Thessaloniki’s teenagers became ‘digital natives’ and presented their views and the problems they face to young people from other countries through theatre. The programme, which is entitled “Digital Natives” and co-funded by the EU’s Creative Europe programme, was implemented by the National Theatre of Northern Greece within the framework of the activities of the Union of the Theatres of Europe.
Teens from five European countries took part in the project, presenting the fruit of their joint labours, exchanging views on the things that matter to them, and enjoyed themselves at an interactive party broadcast live online to and from five European cities: Vienna, Rennes, Cluj, Cologne and Thessaloniki.
The teenagers from Vienna, Reims in France, Cluj in Romania, Cologne and Thessaloniki interacted online, expressing their relationship with contemporary technology and speaking about their concerns and interests. Their inspiration was provided by Concord Floral, a play by the young Canadian writer Jordan Tannahil. The NTNG participated in the program with a series of theatre workshops for teens: guided by the theatre educator Komno Krikelikou and in collaboration with the psychologist / drama therapist Foteini Papacharalambous, two groups of teenagers—30 individuals in all—began work on the play’s key themes back in October 2018. Using theatre-game techniques and drama, the groups set out to formulate questions, to tackle issues stemming from online communication, and to achieve a deeper understanding of both the Internet’s potential and its potential traps.
ETHNOS, 4 June 2019
Online party at the NTNG
The online party thrown on Saturday 1 June brought to a close the “Digital Natives” programme, which was co-funded by the EU’s Creative Europe programme. The programme, in which the National Theatre of Northern Greece took part, was run within the framework of the activities of the Union of the Theatres of Europe. Teens from five European countries took part in the project, presenting the results of their joint labours, exchanging views on the issues that concern them and, of course, enjoying themselves together at a party that was broadcast live online to and from five European cities (Vienna, Reims, Cluj, Cologne and Thessaloniki).
Notes from the 2nd Conference on Digitisation at the Comédie de Reims
S.O.S. Encapsulation… or the Soul after Victory III
Interferences in Cluj-Napoca among Seasons, Représentation and the Digital
David vs. Goliath
About the premiere of Jordan Tannahill's Concord Floral in Reims
The Generation of Joyful Knowledge
Silver Sufer, a theatrical experiment, in which the bracket between millenials and silver surfers finds its expression in all their contradictory and appropriate facets
Mixing the languages: personal encounters within a digital framework
A vivid picture of a spring weekend through the workshop and premiere’s experience of 25 teenagers from five different countries
How to think about digital and analogue communication on European stages in the future. What kind of intergenerational dialogue will be made possible. Notes from the UTE-Conference on Digitisation «Digitization and young people» at the Comédie de Reims, as part of «Digital Natives», a transnational educational UTE-project, from Elena Galanopoulou.
“I share therefore I am.” The phrase takes me pleasantly aback for a moment as it leaves the lips of French sociologist Elen Riot. I’m in the Bar de la Comédie in Reims, where UTE, the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe is staging a conference on «Digitization and young people». A few minutes earlier, I’d uploaded a photo of the panel to my social media accounts. I had already announced my being there… so I really was here, I thought with a smile before sinking back into the speakers’ interesting takes on the subject.
Most of them are no longer in the first blush of youth. They are using their academic tool kits to try and monitor, understand and predict trends relating to an enormously dynamic phenomenon-in-progress: digital living. And with a focus on an age group every bit as volatile: young people.
However, they are still the most suitable to help us better understand of this subject. Patrice Flichy, a researcher and professor of sociology at Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, is up first. He talks about the internet over the last three decades, dedicating a little time to the broader historical framework and a great deal more to the changes since. There is a huge semantic gulf between the Nineties’ view of the Net as a wonderful tool for democratizing public discourse and the suspicion which we might have towards it today.
These and other aspects of digital life are also rendered transparent in Concord Floral, the play which provided both the impetus for—and fundamental axis of—this meeting and public discussion. Written in 2015, the play was first staged in Canada, where it was a serious success, garnering particular praise for its handling of burning issues such as youth, democracy and the impact of new technologies and social networks on modes of socialization.
Its French première, which features a local amateur cast of young people aged 13 to 17, is to be staged that night. The Comédie de Reims is one of five member theatres participating in this educational and transnational UTE-project. The other four—Thessaloniki’s State Theatre of Northern Greece, Vienna’s Volkstheater, Cologne’s Schauspiel and the Hungarian Theatre in Cluj—have also undertaken to stage either the play itself or workshops and lectures relating to it. Ultimately, simultaneous project parts will unite the five cities and theatres involved via the… Internet, in a celebration which is surely one of most positive ways in which the Internet has impacted our lives. But what about data: all the information which, having been stealthily collected from users, ends up in the hands of powerful commercial giants? Flichy referred to the example of Housing. It started with people who simply wanted to share their sofas with guests, and ended up with platforms like AirBnB dictating the market’s rules.
In her lecture, Géraldine Taillandier, director of Centre Saint-Ex, Reims, dedicated to new ICT technologies, stresses that the Centre educates people aged 6 and up in using digital tools. Young people attending the Centre find themselves in a welcoming and free environment being encouraged to think “outside the box”. Their philosophy is so wide-ranging, it doesn’t even rule out hacking as a concept.
Olivier Nocent, professor of Computer Science at Crestic Laboratory, Reims, praises the work being done at Saint-Ex Centre, before going on to mention the algorithms which, having identified our preferences, undertake to inform and influence us by both redirecting our desires and attempting to foresee them. Simultaneously, the algorithms group us with other users with similar tastes and behaviours.
