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

The Festival of the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe Is Returning To The Stage!

At the end of May, the first General Assembly of the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe (UTE) for 2019 took place for the first time in Sofia, Bulgaria. Regarded as one of the most influential theatre associations in Europe, the UTE’s history and presence goes back more than thirty years. Today, the network has about 30 members. Different in their size, funding and esthetics, they are united by their common understanding of Europe as cultural areal and of theatre as art, constituent for a larger civilization context. With this view, UTE equally welcomes as members national and state theaters from Porto, Moscow, Athens, Cluj, Vienna, Belgrade, Bucharest, Cologne, Luxemburg, Sofia, Milan, Prague, Thessaloniki, Rome, and Budapest together with independent troops and associated members from France, Hungary, Poland and Georgia. Thus, transcends with ease the geographical borders of the European continent with members from Israel, Palestine and partner-artists in various Arab countries. A quick calculation reveals that UTE’s network shows more than 10,000 performances per year, which are seen by 3 million spectators.

The only Bulgarian member of the network is the Sfumato Theatre Laboratory. Founded in 1989 by stage directors Margarita Mladenova and Ivan Dobchev, it celebrates its 30th anniversary this year and that was among the reasons why the first General Assembly for 2019 took place in Sofia. 24 representatives of different members attended and together discussed and voted on the short and long-term plans of UTE. However, the biggest news and decision taken unanimously was that the Festival of the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe will be relaunched by the end of the year.

The Festival of the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe is a major tradition for our network, which lays in its foundation and existed ever since its beginning in the 1990s. It was disrupted due to different reasons for 11 years and we are thrilled to announce its relaunch! This year’s edition will take place in Cluj, Romania, hosted by the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj. The Festival will be continued in the next years, by UTE member theatres as Teatro Nacional Sao Joao, Porto, as well as by the Schauspiel Köln and the City Theatres Prague. The program will include productions from UTE-members and beyond and will show an interesting selection of the best productions from European theatres. – explained Daniela Dibelius, Executive Director of UTE.

It all started when three theatres in Italy, France and Spain decided to form an international alliance called “Théâtres de l’Europe/Teatri d’Europa”. Soon, other theatres became interested into the idea and in 1990 Jack Lang – French politician and intellectual, who was also Minister of Culture of France at the time –and the director of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, the legendary theatre director Giorgio Strehler, founded the “Union des Théâtres de l’Europe”. The activities of the newly formed association were centred on a program of regular festivals with the aim to create possibilities for artistic encounters and exchange between Eastern and Western Europe.

The Piccolo Teatro di Milano was among the founder members of the UTE in 1990, a period in which the idea of a Europe of Culture was a big project, to which theatre contributed going further and anticipating the need of a Cultural Europe, not only economic and commercial. Every theatre of the UTE interprets this mission following its own tradition and difference. We work together for a European Culture, strong of our differences, committed to building a culture of differences. – recounts Annalisa Rossini from The Piccolo Theatro.

Prof. Margarita Mladenova, director of Sfumato Theatre Laboratory shared following the meeting: I remember the early editions of the Festival in Western Europe, its French beginning, as it was initiated by Giorgio Strehler and Jack Lang so that the big artistic actions can travel, artists can meet with one another and with different audiences. This diffusion of creative ideas, this exchange of results, works, achievements organized into systems, into poetics, into esthetics, is the most important entity around which life of UTE strives. Our theatre has a very active dialogue with the other members and I am very happy that the Festival of the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe will be relaunched. We will take part in its first edition with the performance Crazy Grass (after texts by Yordan Radichkov, director Margarita Mladenova)”.

The 18^th edition of The Festival of the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe will take place between November 19^th and 30^th in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. At the main stage and in the studio of the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj 20 productions will be performed by 13 different European theatre companies.

Published on 28 October 2019

Identity, Sexuality, Language and Power

Nationalist temptations; the return to a reactionary morale; the refugee crisis; the crumbling of solitary bonds… the topics tackled at the Reims Scènes d’Europe festival show the bleakness of our times, but also give a voice to those who defend another vision of Europe, another possible version of Europe. At the backdrop of the emergency state and Brexit, the most European festival in France, taking place in Reims, gambles once again this year on the opening, the party and the debating of ideas—a veritable breath of fresh air.

Gorky-Theater “SMALL TOWN BOY”, a project by Falk Richter © Thomas Aurin

Since 2009, the city of Reims—better known within France for its champagne rather than its European spirit—has become, for ten days, the point of convergence for a crowd of people who’ve come from all over Europe. Artists, theatre professionals, spectators; you can’t count the number of nationalities there; even Parisians will now be rushing to Reims to attend this commotion of cultures, languages and ideas.

For this eighth edition of the festival, the artists have come from Germany, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Cameroon, the Congo, Greece, Iceland, Iran, the Netherlands, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland and Syria. Amongst them: Sanja Mitrović, Louis Vanhaverbeke, Antoine Defoort, Argyro Chioti, Myriam Marzouki, Massimo Furlan, but also great European figures, such as Peter Brook, Falk Richter, Fabrice Murgia… A programme that is jointly carried out by seven cultural structures of Reims, one of which the Comédie de Reims, member of the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe.

And this year, more than in the years before, diversity is mirrored in the programme: “conceived in the spirit of the Maxim-Gorki Theater in Berlin”, the programme of the festival intends to “present works that question our European identity by drawing attention to its diversity (origins, religions, sexual preferences or even through multiculturalism).”

Light-years away from any sort of chauvinism, the festival indeed paid tribute to the work of Shermin Langhoff, director of the famous Maxim-Gorki Theater. Figurehead of the “postmigratory theatre” (a cliché term today, considering its wild use), the latter described her theatre’s project as an attempt to “think of the city in its entirety, with everyone who has gotten there in the past few decades, whether they are refugees, exiles, immigrants, or simply those who grew up in Berlin.” The actors of the company are the spitting image of the great cultural melting pot that is the German capital: they are from Turkey, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Serbia… Their journey fits the, oftentimes violent, history of the migratory influx that continues to shape Europe today. They constitute the very subject matter of the shows of the Maxim-Gorki Theater, which relate stories from elsewhere as anchor points to tell our common history differently.

Emblematically, Falk Richter’s show Small Town Boy, produced by the Maxim-Gorki Theater, is the highlight of the Reims Scènes d’Europe festival. The show’s title is taken from a song of the Bronski Beat that talks about the “the escape of a young homosexual boy from a narrow and oppressive world to a freer and more distant city.” In his way, mercilessly, disenchanted, cruelly funny too, Falk Richter questions the promises of liberty that embody the city: the possibility to invent oneself outside of traditional norms, to love differently, to reverse dominating relationships, to live ones identity without fear or shame. In a stroboscopic flood of scenes with pop impulses, the show emits a harrowing energy, fury, and melancholy.

Identity, sexuality, language and power are also at the heart of the questions of I Am Not Ashamed Of My Communist Past, directed by Sanja Mitrović and Vladimir Aleksić. Written in the tradition of performative and political theatre, the show mixes personal and collective history for crossing the Socialist past of Ex-Yugoslavia; that country that no longer exists and that Sanja Mitrović and Vladimir Aleksić grew up in. Some childhood souvenirs and images from the Golden Age of Yugoslavian cinema tell the end of the Socialist utopia, and the dislocation of a nation united in its ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity. War, the rise of nationalism, the explosion of unemployment, and neo-liberal misdemeanours; the issues addressed here also remind us of the crisis in Europe today. It’s in this context of ruined ideals that the questioning of identities of these two adolescents divided between two possible compromises resound: the stopgap of European integration or the illusion of returning to their countries of origin.

