Published on 5 January 2018 (Article originally written in English)

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AUSTRIA’S (CULTURAL) WEALTH