Jean-Pierre Cahier, professor at Université Technologique, Troyes, speaks about his collaboration project between engineers, systems designers, hackers and creatives. Each of them brings a different point of view. He also describes a project running in rural areas, where tools are brought together for the agro-ecological transition.
In the following public discussion, in answer to a question posed to Cahier about creativity, he uses the example of Wim Wenders’ 3D-movie about Pina Bausch. It is just one hour long, but required thousands of hours of filming. A number of other issues are raised by the fifty or so young people in the audience from YPAL (Young Performing Art Lovers), who previously attended the workshop in question.
How much do we really know about the tools we use on a daily basis? Are we aware of what they can and cannot do? To what extent are we really free in terms of online media and platforms? What sort of abilities and knowledge do we need to enjoy freedom of information and exercise freedom of expression? What are the differences between online practices of different digital generations, especially generations which are and are not “digital natives”? Is it possible to provide an education in new media? And if so, what might be the rules?
In conclusion, I tend to agree with what Elen Riot already noted in her introduction; that we are really mistaken if we think that the “digital natives” can instinctively manage the new technologies that extend everywhere before them (from school through the workplace). Taking everything into consideration, it is clear that only by observing what is really happening into our lives as daily practice we can help and encourage democratic knowledge.
Panel participants:
Jean-Pierre Cahier
Roland Flichy
Olivier Nocent
Géraldine Taillandier
Moderator: Elen Riot
Published on 7 May 2019
Translation from Greek into English: Michael Eleftheriou
With the Silver Surfer world premiere at Volx/Margareten, the studio of the Volkstheater Wien has brought out an innovative theatrical experiment, in which the bracket between millenials and silver surfers finds its expression in all their contradictory and appropriate facets, without abandoning the critical attitude towards smart technology.
Barbara Pálffy / Volkstheater
Ganaele Langlois is Professor in Communication Studies at the York University. Her book Meaning in the Age of Social Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) studies how the very concept of meaning is being reshaped in the light of human-computer interaction. Following Langlois, in the process of creation of meaning online, the human user is only «a component, but not the driving force of these systems». A social networking site (such as Facebook or Instagram) is based on a very complex software architecture, only partly activated by us and made by a sum of technical objects that possess their own agency and are able to influence, reshape, and bend to their will the human actors.
Digital Natives is a cooperation project by the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe (UTE) with the support of Creative Europe, that involves the Volkstheater Wien, Schauspiel Köln, the Hugarian Theatre of Cluj, the Comédie de Reims and the National Theatre of Northern Greece. At the end of March 2019, Vienna was animated by a two day-long series of conferences, talks and performances, all dedicated to exploring how twenty years of interactive Web technologies were able to determine a new way of looking at reality and living interconnected lives. Digital interaction can indeed be interpreted as an opportunity in digging new paths to creativity: but, if relationships seem to no longer have limits, how can we trace boundaries between a fake reality and a real fakeness?
Since the advent of anthropology, human sciences have come to terms with the importance of a specific context, a system of social conventions and common rituals that really defines the roots and the logic of a local community. The very concepts of “openness” and “closure” can be fully understood only by measuring how such conventions and rituals invite or refuse a negotiation with others coming from different cultures.
If, back in the days, the Internet was created as a powerful vehicle to exchange data and information, Web 2.0 – those platforms characterized by highly interactive functionalities – deeply changed the modes used by different communities to establish a dialogue. We are not only talking about a new order and pace in mingling social traditions, but also new languages and velocities able to reshape the basic forms of intergenerational communications.
This is the thematic core of Silver Surfer, a project by Volkstheater’s Youth Programme, directed by Constance Cauers and Malte Andritter, that had its world premiere Saturday 30 March at the Volx/Margareten in Vienna.
Five adults and six teenagers meet on the same theatrical stage to discuss their everyday life, building, layer by layer, a dense collective discourse around the “digital diet” of the present society.
The wide blank stage is surrounded by translucent curtains, a sort of open limbo between two generations. A sparse vegetation of black lecterns grows on the empty white space; each stand has a LED light that illuminates the faces when the actors in front talk. Between rapid accounts of conversations with mom and dad and quick dialogues through which the digital natives walk the first steps into a romantic affair, every line of this very rhythmic and sparkling text is addressed to the audience. This shows how disconnected we really are when engaged in virtual communication. “Online relationship”, “Digital daily routine”, “Digital assault” are some of the titles that break the text in several scenes; but there are also such terms as “Nude pictures”, “Porn”, “Darknet”, all related to “the dark side of the Internet”. The virtual world is always a mirror of the actual one, where an inattentive traveler can easily get lost.
In establishing virtual contacts with the outer social circle, a turning point may then be a solid education, a kind of knowledge that makes us cautious and curious towards how we can actually appear to the eyes of the others and how we can understand and gain control over new systems of power. In his model of “discourse analysis”, Michel Foucault used to look at language and practices as battlefield where one has to oppose resistance to a number of power structures. In Langlois’ opinion such war is nowadays fought through the creation and the negotiation of meaning: «Media transform the conditions within which we humans come to interpret, produce, and share meanings. At the same time, media can be harnessed by specific social forces to establish power formations». Social media are fundamentally based on the idea that an individual view of the world can recognize itself through the act of circulating information and thoughts, in a way which is no longer able to distinguish private from public content.