Equally in gear with current events, Elfriede Jelinek’s The Suppliants is presented in the form of a lecture directed by Ludovic Lagarde and Ferdinand Barbet. In this text, written in 2013, Elfriede Jelinek directly echoes the tragedy of the shipwrecked migrants in Lampedusa, and the violent repression that lead to the interruption of a hunger strike started by 60 refugees in a church in Vienna. In a flow of language enamelled with mythological stories, philosophical quotes, and administrative and political language, a voice raises up—sour, brutal—that of the foreigner. Suppliant, menacing, furious, this voice takes the spectator to the task, sends him back to his actual responsibility and denounces the indifference of society and the contempt of the asylum politics of our countries; a chilling text of fearsome necessity.

If the violence of our century infiltrates and tinges some of the productions presented in the context of this festival, it is not a permanent feature of the contemporary creation. Without losing relevance, other artists prefer humour and poetry to express our times, including its most conflicting aspects.

That’s the case with Multiverse by the young Belgian artist Louis Vanhaverbeke. A hybrid performance, Multiverse convenes the phantoms of our collective memory and takes the spectator into the cosmogonic whirlwind of a fragmentary history of humanity, subjective and steadfastly pop. From Elton John to Johann Strauss, passing quotes from the Genesis and with a wink at Baywatch, Louis Vanhaverbeke composes a patchwork universe put together from founding texts, music hits, and mythical objects. At the same time poet, slammer, dancer, tightrope walker, musician and DJ, the artist makes cross-breeding and assembling his preferred mode of expression: music pieces are melted together, periods of time knocked together and objects are clustered, piled, motorised, forming strange constructions under our eyes that resemble the chimeras of ancient times. A production of enchanting poetry, where the simplicity of expression carries a rich and complex thought.

Another singular subject of the festival, Un Faible degrée d’originalité by Antoine Defoort is a journey through the history of copyright, from the Renaissance to the era 2.0. A priori nothing too exciting and yet… Between historical reconstruction, concept materialization, proof by contradiction, infantile jokes, scholarly content, popular references, suspense and dramatic turns of events, the lecture quickly turns into a show, and lets us dive into the mashes of the narrative that is as captivating as it is instructive.

While the festival is still in full swing, I have to interrupt this brief and yet incomplete inventory of the most remarkable shows that I’ve been fortunate enough to see during my visit to Reims. But a final image has come to my mind and I feel that it’s with this image that I want to conclude this article: that of a group of young people who have come from all over Europe to take part in this festival. Invited every year in the context of Reims Scènes d’Europe, they are part of a network of young European spectators, the “Young Performing Art Lovers”, financed by the Comédie de Reims and the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe, in the context of the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. They are 70 this year, gathered together to watch the shows, produce texts, organise meet-ups, discussions, and workshops. In the entrance hall of the Comédie de Reims, in the bar, or on the tiers, one can hear the hubbub of a joyful ‘globish’ with contrasting accents. They laughed openly during the performance of Multiverse; they applauded with fervour to the slick comicality of Antoine Defoort—the actors of Small Town Boy had to come back on stage six times… The ensemble of the festival is soaked with their youth, their energy, their many languages. The enthusiasm is infectious—only in Reims do we surprise ourselves by dreaming of Europe again!

Published on 14 February 2017 (Article originally written in French)

Festivals As States Of Culture Within Nation States

From 24 November 4 to December in Cluj (Romania) the fifth edition of the Interferences International Theatre Festival took place. “OOOO – The Dream Of Gogol” (based on “Nevsky Prospect”, “Marriage”, “Ivan Fiodorovich Shponka and his Aunt” and “Diary of a Madman” by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, written and directed by Margarita Mladenova and Ivan Dobchev) by the Sfumato Theatre Laboratory (Bulgaria) was one of the 22 performances, coming from 14 different countries in 13 languages, all of which constituted the rich programme of the event. That was the second participation of the troupe in the ten-year history of the festival, following their visit with “Jean, Julie and Kristine” (after “Miss Julie” by August Strindberg, directed by Margarita Mladenova) in 2012. The Sfumato, UTE member since 2011, is a theatre-laboratory, aiming at in-depth theatrical research through long-term programmes, masterclasses, workshops and parallel programmes.

Prof. Margarita Mladenova - © Simon Varsano — Prof. Margarita Mladenova – © Simon Varsano

Prof. Margarita Mladenova, a theatre director and a cofounder of the Sfumato (together with Prof. Ivan Dobchev), tells us more about her immediate impressions of the festival from the perspective of a participant in two of its editions; the role and the meaning of festivals in the contemporary cultural situation; and the place of festivals in the own artistic perceptions of the troupe:

The Sfumato Theatre Laboratory regularly participates in festivals worldwide. In your opinion, what is the role of festivals in our current cultural and theatrical context and where on this map would you place the Interferences International Theatre Festival?

The Sfumato is a festival theatre. Not because we deliberately create works meant exclusively for festivals, but because, especially in our contemporary context, festivals are those cultural and artistic spaces that are interested in the quest for a more unusual language, innovative methodologies, creative techniques and processes. They are “states of culture within nation states”, which insist that theatre as a living form of art should remain a form of art.
For us, Interferences is one of the major theatre festivals in this part of Europe. We have long-term contacts and partnerships with about forty festivals. We have participated at many of them several times — in Avignon (France), Essen (Germany) and Nancy (France), for instance. We have been to Japan, Korea, and we have visited festivals in Central Europe many times. But for Ivan Dobchev and me, and for our actors, the participation at the Interferences Festival brings a sense of completeness and satisfaction due to the high levels of consideration, implementation, nurture and accomplishment of this festival space. Beginning with the minor details, through the team and it’s the attendance to the forums envisioned in the programme — I have in mind the follow-up meetings and the discussion instead of simply showing the performances. And the audiences; because this festival has one very thoughtful and knowledgeable audience, which has been nurtured. All encounters with them seem to me as if one were attending a music concert, where everyone in the audience knows the notes and the scores.
For example, we had a very powerful discussion after our performances. And there we talked about how different “OOOO – The Dream Of Gogol” is from “Jean, Julie and Kristine”. The spectators were able not only to distinguish them, but also to reason on those differences in an analytical and artistic perspective. That means that there we encounter a developed, watchful and sensitive gaze, echoing our own processes and intentions. For us this is significant in terms of having a future instead of simply having a full house, a nice performance, applause, and then return home. The real effect, the efficiency of those meetings, goes beyond our stay there.

And is there something that can make the whole experience even more fruitful?

There is one wish of the troupes that is always present when they are invited to a festival: to have the chance to stay longer than the time needed for their participation in order to be able to see other performances of the programme and to meet with colleagues. Fundamentally, this is in the meaning of festivals: for artists to gather in the first place, and to sojourn in a community. But, particularly since 2010 and since the enforcement of the logic that the performance needs to be placed as a commodity on the market, this notion has changed its pathos. Now festivals are more for the audiences than for artistic encounters. Yet, in my opinion, theatre should not give up on this. It is exactly in this situation that festivals need to want and quest for possibilities to open up spaces for artistic collaborations. Because there is no other place where artists can meet other artists outside these special festival territories. We have discussed that with the Interferences Theatre Festival’s organizers and this is their will, too; but the limitations are many.
However it is through those reverberations among us that the system opens up and chain reactions and theatrical collaborations occur. And they can become as a relay through time. Some things might end, and some might last or bring into the world their natural continuations. And when we, the theatre makers, have this way of thinking and need, no one can avert us from gathering together in such communities.
Look at UTE masterclasses, for example. We send interesting young people, open to learning through experience. Since 2011, when the Sfumato became a member, up till now we have sent more than ten participants. Two of them, who attended Lev Dodin’s masterclass in Saint Petersburg, met other people there and together they decided to form the ISO Theatre in the frame of the UTE that is now striving to create its own, permanent existence.

Etymologically speaking, “festival” derives from the Latin “fēstīvus”, meaning festive, merry, joyful. We know that ancient theatre is also tightly related to the feast, the ecstatic, the interruption of the everyday, linear time and opening up space for vertical connection with the transcendental. In this sense a theatre festival has to multiply the festivity, to make it a feast of the feast within the feast. Is that what contemporary theatre festivals do?

This is the pathos of every festival and it remains there. No matter what its priorities, themes, own pain and subject of curiosity of the given edition are. Theatre itself, the nature of the encounter, occurs in a greater reality; on the borderline between truth as “we all know it”, as a daily routine, and the extraordinary, the exceptional, the festive, the complete existence of art. The two are merged together intensively and not at all mechanically, but exactly through this edge, where the performance itself exists as a greater reality.

And the polygon that appears as a result of adding together all the “edges” of the performances, included in the festival’s programme—

—lifts up this entire existence vertically and does not conform to the horizontality of daily life. It is extraordinary.

Earlier you mentioned festival audiences. In this logic, they are different than the ones regularly entering the building where a troupe performs and where the performance is created. In that sense, the chance of meeting with them is singular. Does that intensify this encounter, and how does it alter it?

A festival participation, with its specific presence, voltage and concentration, makes the troupe and the whole crew hungry and long for a higher encounter. That is also valid for the audience, seeing a performance that cannot be seen outside of the festival’s programme. This singularity of the encounter gives it exceptionality and intensity. The festival performances are always more inspired.
Even though when I say “more” and I begin to think about how in the Sfumato, for the tenth year now, two of our performances of the “Strindberg” programme — “Jean, Julie and Kristine” and “Dance of Death” — that have been all around the world, are still on stage. They have had extremely powerful vertical motions in their encounters with audiences. And they have preserved that spirit. The performance absorbs, creates memory of exceptionality, which is later stored and reenacted; because, in principle, every single night the encounter with the audience is an exceptional experience; for the performance, and for the spectators. This is how we should think of it. The other is inertia.

And this exceptionality, transitory, and yet endurance; the live encounter with its high risk, vulnerability, but at the same time its resilience: the coexistence of all those entities is partly what makes each theatre performance a unique experience.

It begins now, it develops now and it happens again. It is fragile but at the same time it is vigorous. It fights for the higher encounter. In that sense festival participation accumulates and charges the performances not only with self-esteem, but also they generate energy that allows them to endure harder and harsher situations later on, for example, to handle more indifferent encounters.

We talked about what festival participations generate and add up. But is there something that gets lost and worn out?

Of course. The Sfumato Theatre has been travelling for thirty years now. And the encounter of the foreign spectators with our fervent performance is significantly more responsible and difficult, especially through the language barrier and the surtitles. The spectator’s perception is divided. He or she needs to read above what the actor is saying and at the same time to embark on a journey with the performance; to enter into it through his or her senses.
In our meetings with audiences throughout the world we have discussed that many times. It is a delight that there is a group of spectators who claim that — even if they do not know the text beforehand, as there are people who are familiar with the plays and the communication with them is much more straightforward — they just leave off reading the surtitles and enter into the performance. They take a look only when it is crucial and in context they understand. Senses tune to a level of expression that is above or underneath the linguistics, which is purely theatrical. This is where the encounter happens. And within it both sides mature. Language is not the only “track”. What is being said does not clarify what is being done. That happens through the energies, scores, choreography of living, gesture, which is also a text, movement, that is a text and a message.

And, if we are to bring this conversation back to the chronological notion of linear time, we have to admit that this extraordinary encounter with the audience happens for a limited number of hours. “OOOO – The Dream Of Gogol” had two performances at the Interferences International Theatre Festival in one day, each of them lasting about two hours. In this light, in order to take a look at festivals from a more practical perspective, could you tell us how much time, effort, travelling, preparation, etc. goes into it for everyone involved — from the actors to the technical crew?

I can answer that immediately. The participation took us four days. On the first day we left early in the morning and arrived late at night. The next day we began adapting the performance in the late afternoon until sometime late at night. On the day of the two performances we continued working on the adaptation. Those are the complex, uneasy, hidden from the sight of the spectators’ hours of adapting each part of the performance. Of course, everything is already arranged in a long correspondence on the technicalities beforehand. And yet, no matter the preliminary preparation, for everything to happen — to place the scenography in slightly different scales, to adapt everything, to involve the actors, to check the surtitles, and everything to match each other and the two performances to begin — takes time. Afterwards we had performances at 4 p.m. and at 10 p.m.
The next day we had a discussion at 10 a.m. We were back in the bus at noon and arrived in Sofia around midnight. It is challenging, but we love to travel. We have always wanted it to be that way. Our actors and our crew do not complain, no matter how heavy the journeys are. Actually there is this spirit of travelling, it is pleasing that we spend those hours together and can say unspoken words about the performance or something else. Other times they just play “word association” games, listen to music, and we stop wherever we want to. This is a continuation of our coexistence. And everyone who is involved in theatre is prepared for this.
The nomadic code of living is fundamentally inherent to theatre. Many theatres nowadays have settled and do it rarely. And when they do it, it is difficult for them. Whereas we have adopted this model from the very start. When we created the Sfumato as a theatre laboratory, questing for new expressions and contents, we very much wanted not to “look down” on our feet but to be able to verify our quests through encounters; through formats such as the workshops. They precede all our bigger processes and are a basic model of the Sfumato’s existence. And when we have a work as a result of that, we want to test it through demanding festival participation or responsible tours, in front of other audiences and measures.
We insisted to be like this from the very start and that is the reason why since the beginning we have organized the “Sfumato Reviews”. There we invite our partners to come to Sofia. They come and see what we do and invite us. We go, and other festival curators see our performances there, and later invite us. When we attended the festival in Avignon (France) with “The Black Fleece” (author’s performance, co-directed with Ivan Dobchev and created as part of “Archetypes” programme, 1997 –2000), for example, Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (Japan) had sent their curators. They saw the performance and immediately after it ended invited us to their festival.
And this is the most natural and unyielding way that things work. That is why we organize these formats, where someone who is curious about the Sfumato’s work can come and see it. We prefer not to rely on recorded performances, because they cannot substitute the live gaze and the live encounter. And this live experience is there and will continue to be there. And the Sfumato will exist as long as the live experience exists. If, for any reason, we settled down and embraced the existence of a theatre that simply struggles to survive, the Sfumato will become extinct.

Published on 21 December 2016 (Article originally written in Bulgarian)

In the stranger, I recognize myself

“Az idegen Odüsszeiája” — “The Stranger’s Odyssey” is the title of this year’s “Interferences” Festival at the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj that wishes to explore the theme of strangeness.

2016 Interferences Festival — © István Biró

It is my conviction that most of the performances (aiming at the creation of aesthetic value) can be easily interpreted in the conceptual framework of strangeness. Moreover, the festival itself as a border context — whether at home or abroad — makes this topic intensely thought-provoking.
In other words, the topic of strangeness is perhaps a bit too self-evident to discuss in relation to theatrical performances — and yet it proved to be an intriguing intellectual “carrot” for me after spending three or four days at the festival: and not only through the performances, but also in connection with my unique and special position. Theatrical writers in Hungary try to follow Hungarian theatre events in Romania (even if not with the desirable and necessary intensity, which is mainly due to financial reasons), so I run into a lot of colleagues. But this time, I’m standing out a bit from this somewhat complex and conflictual Hungarian/transborder Hungarian relation: since I’m attending the festival in the framework of a meeting organized by the UTE (Union des Théâtres de l’Europe) for journalists, I mostly walk the streets with Italian, Czech, Greek, or Bulgarian colleagues, talking about performances and theatrical structures. Perhaps never have I ever attached nationalities to names so firmly as now when the explanation of my “Hungarianness” calls for interesting supplements, when I am halfway between the guest and the host, the strangers and the locals..
Maybe partly due to that, I am a bit more restrained: I feel less tempted to hold “informal” introductions before the Hungarian-language performances as I would usually do. (That is how it could happen that I had already discussed all the bits and pieces of a performance with a colleague when he suddenly had a revelation: but of course, the piece was played in my mother tongue.) It is hard to decide whether this restraint is caused by a sort of laziness, or that I would like to see the performances, my opinion as a critic, the theatre I can associate with weighed without the “active involvement” of my Hungarianness.