The moment when the world was divided into online and offline is buried in the past: the Italian media theorist Giovanni Boccia Artieri (University of Urbino) argues that «we are facing an accumulation of occasions in which individuals “play” with self-representation forms, thanks to the diffusion of reproduction and production technologies in daily life, from digital photo cameras to editing software». The resulting media forms are very close to the ones promoted by the mainstream media and such scenario is reinforced by a growing “disintermediation” (the removal of intermediaries in a supply chain), encountered both in the market and in the individual construct of reality.
In his speech at “Digital Hermits”, the first Digitization Conference in Cluj (read the report here), a very young Hungarian YouTuber, Tamás Trunk, was explaining how quickly a teenager can launch his/her own online career as an influencer, only by endorsing the right product at the right time. Because virtual communities are already prompt in getting engaged in a communal attitude to marketing and in sharing ideas.
And yet, Silver Surfer focuses on the controversial duplicity between virtual and actual presence, observing how certain natural dynamics of interaction are today encapsulated in a form of “digital milieu”, where everyone has to prove his or her level of connection, to be a witness of a shifting era.
The performance is a generous mix of vivacity and humor, the group of teenagers is very efficient in presenting different approaches to storytelling. Singing songs live, the actors display a polished body language and an accurate work on facial expressions that become extremely important in the way they convey and share with the spectator what such a fluvial text couldn’t, especially when the choir speaks in unison, winking at a Brecht’s “didactic drama” and, at the same time, portraying the effects of fixed thought.
One-to-one relations (between natives or with the «instaGrans») can in fact serve as a good model for political involvement, which is another big “black hole” of the proliferating digital culture(s): the absence of a real political attitude, the end of what Jürgen Habermas called “communicative action”. This has historically founded on language and the possibility of formulating an argumentation, as deliberate as possible but able to be contested and discredited.
To gain back what Habermas had envisioned, the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han proposes a quest for an alternative, a “digital rationality” that comes from a crucial understanding: the “digital swarm” is not a mass, rather an aggregate of individual egos not organized in a political construct.
As inhabitants of different areas of the same gigantic virtual community, our very imagery is being replaced with a wall full of slogans and tags, a semantic formula that gives the users the impression of being part of the same family of friends and followers, consuming and sharing the very same symbolic forms, productive «networked publics» (Diana Boyd) who recognize themselves in the same hidden processes.
While the social media establish themselves as the most advanced meaning machines, where a users’ response can discipline, at the same time, the accurateness of advertising and the relevance of the news, we are all “texting”, “snapchatting”, “skypeing”, “instagramming”, “posting”, “twitting”. All terms that had no sense less than a couple of decades ago and that now are included in every dictionary, at least in our glittering Western world. What is interesting about Silver Surfer is the way its energy sets the stage for a new kind of critique, because a clear division between “apocalyptic” and “integrated” (as Umberto Eco had defined two attitudes towards new technologies) is no longer there.
Thus, the idea of inviting members from Veterans and Generation Z to handle the same vocabulary and together funding a common language is an intelligent getaway to gain knowledge by living a real-time experience.
«What’s missing again at the moment that is has to be now?» is the last sentence of a long “teen choir”. Facebook suggests us to re-post a “memory” of a time when we were still married or still pregnant with our first daughter, and suddenly the past becomes a revenant; the future appears under the mask of “events” to be interested in. Between
posts, video-chats, virtual encounters and Instagram stories that 24 hours later are gone, this is the scenario: a condition where present is the only tense. At the end of the day, theatre is one of the last occasions to gather in the same room, among unknown people, and together occupy a time and a space which are owned and negotiated by an actual community. The same that, in the bar of the Volx/Margareten, has shared a drink and toasted to the wonderful effort of this bunch of members from a generation of joyful knowledge.
Mixing the languages: personal encounters within a digital framework
UTE’s Sofia correspondent, Ina Doublekova, gives a vivid picture of what happened in Vienna’s Volkstheater during a warm pre-spring weekend in March through the workshop and premiere’s experience of 25 young Europeans from five different places and cultural and migrational backgrounds made possible by the educational theatre project Digital Natives.
DIGITAL NATIVES is a cooperation project between five of the UTE’s member theatres: Volkstheater Wien, Comédie de Reims, Hungarian Theatre of Cluj, Schauspiel Köln and National Theatre of Northern Greece. The starting point of their collaboration is the play Concord Floral by Jordan Tannahill, a play about teenage identity and interactions, the power of perception and technology. The five theatres will take the text and work on it, either staging a production or using its themes as the basis for workshops with amateur teenage actors. The theatres, together with their amateur actors, will simultaneously develop a digital experiment during the rehearsal period.” – explains the text on UTE’s website, presenting this year-long, transnational educational initiative. However, what is not mentioned in this paragraph and naturally does not fit into this kind of project descriptions is that the teenagers involved are 90 in total – 15 in Cologne, 40 in Thessaloniki, 10 in Cluj and 10 in Reims, 5 stage directors are working with them on a weekly basis during the rehearsal period. Now just imagine how these five different groups meet in these theaters in each city almost every weekend. How they work with and on Concord Floral play (or do not work on it all but still spend time together), probably often simultaneously. So close and so far away at once – in the same theatrical dimension and at different geographical locations. Put in the same project and virtual framework but apart, at least in the first step of the project.
And yet, one weekend they all came together for a very first time in Vienna. This meeting was not in the initial schedule of the project but instead an almost spontaneous change in plans, which the Volkstheater agreed to host. In the morning the teenagers participated in their first ever workshop together and in the evening they attended the premiere of Silver Surfers – a performance created by the Volkstheater with seniors and millenials, again in the frame of #digitalnatives19, that you can read more about in Sergio Lo Gatto’s text.