The performance I was referring to above was Hullámtörés (“Breaking of the Waves”) by the troop of Cluj-Napoca: it was a pleasant mixture of the familiar and the alien.
I feel at ease in the language, but I must admit that even after so many years’ of working as a critic, the “transborderness” of a performance still has a special flavour to me. (I do not think it is simply the paternalistic goodwill of those coming from the mother-country; on the contrary, sometimes it is in the light of transborder performances that I see the theatre of Hungary as provincial.) The play’s antecedents, a film by Lars von Trier is also familiar to me, so I can easily lose myself in the interpretation of the actors (Anikó Pethő and Ervin Szűcs, the two protagonists are the equals of Emily Watson and Stellan Skarsgård, but fortunately they do not want to compete with them; one cannot smell the sweat of the effort.) I also find it exciting that the performance itself reflects on the fact of adaptation: how inspiring the differences between the two media can actually be. For instance, in the scene when Bess is brutally raped, it is a male actor who plays the female protagonist’s role, using utterly exaggerated and ridiculous gestures imitating a woman’s whining — as an indication that while this kind of episode goes down well in a film, it simply would not work in a realistic theatrical framework. It is all the more frightening when the same male actor starts howling in a manly way — trying to stop the game and the sailors —; it is only then that I suddenly become aware of Bess’s vulnerability. Later on, the performance “re-enacts” this scene impressively: this time with Bess, seen from a distance, with darkness, camera and music.
My colleagues (with one exception) did not like this performance. Strangely enough, we cite the same arguments in favour of the performance as against it; we forgive the same nuances or consider them unforgivable. It is not for the first time that the idea haunts me that first an impression is formed within the critic, and it is only then that we look for arguments to support that; not that I have ever thought that being a critic has anything to do with being objective and exact.
We all agree about the performance of Vígszínház from Budapest (Jó embert keresünk – The Good Man of Seciuan): none of us considers it especially exciting, but rather as a series of sensationalist theatrical solutions at the most. I must confess this is the first time that I have seen this performance, and my “suspicion” regarding the big stage and the people’s theatre efforts of Vígszínház in general cannot be washed out, not even by the enthusiasm of the public celebrating Enikő Eszenyi, the renowned actress.
It is the Stranger’s Song, a performance by the South Korean Pansori Project ZA that convinces me that we are watching a theatre here and now that starts out with similar chances for everyone, without having to overcome any prejudice. This performance adapts a short story by Márquez about immigrants from the Caribbean who live in Geneva; and what is more, it is embedded in the tradition of phansori, the Korean folk opera. In other words, it is the western narrative tradition that renders softer and more digestible whatever is strange or exotic in the Stranger’s Song. If there is a performance that is suitable for an international festival, it is this one.
While I enjoy every minute of it, perhaps I also resent that something should meet my expectations to such an extent even though one cannot feel the rigidity of the compulsion to conform — but it is undeniable that the strangeness and the familiarity are weighed out on precision scales. Isn’t it self-deception that makes this performance work? That it lulls us into believing that we are getting to know something new, distant and beautiful while whatever is strange in it reaches us to the smallest extent? Am I not more pleased by recognizing myself in it (as a European, as a Westerner) than by watching the strange (which is much less strange due to the above)? Do we pay attention and if yes, how much, to the drummer (Hyang Ha Lee), who can play her simple-looking instrument in a multitude of ways, and who seems to be expressing her disbelief or disapproval, or highlighting key sentences with cries?
I ask Patrice Pavis: is it globalization or universal humanness that cements this performance? I want the latter to be true, and Lee Jaram is a performer who makes me believe that, indeed; just like she can make me believe that there is some kind of universal humanness in theatre in general.

Published on 19 December 2017 (Article originally written in Hungarian)

The Stranger’s Odyssey. Who am I, really?

The fifth edition of the Interferences international theatre festival (for the fourth time in cooperation with the UTE), which was held over 11 days at the end of November and the beginning of December at the Hungarian Theatre in Cluj, staged productions from 14 countries, by means of which the organizers aimed to present contemporary trends in drama. In addition to the predominantly Eastern European works, the audience had the opportunity to see a performance given by South Korea’s Jaram Lee, who had appeared at the festival in previous years, and the J.U.S.T. Toys Production from the USA.

Interferences Internation Theatre Festival — © István Biró

Since the first edition, in 2007, primarily focused on establishing an inter-culture dialogue over the long term, the festival programmes have centred on clearly formulated themes.
Following the seeking of the common roots of theatre and music, the phenomenon of the body and physicality, this year the organizers concentrated on a current social issue – difference, or diversity.
Even though the festival’s secondary title, The Stranger’s Odyssey, obviously alluded to the ongoing migration wave, the programme directors’ intention was to view otherness in a variety of forms and contexts.
The word strange harbours several meanings. It may refer to an individual’s visual or personal distinctions, which make him/her surpass the standard. Connected with this is the individual’s position among and relationship to the majority society. Irrespective of the person’s particular qualities being regarded positively or negatively, and his/her being spurned or, vice versa, put on the pedestal of the recognised values, the person’s social status explicitly differs from that of the others.

A prime example of the ambivalence contained in the word strange is the character of Shen Teh in Bertold Brecht’s play The Good Person of Szechwan. First, the young prostitute is ejected to the margins of society because of her profession; later on, owing to her moral purity. Although spurned by the gods and people alike, Shen Teh represents an exception confirming the strength of the human spirit. Perhaps that was the reason why Brecht’s play featured in the festival in Cluj twice – first in a production directed by Romania’s Andrei Șerban (Teatrul Bulandra in Bucharest), and then in an adaptation by Michal Dočekal, the current President of the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe (UTE), Director of Drama at the National Theatre in Prague and a freelance director.

Dočekal’s piece of theatre, staged with the actors of the Vígszínház theatre in Budapest, was heralded as being the apex of this year’s festival programme. The three-hour-long performance abounded with theatrical ideas and scenographic effects, which incessantly assaulted the audience’s attention and maintained tension, yet in the final form were actually wearisome. Martin Chocholoušek’s sets, dominated by a movable interior with a projection screen, fiercely transformed with every new scene. Similarly varying were Kateřina Štefková’s costumes, which the actors continuously changed, as the roles were taking turns. The scaffolding, conveyor belts, dining tables, shooting cannons and suspended desks with lamps, splashing real water, served to demonstrate the maximum utilisation of stage technology, straddling purposeless self-presentation. For all that, the spectacular setting did not lack visual uniformity and integrated form, which, however, was not the case of the dramatic means. The creators wittingly employed Brechtian cutting and distinguishing between the character forming and the actor’s critical commentary, yet they failed to adhere to the chosen principle throughout the performance. Accordingly, the individual scenes were abandoned and returned to the play without evident logic. The inconsistent differentiation of the roles was the most palpable in the case of Enikő Eszenyi, who portrayed Shen Teh. The actress let herself be carried away by her own energetic involvement, which reflected in overexposed gesture and lack of co-ordinated motion. As a result, Shen Teh did not come across as a moral example, but a caricature of herself. In the final analysis, the performance oscillated between epic theatre, an ironised version of the original play, and a scenic spectacle devoid of a clear-cut staging vision.

Totally different in form was the production Stranger’s Song, based on Gabriel García Márquez’s Bon Voyage, Mr. President. The tale of a poor married couple and a dying statesman was depicted using pansori, the traditional Korean genre of musical storytelling. The narrative nature of Asian theatre and its blending of playfulness and specific technical execution inspired the European avant-garde, including Brecht’s epic theatre. In the case of Stranger’s Song, the audience’s experience entirely depended on Jaram Lee’s precise work with her voice and movement co-ordination. The performer stylised herself into several personages, expressed by means of effective gestural contraction (a hunched pose, erect or cautious gait), without forfeiting observational distance or the awareness of her being in the role of the narrator. Jaram Lee was accompanied on the almost empty stage by two musicians, whose aim was to provide rhythmic underpinning to the drift of the narration.

In my opinion, Stranger’s Song was the zenith of the final third of the festival programme. Owing to its minimalistic, precisely built theatrical form, as well as its title, it most closely expressed the festival motto – otherness was viewed through the lens of a forlorn young couple who, notwithstanding their poverty and low social status, retain a high degree of morality, and through the eyes of a privileged politician, who rediscovers his humanness in the twilight of his days. The two seemingly incompatible parties are forced to find a common parlance, by means of which they duly succeed in breaking down the established barriers. The fact that the Colombian author’s work was staged by Korean artists with regard to Western European theatre conventions represented another parallel, fulfilling the theme.
The programme selected for the fifth edition of Interferences entirely complied with the set theme. The final third of the festival agenda was dominated by productions of plays by Beckett, Gogol, Ionesco, Brecht and a theatrical remake of Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, whose characters are generally perceived as embodiments of otherness, external and personal deformation, the individualised (and problematical) self. The organisers’ endeavour to place the festival within the context of the current society-wide processes, whereby the meaning of the word strange must be constantly redefined, was more than welcomed. All the more striking, however, was the mediocre quality of some of the selected productions, which many a time only superficially illustrated the original literary or film work, instead of seeking a peculiar theatrical key.

(Days reviewed: 2 – 4 December 2016)

Translated by Hilda Hearne

Published on 16 December 2016 (Article originally written in Czech)

“Our theatre, such as this festival wants to belong to the whole city”

In the most central position of the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj, next to the main entrance, hangs the portrait of Gábor Tompa, artistic director of the theatre for the past 26 years. He also founded and runs the ‘Interferences International Theatre Festival’, for the 5th edition of which (24th November-4th December) we – the Journalists of UTE´s Online-Magazine Conflict Zones.Reviews – visited the second largest city in Romania, the picturesque Cluj, 324 kilometres north of Bucharest.

01_interferences_bi-4042 — © István Biró

After receiving the first snow of the season, the city is frozen and decorated with numerous flags due to the Romanian National day (every 1st of December they celebrate the unification of Valahia, Transylvania and Moldavia in 1918). The atmosphere inside the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj – member of the «Union des Théâtres de l Europe» since 2008 – is definitely much warmer. Dozens of volunteers joyously take care of every single detail and the theatre lovers of the city enjoy discovering performances from all over the world.

Such as the Korean performance, the curtain of which has just fallen, receiving the warmest rhythmic applause from the audience. It naturally takes the artistic director of the theatre and the festival, Gabor Tompa, longer than usual to cover the distance from the stalls to the main entrance, as he is constantly engaged in greeting friends and in brief conversations.

What if governments change at the speed of light in this idiosyncratic city of the Southeast Europe? Gabor Tompa remains in the same position. “We often happen to have three different Ministers in a year. This is one of the obstacles we have to overcome in our work, which I have always considered as a long-term project” he explains as we cross the stage, where some technicians are occupied with removing the set of the performance which has just finished, and preparing for tomorrow morning’s rehearsal. A busy beehive.

A staircase at the back of the stage leads up to his office. The walls are decorated with mementos and awards of a journey that started in 1990 and still goes on. “We had to modify contracts, build a team, a 36-actor ensemble and a repertory. But we also had to be international, build a ‘studio’ and a team of young actors. I always feel all this is too fragile to be abandoned. Of course, the administrative issues are far too many, so I am deprived of a significant part of my energy. I always try to find the pleasure in what I am doing” he says and carries on.

“Where I do locate the source of pleasure, I would say that it is basically found in the team of young people who work with me and who are quite independent, since they can make their own decisions without having to get my approval all the time.

“This helps me a lot since I have to spend a lot of time in Los Angeles where I teach acting, as well as in other countries where I direct. Then, pleasure lies within the opportunity I am given to invite directors I admire to come and work with us. Not few artistic directors choose to invite weaker artists than themselves. On the contrary, not only do I want to invite people whose work I admire, but who I also believe to happen to know something about the theatre which I ignore.

“I see that as a supplementary procedure” he explains. As for whether he would miss the office in which he has spent almost a lifetime: the answer is astounding! “I most certainly believe the reason I am still here is because I don’t actually care about the position as such”.

We are one step away from the closing of this year’s festival and he confesses having gained this: “The pleasure of having almost doubled our audience and of beginning to succeed in what we had really wanted in the first place: uniting the people of Cluj.”

And he explains: “There is this pretty common phenomenon here that has to do with the division of communities in everyday life: Romanians, Hungarians, Germans, Jews, but also people of different religions or social backgrounds.

“This theatre, founded 224 years ago, in 1792, is the oldest Hungarian theatre in the world. But we really want it to belong to the whole city and to people who gather here in order to encounter one another. This is why, not only now during the festival, but all year-round, we translate our performances into at least two more languages: Romanian and English, as our company performs in Hungarian. This helps win the trust of the Romanian community, so the proportions are now 65%-35% or 70%-30%. Moreover, there are seventy thousand students in Cluj who are the best audience.”

So if the goal set is so big, with what criteria does one choose the performances that are to be included in a two-year international theatre festival?

«First of all, we begin by choosing the subject, which this year was “The Odysseys of a Foreigner”. We have already found the subject of the next festival, two years from now. It is going to be “War Memories” since it will take place 100 years after the end of World War I. Among others we are thinking of inviting Ivo Van Hove, the new artistic director of the Comédie-Française.

“The performances I select approach the subject from different aspects, so as to complement one another. Of course, it is impossible to have only masterpieces. And actually, this is not the objective. Yes, there are performances which happen to be enthusiastically received by the audience and others which shape it. My experience has proved to me that the audience can be educated. The most important thing is to move on and take risks.

“We try to invite all kinds of performances: from well established companies to small independent ones. For instance, this year we invited a performance called ‘It’s Not the Time of My Life’, which was the first adaptation of a film that won this year’s award in Karlovy Vary. An utterly independent performance with absolutely no budget.”
He insists that he does not believe in the separation between independent and repertory theatre. “This is a plain nonsense for obsessionals and critics. In this case, we are rather concerned with ourselves than with the theatre as such. No, we need to let ourselves out of the picture.”
What about his personal point of view as far as this year’s subject, the Foreigner, is concerned? “It is not restricted to the immigration and refugee issues which are pretty hot. There is a more philosophical approach to it. What does it mean to be a foreigner? What does it mean to belong? What is the European identity? Which us, the East-Europeans almost have or believe to have? I think that solidarity nowadays is not powerful enough. Although the world is becoming smaller and smaller. For example, something happens here as we speak and people all over the planet find out about it in a few minutes. However, we still believe we are not affected by it. This is wrong. Everything that goes on involves us. We are to be found in every story. On the other hand, of course, we live in a period of a completely hypocritical political correctness and you can see the result. We witnessed it recently in the US elections. We ought to analyse what brings this about” he says.

Our conversation carries on about the qualities of the renowned Romanian directing school, which as he explains to us “puts forward the concepts, proposing each time a strong choice of play and a strong directing approach, from which are derived all the supplementary elements” and ends up to the Greek theatre as a plentiful source.