Witnessing their first live encounter, after three premieres of Concord Floral already done in Vienna, Cologne and Reims and more importantly after all the participants having been in touch with one another via Skype for more than a half year now, was thrilling and though-provoking experience. Having to describe it – meaning to “zip” it into words for people who were not there – for an online journal makes it even more so.
The teenagers met in one of the rehearsal rooms of Volkstheater on a Saturday morning. The idea was for them to get acquainted with one another and also get a grasp on how the workshops happen in each city, what their counterparts have been doing,. For this purpose each of their trainers – Simon Windisch (Vienna), Bassam Ghazi (Cologne), Naïma Perlot-Lhuillier (Reims) – worked with the whole group for about an hour each, involving them into activities and trainings that they normally practice at home. Needless to say, at the beginning the atmosphere was awkward. Most of the kids were shy. One of the first rules established was that languages needed to be mixed. The first meeting ground for that, as it was noted, was the English language, which was not native for anyone but was the one which everyone spoke. Then came the body language. Everyone was encouraged get louder and louder, to stretch beyond the timidity, to open up to the others. To look them in the eyes. To team up with someone and to learn to follow their gaze, to recognize their laughter or cry from a distance. Some of the teenagers started acting out. One could tell that they got into it and got intrigued. Links were built; question of power (and superpower) was also raised. Through exercises and games synergy came into being. The languages were mixed up indeed. The atmosphere was now joyful and exalted. The magic of a dense personal encounter had worked out.
And here aroused a major question: how much this result was favored by the online encounters the teenagers had before their live meeting? And how their interaction online will be changed from now on that they know each other in person? What is the recipe for mixing up the language of the digital communication with the one of the personal interaction in the right proportions to make it taste good and right?
On the next day the conference, Digitality and Democracy, took place, focusing on Big Data, power and access to knowledge, possible ways to achieve digital maturity. It was moderated by Corinna Milborn, co-author of Change the Game. Wie wir uns das Netz von Facebook und Google zurückerobern (Christian Brandstätter Verlag, 2018) The other speakers were Dr. Sarah Spiekermann-Hoff (Professor at Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, author and researcher), Angelika Adensamer (Lawyer and criminologist, Policy Advisor at epicenter.works) and Stefanie Wuschitz (Artist, researcher and hacktivist).
During the discussion, many crucial issues were touched upon: the personal data collection and the fact that all our activity online is tracked, which violates the fundamental right of doing things without being under surveillance, thus this gathered information is used as an instrument of control and manipulation. What is more, algorithms are not transparent and tend to strengthen inequality. One possible solution mentioned is for these processes to be led bottom-up, which is not the case at the moment, since the major players on the field like Facebook, Amazon and Google are privately owned corporations. Furthermore, the situation of internet security in Europe was discussed, comparing it to countries like Russia and China, which are developing their own internet, while most of the servers where the European information is stored are still in the USA.
Without undermining at all the importance of those significant concerns, it seems that there are several outstanding tendencies when we talk about the digital world that we inhabit in general. First of all, we talk about it a lot and discussions about the near and distant future are quite common these days, which, is already a symptom. Second of all, those debates often seem to be only two-sided (which was not the case for this conference) – there is one side claiming that the advance of digital world and the artificial intelligence is good and there is another side explaining why it is bad. Third of all, the digital is presented as a separate entity, a world of its own, not connected to the analog world outside the screens of the mobile devices.
Having attended both events in the course of 24-hours, it seems that probably we should start thinking of it as a mixture, as the right balance and between the two, as the golden middle. The digital is here to stay. And it is part of the analog daily life. And vice-versa. Nowadays they complement each other and how this relationship works needs to be examined deeper and deeper.
At Reims Scènes d’Europe, held between 24th January – 7th February, which presented artistically valuable works in performing arts marked by a diversity in genre, the performance Concord Floral premiered at the Comedie de Reims. Based on the award-winning play by the Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill, this production is part of a project by the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe, #digitalnatives19, which has brought together five theatres – from Cluj, Cologne, Thessaloniki, Vienna and Reims – to work with this play.
The starting point of the project, which commenced last June and is to continue until June this year, is to explore the balance between the digital and analogue world, especially among the teenagers growing up amidst global digitisation. The production at the Volkstheater Wien has focused on how digitisation affects today’s teenagers’ everyday life, as well as on cyber-bullying, while the performance by the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj will concentrate on positive and negative aspects of global digital communication. The idea is to have five interpretations of Tannahill’s texts, all performed by teenagers, amateur actors. It is worth mentioning that the text was created in Tannahill’s workshops with teenagers, that it has been performed both in schools and in theatres. That was also the case with the performance in Reims, which cast ten teenagers aged between thirteen and seventeen.
One of the reasons for casting teenagers, amateur actors, is based on Tannahill’s belief that it is the amateurs who will inherit the 21st century, as he states in his book, “Theatre of the Unimpressed”: “The Internet’s nature of openness and perpetual liveliness makes it a space made for amateurs who are given the chance to make themselves known through creating in innovative, ground-breaking ways”.