“What is very important is that the ancient audience did not use to go to the theatre to listen to stories. They were all acquainted with the story of Antigone or Medea. They did so in order to taste the actual experience. Nonetheless, it’s not just the drama itself that teaches us a lot” as he says. “The Dionysia was the first festival ever. A celebration in which the whole city took part. And this is something we always need to keep in mind.
“Max Reinhardt, who re-invented the festivals in Europe, wanted the Salzburg Festival to be a celebration of the whole city, like in ancient times. When everyone would take part.”

Published on 15 December 2016 (Article originally written in Greek)

Voices at the Crossroads … or the Soul after Victory II

Voices at the Crossroads…
or the Soul after Victory II

The Mouse Paradise Experiment, directed by Jiri Havelka. Národní divadlo, Prague. Photo © Herwig Lewy

A love letter at Národní divadlo: To Havel with love. In honor of Václav Havel, the Prague National Theatre’s festival Prazské krizovatky / Prague Crossroads (October 4^th to 9^th) presented 80 hours to celebrate the late theatre-maker and President of the Czech Republic’s 80^th birthday, 27 years after the start of the Velvet Revolution: 22 events over the course of seven days; winner of the Nobel Prize for literature Svetlana Alexievich in a discussion with Jáchym Topol; the theatre’s own production of The Mouse Paradise Experiment; guest performances from Belarus, Russia, and the Ukraine.

Built between 1977 and 1983, next to the National Theatre on the banks of the Vltava hangs the glass encased Nová Scéna, dark and cubic on four cement stilts. Inside are the green slabs of marble across four floors that create, strangely enough, a sacred atmosphere. The Crossroads Festival took place in the courtyard in front of the theatre (Piazzeta), in the mezzanine, in Café Nova, and in the foyer, which leads to the main hall, and which also serves as home court for the world famous avant-garde theatre group Laterna magika. The festival honoring Václav Havel felt in a symbolic way like a crossroad, at which many spirited voices proclaim their doubts about the present.

The Mountain Giants

For Luigi Pirandello it’s the rejects of society that meet a company of actors in the villa “Misadventure” and who, without props, attempt to perform the piece with the help of their imagination. Václav Havel brings together both sides of this coin and an exhibit in the mezzanine pointed it out. On the walls hang posters with documents from Amnesty International. In the case of Jirina Siklóva, Petr Uhl, Ivan Martin Jirous and Václav Havel, human rights offences were made public. The date on all of the posters: 1989. It is important to know that Václav Havel could not follow his classmate Miloš Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1975) to film school because he did not meet the requirements for his secondary school examinations after finishing his compulsory education in 1951.
He worked as a taxi driver in order to pay for his night classes, completed two years of military service and in 1954 he began working as a stagehand at the ABC Theatre and at the Theatre on the Balustrade. He began to write plays in the absurdist style, including The Garden Party, The Memorandum, and The Increased Difficulty of Concentration.
Culturally and politically, Havel appeared at the 9^th Writers’ Congress in Prague and openly criticized the censorship of the communist party. As head of the “Club of Independent Writers” he supported the reforms initiated by Alexander Dubček in 1968 which were repealed during the Prague Spring. In 1977 Havel was one of the three main initiators of the Charter 77 manifesto. Because of this, he was arrested three times and spent a total of five years in prison. After international protest in the early 80s he was released, but in January 1989 was jailed again for nine months for “disturbing the peace.” As candidate for the Civic Forum Občanské fórum (OF) Václav Havel was elected President of Czechoslovakia on December 29, 1989.

In light of this background, we have to ask this question: Which form of language is attached to this exhibit? It’s too naïve for “(Anti-)Communism in Museums”; much too concerned about facts for an artistic installation; the sounds from the foyer make their way into the exhibit. There, Marek Hejduk’s adaptation of the production of Protest, one of Havel’s best known pieces around the world, Protest/Rest (Theater Švandovo, Director: Daniel Hrbek) is being played. The sounds are evocative of a chorus and one floor further probably call to mind a tradition of collective passion in the Stalinist papal state. A sonorous illustration of the heartfelt matter in the mezzanine, it takes on a perspective of hero worship. As if to confirm this, a TV documentary with and about the man in his mid-fifties, with a rather anti-hero-like impression: “Go Havel! Go Havel!” can be read in the surtitles on the screen showing a mass rally. Above the screen, pictures flash of Havel in his robe (yawning) with his morning coffee, Havel in a suit (formal) performing a bodyguard’s salute. Pictures that show him with friends and artistic colleagues and companions, how they opened the locks of the atomic bunker left from his predecessor, Gustáv Husák, deep underneath the palace. “They really were afraid that war could break out as they stood in the reception and toasted; that someone would say, ‘The war has started!’ and they would push a button and ride down eleven stories!”, Havel recalled laughing, only “The elevator wasn’t ready!”

The atomic bunker was the most expensive investment in the history of the “Villa”, the Prague Castle on Castle Hill. The abys of the Cold War is sometimes considered the inheritance left from World War I, when Woodrow Wilson and Lenin tried to outdo each other concerning which political system was best able to help the people get back on their feet: With private ownership of resources or without. How should we go about shaking off the chasm?
Here it’s also important to know that Czechoslovakia came out of WWI as an independent state from the Habsburg Monarchy and existed until the Munich Agreement in 1938, with which Hitler-Germany took over the parts of Czechoslovakia containing ethnic German speakers and made them a part of the “Greater German Reich”, hereby creating the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The first president was the philosopher and writer Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk who served until 1935 and later died in Lány.
At this point, Havel’s life as a theatre person is required, as the TV documentary asks about his skills as master of ceremony and Havel responds: “If the first elements of a market economy should decisively and lawfully enter into our lives today, then we will also have to keep in mind in the following days, that a nation is an entity also made up of a spiritual component.” Borrowing from radio broadcasts with Woodrow Wilson, the Talks from Lány were born. The president needed a channel of direct communication. The idea came from the former ambassador in Washington and London, Havel biographer, and current director of the Václav Havel Library in Prague, Michael Žantovský.

The Space-Time in Secondhand Societies

A foray into the festival programme reveals a central focus on current events and present aptness in East European bordering countries. Voices questioning the present came to honor Václav Havel from Belarus (Belarus Free Theatre, Time of Women, Director: Nikolai Khalezin), from the Ukraine (DAKH Theater Kiev, Dreams of Lost Roads, Director: Vladyslav Troitskiy), and from the Russian Federation (Teatro di Capua, A Life for the Tsar, Director: Giuliano Di Capua). These productions show that the “happy fracking” that Lev Dodin started in Gaudemaus has since differentiated itself in the last 27 years. A wider attention for these works would be desirable, attention which recognizes their formal language and content related characteristics in relation to social coherency in their respective societies.

Maybe a guest performance from Poland could have added something to this central focus. Current developments in Poland show perhaps symbolically, through the hero worship for General Józef Piłsudski, political objectives diametrically opposed to those of the artist-president Havel.
The situation in the Baltic States is similar. It doesn’t hurt to know about the constant conflict zone in the space-time continuum of spiritual border conflicts in the eastern part of the European Union: Created in the inheritance of the Romanov Monarchy — because in 1918 the Bolsheviks were supposedly waiting on a socialist revolution in Germany — these countries were united in their search for “identity” following the fall of their shared past in the Stalinist Papal State.
One doesn’t have to be surprised about the extreme nationalism that has taken hold since changes in 1989/1992, the sometimes racial and Christian fundamentalist tones. The German Heer (military) went forward with its regime on Romanov territory — despite the peace treaties of Brest-Litowsk (March 1918) — and capitulated on the western front (failed spring offensive), and Woodrow Wilson must have forgotten to negotiate a border by the end of the First World War (November 1918). This led to a civil war against Soviet Russia (1919 – 1921) after the start of General Piłsudski’s “preventative war”, supported by Great Britain and France.
The arrival of the Cavalier Budjonnyjs led to the complete recapture of the Ukraine (1920) but also to Crossing the River Zbrucz in the first chapter of Red Cavalry by Issak Babel, the literary man from Odessa, as if paying homage to Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon.