Within the frame of the Festival and of the project #digitalnatives19, Comédie de Reims was also the venue of a conference which tackled various aspects of digitisation. The conference was moderated by the anthropologist Elen Riot, while the topic of the amateur art breakthrough on the internet was addressed by Patrice Flichy, Professor of Sociology at the University of Marne-la-Vallee: “The internet produces amateurs, which is something that our society sees as a new phenomenon. Moreover, amateur practices are still developing thanks to the internet. Today, anyone can use creation and sharing tools which used to belong only to professionals. For example, amateurs can learn video editing by watching tutorials on YouTube, thus expanding their knowledge and creations. That is something we didn’t have before.”
Tannhill’s play takes place in an abandoned greenhouse known as Concord Floral, where a group of teenagers discover their torments, desires, dreams, weaknesses, sexual awakening, love of nature, while sharing it all in cyberspace. They have fled into the garden from the social plague, just like the heroes of Boccaccio’s The Decameron, which served as Tannahill’s main inspiration. However, while Florence in The Decameron is ravaged by the real plague, our present world is, in Concord Floral, affected by a metaphorical plague which all the children have escaped from, and decided to use the garden as a haven, a space of freedom, isolated, safe, and protected from their parents’ supervision. The Reims performance is marked by an extraordinary energy of the young performers who have won the audience with their dedicated, energetic, unrestrained, and sincere acting, playing the roles that echo their own lives. Dressed in colourful sequined clothes, they are placed on garish green grass. There are chairs scattered around, while the performers enjoy the rubble in the absence of parental order and supervision. Their play is guided by a DJ in the background, serving as a narrator who occasionally assumes the role of a controller, similar to the Orwell’s omnipresent Big Brother.
After long standing ovations, the director of the Reims performance, Ferdinand Barbet, said that the performance aims at revealing the real world to teenagers. During the rehearsals, they were constantly checking their mobile phones, immersed in various applications: “They keep taking photos and posting them on their profiles, that’s what’s typical for children of their age. They discuss everything quite openly on the internet, that’s what distinguishes them from my generation”, Barbet said.
In a very inspirational introduction to the conference about digitisation, Elen Riot said that Concord Floral was written with teenagers for teenagers, based on documentary material, and born out of young people’s reality: “It is a reflection on young people, on democracy and on the role of new technologies and social networks in their modes of socialization. If you don’t use new technologies, you are outside of society.” Furthermore, Riot mentioned some interesting insights made by Sherry Turkle, who claims that people are nowadays trapped in online exchanges and images they create about themselves. “I share, therefore I am”, has become a ubiquitous mantra, a contemporary response to Descartes’ rationalist thought “I think, therefore I am”. Today, sharing one’s intimate world has become young people’s life purpose, the primary means through which they construct their identities (and it is not only teens but also older generations who have become consumed by the same digital passion). The phenomenon has been analysed by Steve Dixon, who has claimed that the internet and social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, are no longer mere virtual spaces, but fields of communication that keep gaining momentum, gradually becoming substitutes for real-life exchanges: “Internet communication is turning into a form of virtual performance of one’s self, it encompasses various forms of communication and representative aspects of everyday life. Theatre is being created by a great number of individuals who use the internet on daily basis, through e-mail communication, their personal websites and blogs, Facebook profiles, etc.” (Steve Dixon, Digital Performance. A History Of New Media In Theater, Dance, Performance Art, And Installation, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 2007, 4.) Numerous internet profiles and blogs are digital palimpsests of Goffman’s ideas about representation in everyday life, where subject is being progressively erased, redefined, and re-established as a person/performer, within a computer screen as a theatre proscenium: “The world wide web is a space of therapeutic catharsis, and it creates the greatest theatre in the world which offers fifteen minutes of fame to everyone.”(Steve Dixon, Digital Performance. A History Of New Media In Theater, Dance, Performance Art, And Installation, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 2007, 4.) That process leads to new configurations of individuality that obliterate borders between the human and the machine. Man becomes a cyborg, the one connected to the machines.
In line with these problems, Riot mentioned some new, alarming statistics published in Le Monde on 19th January, according to which an excessive exposure to monitors can cause problems, which is why young people in particular should learn how to be alone. The article states that intellectual and cognitive disorders have lately risen by 24 per cent, mental disorders by 54 per cent, and speech disorders by 94 per cent, all connected to an increased fixation to screens. Concluding the analysis of Sherry Turkle’s ideas, Riot expresses an attitude that the machines offer an illusion of friendships, without a demand for intimacy.
On the other hand, the teenagers in Reims’ Concord Floral find the value of the tangible, material world, which was also mentioned by Barbet after the performance: “In the play, the children discover the real world, the one which exists outside the internet and monitors, a life in the nature, in grass, the world outside, that is the point of the play. That is why we use real things in the performance: grass, old things, like this couch, objects filled with life, not abstract things.”
The analogue world of theatre is presented here as a ritual, holy space which preserves the reality crushed by the digital machine. It is a physically present stage which is trying to protect the material nature of the world. We recall the metaphor used by the theoretician Peggy Phelan in 1993, while considering the value of the presence in performing arts as opposed to digital art. She saw theatre as a poor David, struggling against the Goliath of the new media and technological capitalism. (Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics Of Performance, Routledge, Florence, 1993, 149) The hope remains that this David will save the old world, in its most valuable fragments at least.
Published on 27 February 2019 (Article originally written in Serbian by Ana Tasić and translated by Vesna Radovanović)
The riddle of the International Theatre Festival is its name: Interferences. This year’s sixth edition of the biennial tournament for collective representations in Cluj-Napoca, which has been held every two years since 2008, deals with the theme of war. From the 22nd to the 30th November 2018, 16 ensembles from 13 countries met in Transylvania, a cultural interface below the Carpathian Arc since antiquity.
The cultural diversity and multilingualism can be felt at every corner of the city. It is home to various spaces of experience of distant pasts, which in their linguistic expression meets daily today in Hungarian, Romanian and sometimes also in German. The memorial culture of the city with the name triangle amazes and wonders visitors at the everyday overlays, because besides Cluj-Napoca there are also the names Kolozsvár and Klausenburg. Thus, the two city centres, a Hungarian and a Romanian one, are connected with each other by a street on which the sculpture of a myth was placed. It is the myth of the founding history of Rome – a she-wolf feeding Romulus and Remus on a marble-covered pedestal with a portrait of Trajan, including the inscription: Alla Citta di Cluj – Roma Madre – MCMXXI. The visitor is confronted with the question: Is this still young memorial a reminiscence of 1921, staging Rome as a matrilineal origin for the city of Cluj-Napoca?
Time is Convention
Anyone looking at the sculpture from outside looks for words to understand what kind of représentation finds expression here. Judging by everyday political standards, it may well have been the intention to create sense to meet the challenges after the turn of 1989/1992. However, a link to the founding myths of the nation-building process after Romania’s founding one hundred years ago as a result of the Versailles peace negotiations has attracted too much social attention. Festival director Gábor Tompa, at the opening of the festival in the Hungarian theatre of Cluj-Napoca, gives a hint, both in his address in the festival catalogue and in his personal address: the theme of the festival is war. One hundred years has passed since the end of the First World War, whose peace negotiations dramatically and tragically rearranged the map of Europe. At the same time, however, they also prolonged warlike conflicts indefinitely until today. – In his speech, he directly asks the audience the question: “How can we remember war in ways other than that losers remember losers? – Because in a war there are no winners,” says Tompa.
From the spectator’s point of view, his suggestion makes the facets of the festival programme comprehensible much more quickly. The chosen season in the festival calendar is the time of mental heaviness in Europe. Autumn passes into winter and the days become shorter. And outside only fog circulates. Theatre as a festival needs such a stable sacred anchor, which is realized anew in a periodic sequence depending on the season. The word “sacred” floats in my mind as I listen attentively to Tompa’s words in the auditorium as I leaf through the catalogue, creating a certain sense of time and space. I’m thinking of Henri Hubert’s essay on La représentation du temps dans la religion et la magie from 1904, read recently on my tablet. Those who get involved with the festival events leave the normal space-time feeling of everyday life. The sacred space-time order captures a feeling of infinity and immutability. Such a joint search for sense in theatre competes with the fixed memorial culture, which wants to present stability as an unchangeable factor for everyday life as obligatory; a demand that is strived for in everyday life, but rarely fulfilled.
The theatre, which has its origins in magic, has its own unfixed foundation of meaning. It is an open project, a search for sense. If one accepts the festival from the spectator’s point of view, one agrees with sacred space-time. Tompa’s choice of pieces is based on this common search for meaning under the sign of a shared time and a shared space when he writes in his address in the festival catalogue: With the various types of war, it is important to speak of a theatre of fright. The terrible trauma caused by violence would call for an individual and collective “exorcism”. The fixed point of the search for meaning lies in the similarity between war and theatre, for they are the reciprocal actions of two opposing forces.
Scrape That Fiddle More Darkly
The selection of the various directorial manuscripts from different theatre families in Europe stands for the side of change, self-assessment and collective responsibility. Absorbing a few festival days demands a higher level of attention from visitors from outside and the admission that they can’t see everything. The simultaneous presence of English, French, Romanian and Hungarian, the languages of the guest performances, such as German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian and Serbian, will also be added. There is a closely timed main programme in the main hall and in the studio. There is a supporting programme in the Tiff House, in the Tranzit House, in the Paintbrush Factory and in the Quadro Gallery. There are exhibitions and concerts. And for the first time there was a technical interference called Digital Hermits. This conference at the Tranzit House tried to explore the use of digital technologies and their impact on the coexistence of people in our world. A contribution on war that takes into account the consequences of the Cold War, when the Internet was born, to ensure communication between entities after a nuclear fallout. The focus was on user interfaces – also known as new media – and their own spaces of experience in and with time and space. It was seen as problematic that the dialogue between the generations leads to a dichotomy between the group of people who live completely without digital technologies and the group who no longer want to shape life without them. The connection of passions to the filter bubbles and echo chambers of the digital world unfortunately failed to materialize.
One question that has always been virulent for the two-thousand-year history of theatre is: How do people behave in war? – In a collapse crisis, laughter and crying not only alternate, they can also occur simultaneously. One person’s suffering is the other’s only short joy until the perspectives change and the persecutor becomes the persecuted. Milo Raus shows with his work Compassion. The history of the machine gun an impressice teichoscopy, to which the dramatic elements of the Greek tragedy are reduced. In it, this change of perspective is performed in a loop. The actress Ursina Lardi from the ensemble of the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin plays herself as a young development aid worker in Rwanda, where she witnessed the Hutu genocide of the Tutsi. Later she finds out that the person she helped became the perpetrator. The Belgian actress Consolate Sipérus also plays herself. As a baby, she was adopted by a Belgian couple. More than the country of origin, Rwanda, and the catalogue with the baby faces that can be chosen for adoption are not known to her. From the viewer’s point of view, this enormous amount of social facts is hardly bearable. And Lardi tells of the theatres of war with impressive power of speech and physical presence, as if she has just observed this quantity of irrational actions.