On the other hand, in literature, like in theater, it’s the interpersonal relationships in this space-time continuum that counts, not the dates or schemes of political or historical developments. In her novel Second-hand Time, Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich traces this axis of conflict. Like Issak Babel once did, she lends a voice to stories that have been ground down somewhere between Raison d’Etat and individual emotions, wishes and hopes.
On the stage of the sold-out theatre hall of the Nová Scéna, she spoke with the iconic Czech author Jáchym Topol, famous for his theatre piece The Journey to Bugulma. In this piece Topol deals with the open secret of Czech literary history, according to which The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek has to do with his activities as a political officer without a weapon on behalf of the Red Army in Bugulma during the civil war. Topol makes Bugulma into the iconic embodiment of the Stalinist gulag system where any thoughts of a communist utopia crumble into a dystopia and end in a pile of corpses. Alexievich deals with the past, the effects of which are still felt today, in a similar way. She once stated that she has now been working for nearly forty years on a single book, a kind of Russian-Soviet chronicle: Revolution, gulag, war, Chernobyl, and the fall of the “Red Imperium.”

After a short but heartfelt greeting Topol leads us through the period of the Soviet Union, the time of Glasnost and Perestroika, through the time of a reconstruction of society. Excerpts from Second-hand Time are read. It is a panorama of fates after the collapse of the Stalinist structure. At one point Jáchym Topol speaks about being Czech in Prague. He expresses his surprise at the Russian, Slavic patriotism, which for him was no issue. Topol asks where this love of the Fatherland comes from, which allows one to die for Stalin (meaning Iosseb Dschughaschwili) although he stands for the destruction of culture?
Alexievich answers him in two respects: on the one hand, she is interested in literature and not in patriotism. She is interested in the mentality, for cultural codes that are hidden behind people’s fates. She is not interested in people as a part of a contemporary process, but instead in concrete individuals in space, who exist in the world. On the other hand, one could examine Stalin in this way. The people who lived in Stalin’s time were dependent upon him. And, Alexievich adds, Russia was always a totalitarian country and the Russian people had again and again attempted to free themselves from this totalitarian chain, but always in vain. This is the movement that defines Russian culture, which is also frustrating, because it never brings its ideal to fruition. Alexievich gives an example from her first book, The Unwomanly Face of War, and also mentioned that it will soon be available in Czech. In the book there is a woman who knows she is going to die soon. Fascism is the enemy. The woman didn’t really want to die in the spring. Suddenly she hears bird singing. She starts to see everything around her. She sees a flower blossoming. She sees colors. This woman begins to cry, in spite of her fate that she cannot change. And this is where literature is created, according to Alexievich.

As if there were no nationalism in the Czech Republic, which was familiar with the category of “ethnic purity”, someone in the audience whether it wasn’t an ethnical question of whether or not nations exist “that have a tendency towards totalitarianism, where the people themselves wish to be dominated” — She wouldn’t know, Alexievich answers. One could not say that the Germans are a country with fascist tendencies. There is however a moment of tendencies in which a mind forms opinions that might lead to totalitarianism. When she reads in newspaper about how Lukashenko is a dictator or how Putin is a dictator, she sees just the tip of an iceberg, under which a whole people is hidden, a whole nation. And these words are raised up in each of her books in order to test what is stable and what is not. Second-Hand Time is a collage of everyday voices, separate from the banalities of a political search for confrontation, which Alexievich attempts to give a metaphysical outlet.

Her books follow an aesthetic which she has perfected over time. First she wrote I’ve Left My Village which was not published in 1976 and which Alexievich herself considered too journalistic. She tried again, wrote short stories and essays, traced the voices around her. These are the voices at the crossroads which fascinate her. She met with a Belarusian writer Ales Adamovitch. He was dealing with a new literary model which he called “Collective Novella.” The two were brought together by a desire for the greatest possible convergence with real life. While receiving the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2013 she gave the audience this message: “Flaubert called himself ‘a man of the quill’. I can say for myself: I am a person of the ear.”

Should the Numbers Count?

The humor and biting play on words in the theatre pieces of Václav Havel could be found all throughout the festival. Under an open sky the Theatre Husa na provázku gave a guest performance of Havel’s piece The Pig (Director: Vladimir Morávek) on the Piazzeta. The piece Redevelopment resonated in two different interpretations in the theatre hall, the guest performance from Hradec Králové (Director: Andrej Krob) and the guest performance of the Ivana Franka Theatre (Director: Břetislav Rychlík). Two different performances of Unveiling were interpreted in the foyer by Studenti DAMU (Director: Miroslava Pleštilová) and by První část projektu (Director: Ivan Buraj). Comparable to a reenactment, the Petra Bezruče Theatre attempted Audience (Director: Stepán Pácl) in the style of socialist realism. The inclination to stay true to the originals was obvious in a few pieces, as well as a conscious decision, which protected the absurdities put there by Havel. Twenty-seven years later the communist-bashing is however still funny, but also somehow boring as a spectator.

Looking for contemporary dissonance, the theatre’s own production of The Mouse Paradise Experiment by Jiri Havelka (Director), Martina Slukova (Script), and Marta Ljubkova (Dramaturg) stood out. It handled totalitarian world relations in contemporary scientism and thereby fit better into the central focus of the programme. Going into the theatre, the audience members were each given a mouse mask made of PVC. Taking part in a scientific conference, the theatre is rearranged into a meeting room. On the stage lie half-visible disembodied mice tails at the edges of the carpet. A lectern on the right, behind it an oversized mouse wheel. In the middle there is a green marble conference lectern for three scientists: sociologist, psychologist, biologist. Directly behind them the same conference lectern for just one scientist: the philosopher. A chair on the left, stairs, and a feeding trough, out of which fall croissants. Behind the trough hangs a curtain, to the left and to the right of which monitors have been attached. Visible between them and authoritative for all: the UN symbol, with the addition of a mouse head. We are now part of a mouse society, that seems to be clear. The basics of life together are going to be examined, based on numerical values: birth rates and demographic changes, social behaviour and suicide rates, social stress levels and freedom, how younger and older members of society interact with one another …

The conference starts with an excerpt from a documentary [view here] about the Mouse Utopia Experiments performed by American ethnologist and behaviourist John B. Calhoun. Back in the 60s the National Institute of Mental Health recruited Calhoun to place a few mice in a habitat which provided the perfect conditions for their survival. The result was simple: the greater the security for providing basic needs thanks to external factors, the faster the population lost their social competencies, became violent towards one another, or removed themselves from society, until the population reached a maximum for demographic expansion and finally died out. These characteristics from the mouse species have been compared to the human species. The scene is set.

We mouse-scientists know about the dramatic situation of our species and attempt at this conference to together figure out how much happiness is required to motivate us to live a life of purpose. Amusingly, qualitative questions are posed in a dialogue between the audience and the stage, which are then quantitatively evaluated. It makes for a fantastic parody of views from surveys, studies or even think tanks that operate on the basis of numerical values, often also containing recommendations for political developments and which are spread through radio and TV.
The cynical climax unfurls with a chorus of We Shall Overcome, the classic hymn of the American Civil Rights Movement, which also found its place in the repertoire of symbolic forms in the Czech Republic, the spiritual consequence of building a nation since 1989. However, the performance doesn’t go beyond this cynical commentary. But: the last representative of our species to die is the philosopher and president of the conference. An homage to artist-president Václav Havel, maybe? No one thinks to take a look at the trough. Would that be sacrosanct? Just one misadventure remains. It doesn’t get more humorous than that, at the crossroads between ideal and reality. Czech culture is known for such sharp-witted details, it’s a certain lightness of being. Havel would have been pleased!