By représentation, Hubert means exactly this sacred time level. Just as in the auditorium on my tablet I work on an over one-hundred-year-old text in order to pursue questions of understanding about what is happening on stage, Lardi and Sipérus create a public sphere. Not just a public speech act, that is, one that can be seen by everyone, is performed here, at the same time an understanding of the event opens up for other group members who are not directly involved in the actual action. Now and here we take an insight into the events that took place on another continent in 1994. This is the quality of the festival, with which the riddle of the name, Interferences, is solved: it is the coincidence of all time levels in the concept of humanity. The model upheld in Europe since the Renaissance breaks itself in the face of the horrors of precisely this persistent humanity, no matter what skin colour, language, culture or religion it claims to be right and good for itself. The Greek drama models serve this quality.
Anna Badora of the Volkstheater Wien (Vienna Volkstheater) has created a link between antique representational drama and post-dramatic attempts to cope with the European present in Renaissance style. She stages an Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides in the format of the Golden Ratio, in which Iphigenia is actually sacrificed at the end of the first part, with which the tragedy of Euripides, which for us has only been handed down as a fragment, ends. The war really begins with Badora. While the battle rages, we spectators go to the toilet or to the fresh air. From the two thousand years in the past we fall in the second part into the Syrian present. Here, Stefano Massini’s text Occident Express serves as the basis for a play for the same actors who are now making their way to Europe as civil society from the war zones in Iraq and Syria.
It is said that waves of crisis lead to a learning process. Gabor Tompa shows in his in-house production of William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice that limits are inherent in this learning process. The fact that both actors, Gábor Viola and Zsolt Bogdán, can play both the role of Antonio and that of Shylock as respective double casts bears witness to the deep empathy for the characters that is necessary to represent sacrificial rituals. Antonio, whose sadness at the beginning may not be revealed to the audience until the end of the piece – at the beginning it is not business or love that causes his suffering – it is the quotations of the milieus and their internal morals made by Tompa in his soundscape installation, who let Antonio be as obviously sad as the mirror-inverted despair of Shylock, whose sacrifice in the end – analogous to Iphigenia’s sacrifice – is needed to restore that very internal morality after the group has gone through a common crisis. Antonio, like his alter ego Agamemnon (father of Iphigenia and at the same time commander who sacrifices his daughter), represents in this sense the permanent depression of a human being who knows that it always seeks the good, but at the same time always creates the bad.
Fatherland
The “exorcism” of the festival, which was the goal, took on a physically concrete form collectively and practically with the staging Vaterland in the choreography of Csaba Horváth and the stage design of Csaba Antal. The Forte Company presents text elements from Thomas Bernhard’s The Italians in a rhythmic and sporty sequence of scenes that gesturally play the timbres of Bernhard’s model. Bernhard, who in his will still wanted to ensure that no text, neither novel nor stage text, narrative or poem, would ever appear in Austria, was at war with the eccentric way of his fellow countrymen dealing with National Socialist traditions. The staging succeeds in allowing Bernhard to be regarded as the master of plastic surgery of collective passions that are unquestioned in memorial culture or devotional objects. Whether a geographical space is assigned a patrilineal or matrilineal original character is actually uninteresting.
In this way, the festival creates a concrete link to the themes of past years. Whereas in 2014, for example, it was still necessary to report on the stories of the body, this year the theme of war captures the passions in a way that suggests new approaches to the content of security policy measures, which are often difficult to understand in everyday life. The experiment on the formal side, such as Milo Rau’s, of exclusively exhibiting teichoscopy, seems all too minimalistic. We do not know whether the actress Ursina Lardi was really in Rwanda and whether Consolate Sipérius was really adopted. Here documentary theatre finds its limits in fictionality and has to compete with the classics, the timelessly valid dramas since antiquity. Mere indignation could perhaps have been problematized in connection with the digital filter bubbles and their echo chambers. But then the acting characters, whose limitations and weaknesses in Euripides or Shakespeare were excellently designed and presented in their plot constraints and intentions, would also have had to have been worked out more precisely in Milo Rau’s work. There are no spaces free of experience, even if the widespread contemporary encapsulation à la New Media and the generation conflicts associated with it might suggest it.
When a ship is rescued, the SOS emergency call is made beforehand and the bodies are rescued. The Interferences International Theatre Festival reminds us that the purpose of the SOS emergency call is to save souls. It demands their participation, a shared attention. An encapsulation in technical terms or as usual in analogue memorial culture, on the other hand, leads to isolation with fixed values of collective internal morals and their obligatory victims. By rejecting such tendencies of isolation, the theatre festival leads the search for meaning and sense in Cluj-Napoca.
Contrary to what the sculpture of the founding myth of the city of Rome and its staged history of origin suggests for Cluj-Napoca, the theatre has understood the origo principle. Florence Dupont can read about this punch line on the “monument” to Romulus and Remus: Rome – city without origin. The punchline is: there is no origin. There is only one diversity in mutual respect and recognition. This is what the origo principle stands for. Interferences is also the name for an unfinished search for sense. Theatre is and remains an open project, both in terms of content and form.
Published on 21 January 2019 (Article originally written in German)
“Digital Hermits”. Quite an oxymoron. Because, nowadays, no one could possibly consider him/herself a “hermit” within the digital realm. We are always tracked, chased, captured by complex calculation systems aimed to define us on the basis of what we like, what we look for, what we would desire to be, instead of what we actually are.