Published on 28 October 2016 (Article originally written in German)

Václav Havel. A history of mentalities?

In their work on the revolutionary magazine of “microhistory” Annales, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre outlined the principles of the Nouvelle Histoire movement, demanding that a historian collects the facts of the past society, trying to draw a “history of mentalities”. The current European set-up seems to challenge a cultural journalist in the very same way: after many discussions, the most successful approach in exploring the notion of “international theatre” is proved not to consider this as a static concept, but rather like a complex maze made out of fragments of different imageries.

We spent three days in Prague for a sort of “pilot edition” of the Crossroads Festival, created by stage director Michal Dočekal, director of the Czech National Theatre Drama and UTE President. As written in the booklet, the festival is dedicated to Václav Havel: “As an intellectual and politician, he strove to tell apart the fair from the foul and stood firm, espousing his knowledge of the fair.” Crossroads is a very sharp curatorial action: alongside a series of stagings of Havel’s plays, the first part of the festival invited theatre groups from countries which are dealing with severe political shiftings: Belarus (Belarus Free Theatre, Yuri Khaschevatsky), Ukraine (Dakhabrakha, Theatre for Displaced People or a debate with Nobel Prize laureate Svetlana Alexievich) and Russia (Teatro Di Capua, Viktor Shenderovich).
We attended some of the performances, but above all discussed the very aim of any networking programme in Europe, and how important it is to gather a group of people with different national backgrounds in order to, first of all, tackle different topics from different points of view.
When one tries to engage in a discussion on issues of global interest, it’s evident how often certain positions come from a perspective which is not always shared. This is because the history of a nation shapes the history of the thought of its people.
On the one hand, the very same topic can be addressed from a radically distant perspective from country to country—not all of them easy to understand for a foreign point of view—, on the other hand it’s evident how a vision of “international theatre” would be merely composed of a selection of few “samples” of national aesthetics and artistic trends, out of a much longer list of groups, artists and theatre companies.
This is in fact the basic strategy of the Conflict Zones Reviews editorial project: to keep its writers on the move both in metaphoric and actual terms, to let them visit foreign countries in search of those particular traces of a common thought around major topics. A key might be to look at them using comparative tools, each writer being aware of his/her own background and, at the same time, finding a way to put it to the test.
Amongst the most urgent questions in the nowadays shifting trans-national panorama is the one of national identity, a virtual umbrella which is very hard to keep on everyone’s head. The Crossroads Festival, hosted by the Czech National Theatre in Prague at the Nová Scéna playhouse, was held in the name of Václav Havel. It’s hard to detect at what point Havel’s devotion and talent for drama and his political career met, as hard as it is to define the nature of his status as an intellectual, his strong political activism and the extent of his power in the changing landscape of a Europe in the second half of the 20th century. The decision to dedicate the whole programme “to Havel, with love” is a statement by itself, it demonstrates the profound gratitude of the Czech people to their compatriot playwright and essayist, who had also been the ninth and last President of Czechoslovakia and the first of the Czech Republic, and who passed away in December 2011.
After a selection of eight plays (Havel authored a total of 22), the festival also presented Velvet Havel, a production by Divadlo Na zábradlí company, written by Miloš Orson Štědroň and directed by Jan Frič.
This performance can be used as a tool to shape out some considerations on the role of Havel in drawing a national identity.

Štědroň’s staging (Best Performance of the Year in 2013) is a vaudeville-like pastiche of humour and satire most likely serving as a very subtle tool to praise and, at the same time, to criticize such an extraordinarily charismatic and influential political figure. In absence of a coherent plot, the performance devises a crazy cabaret in which Havel—portrayed as a young man with rockabilly hair cut—is brought to life in a sort of purgatory, where he is asked to revise some of the key events of his private life in front of his uncle Miloš Havel, a very well known film producer.
Life is a cabaret!; In kino veritas!”. Dialogues, monologues, dance, songs and live music mingle up on stage creating a colourful variety show, really hard to follow for those who are not familiar with trivia about the former president’s life as a writer, lover and incurable smoker, always dividing his time between the responsibility of his political engagement and his artistic career .

It must indeed be remembered how unique the journey to independence from the Czechoslovakian communist regime was; that “Velvet Revolution” which also finds its echo in the title of the play. In only a month (November 17 to December 29, 1989), the former sovereign state of the Soviet bloc gave birth to a parliamentary republic, with absolutely no violent resistance opposed by the Communist Party, whose top leadership resigned after only one week of demonstrations and a general strike. Václav Havel, as one of the nine founder members of the text of civic initiative Charta77, played a key role in gathering the consensus around the independence from the Soviet Union, and a deeper attention to human rights. His service as President of the Czech Republic, although widely supported by the people, didn’t fail in receiving also some harsh criticism, especially with respect to certain foreign policy decisions.

Talking with some members of the audience after Velvet Havel, the impression is that such a humorous attitude in describing a popular figure and its influence on people is quite typical of the Czech. Jakub, a Slovak young professional based in Prague, tells a curious story: Největší Čech (The Greatest Czech) is the name of a television poll lunched in 2005 by the national broadcaster Česká televize through which the populace was asked to name the greatest Czech personality in history. The winner was Jára Cimrman, who couldn’t actually accept the prize; this anecdote perfectly captures the Czech sense of humour since Cimrman is actually a fictional character. Created by Jiří Šebánek, Ladislav Smoljak and Zdeněk Svěrák for the radio programme Nealkoholická vinárna U Pavouka in 1966 as a caricature of the Czech people, Cimrman ended up being recognized as one of the strongest Czech symbols, with books, plays and movies featuring him as main character or even as “putative author”.
Jakub’s opinion is that Czechs are not very politically involved and that the sense of humour shown in Velvet Havel is a trustful representation of a sort of national spirit, that—focusing more on the form than on the content—in Frič/Štědroň’s play finds a very subtle and respectful balance between criticism and apology.
In 2011 in Riga, the major Latvian director Alvis Hermanis presented Ziedonis and the Universe, a play which was both a homage and a critical response to the intellectual and political activity of Imants Ziedonis, the “national poet” who died not long after, universally recognized as the most representative icon of Latvian culture throughout the Soviet Union period and beyond. Here too, the play conveyed a mixture between revealing someone’s social influence and praising it. In both cases, the act of unveiling the contradictions of a society resulted in awakening a socio-political conscience. Facts and figures from the past (in the case of Czech Republic and Latvia: the Soviet political and economical influence, as well as the following cultural revolutions) appear to play a crucial role in terms of how people carve out the tools to tell their own collective history. As a matter of fact, such kind of satirical use of performing arts is strictly connected to the sense of community that reunites the conscience of the individuals.

Going back in 2016 Prague, a reflection that challenges this discourse can be found in the preface texts that introduced the Crossroads Festival booklet. The one by Michael Žantovský—director of the Václav Havel Library—summarizes Havel’s thought in a distinctive way: “Unlike all the other politicians, [Václav Havel’s] philosophy did not bear on an ideological doctrine and the necessity of power to apply it, but on the essential need of individuals to live an authentic, meaningful life, part of which is the awareness of being co-responsible for that which is around them and for the fates of other human beings.”
From this perspective, Havel wanted to engage the Czech people’s interest not so much through a strictly political propaganda able to foster an active intervention, but rather through conveying a sense of community based on a shared imagery able to make sense out of living as a collective of individuals. In other words: some ideas that proactively create an identity rather than an ideology that imposes one. This comparison with Havel may be accounted as good material for this little experiment of “microhistory”, which used performing arts to cast a light on the mentality of a country. And, once again, challenge a simplistic conception of “international theatre”.

Published on 21 October 2016 (Article originally written in Italian)

YOUNG EUROPEAN JOURNALISTS ON PERFORMING ARTS

Category: Festivals

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

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

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

Festival of the Union of Theatres of Europe in Cluj.