Digitisation I: Digital Hermits was the title of a very dense and compelling conference, the first of four: organized in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) in the frame of Digital Natives, a cooperation project between five of the UTE’s member theatres—Volkstheater Wien, Comédie de Reims, Hungarian Theatre of Cluj, Schauspiel Köln and National Theatre of Northern Greece.
Concord Floral by Jordan Tannahill (which premiered at Schauspiel Köln on 16 November 2018) is “a play about teenage identity and interactions, the power of perception and technology.” Each of the five theatres involved is going to stage a production or use the themes of the play as the basis for workshops with amateur teenage actors. A series of “digital experiments” will be the outcome of such collaboration and three other conferences will take place throughout the course of the project.
During the Interferences Festival 2018, produced by the Hungarian National Theatre in Cluj, three speakers were invited to share their thoughts about being part of this “new” digital turmoil: Mária Bernschütz, Tamás Trunk and Valér Veres. Three very different contributions, able to draw a multi-coloured picture of the numerous ways to approach digital cultures.
We all know our birthday, there’s no doubt about it. And yet, how sure are we about our role in the digital society? How closely are we watching the technological evolution, how aware are we about our influence in establishing a shared model of “living in the digital era”?
Mária Bernschütz presented an executive summary of which are the generations involved in the digitization process. Based on the so-called ‘generational theory’—initiated by two American historians, William Strauss and Neil Howe—Bernschütz’s speech tried to inscribe our “agency” in five categories, through which we should be able to locate our presence in the development of digital culture.
Ms. Bernschütz is Assistant Professor at the Department of Management and Business Economics (Budapest University of Technology and Economic), she teaches marketing media and research methodology. Her vivid contribution was aimed to show how technology influences individuals in their everyday lives. Feeling sorry for a rather rough generalization, Mária Bernschütz presents a sort of rationalistic scheme, that reveals how technological development could be used as a barometer for measuring generational gaps, according to age range.
“Do you know which generation you belong to?”, that’s the basic question of this inquiry, which is based on an in-depth qualitative research conducted on Hungarian society.
According to the results, the “Veterans” were born before 1946; the “baby boomers” were born after the Second World War and are the most involved in the reconstruction of the world after that disastrous event; they are evaluated as “the most technophobic” group. Generation X—between 1965 and 1979—is considered as the one of the “digital immigrants”: they came in touch with technology as adults. Generation Y—between 1980 and 1995—gathers people who were attending secondary school or were just enrolled in university when they have learned about “new media”; they are now quite used to smartphones and tablets. Members of the Generation Z were born between 1996 and 2000: they don’t even use pens or pencils anymore, Internet has been a part of their everyday lives from the very beginning. The latest one is the Alpha Generation—including children born after 2010—who is already in charge of teaching their parents how to deal with technology.
Ms. Bernschütz talks about “tasks” and “advantages”, which seem to be two fundamental categories to distinguish between our personal and private attitudes to technology and our willingness to be part of it.
Beyond any possible kind of generalization, the reality looks much more complicated: we are all addressed by a sort of ‘collective call’: we all hold a special responsibility in translating our own cultural values into comprehensive statements, devised and conveyed through technological tools. A brilliant example is suggested by the way the performing arts are communicated, today, in the frame of the so-called ‘information society’. On the one hand, the good health of the theatrical system could be evaluated through its capacity in engaging audiences and attracting fresh theatregoers; on the other hand, it would be really hard to detach the virtual communities from the physical ones, that, however, prove to be vivid and tenacious. They underline the very essence of theatricality, the fact that artists and spectators share the same space during the same time.
Mária Bernschütz’s speech, even though deriving from a very specific research sample, was crucial in gaining an impartial view of how different generations of ‘users’ currently deal with the digital environment; and yet, everyone in the room was asked to develop personal insights, trying and locate themselves in this or that generation, becoming part of a sort of ‘common sense’ of participation.
If Generation X is labeled as “very enthusiastic”, responsible for initiating “the revolution” and refusing “strict rules within their working space”, the members of Generation Y “don’t respect the leader’s judgmental language” and are not always able to “find what they are looking for”, locate their own values, establish their connections with other colleagues and “understand how one could actually be ‘disconnected’”. They want trust, and, in this quest, they experience a sort of anxiety. The members of Generation Z are already much more “money-oriented”, because they were “born after the global crisis”. And, by now, they only want to succeed.
It’s not very easy to detect which generation we belong to, until a young man, an honest citizen of the ‘Z-realm’, takes the stage.
As he grabs the microphone, Tamás Trunk definitely looks like the ‘minister’ of Generation Z. He speaks a very good English, with a clear and smart American accent; he handles a remote control to show us a brief yet effective gallery of slides on the wide screen at the rear of the stage; which he doesn’t even look at, but he masters beautifully.
His tone is colloquial, fast, high-pitched, rhythmic and captivating. Tamás Trunk is passionate with sneakers and youngsters’ culture, he’s a ‘professional YouTuber.’ As a matter of fact, he’s an ‘influencer’, and he looks like one, although he doesn’t wear sneakers this particular day, but a fashionable and elegant outfit, laced shoes under a big smile on his face.
He refers to the “grown-ups”, as if he wanted to mark a distance; he himself grew up “globally and digitally”, his generation was the first to be “completely connected”. The easiest impression, he reckons, is that Generation Z can “consume, drink, and eat the same food and beverages and use the same products all over the world.”
Is this what being connected means? Are we actually all the same? Do we really look alike?
“No, this doesn’t mean that we are all the same”, says Trunk. “We are probably the most diverse generation ever. And, yeah, we actually love to show that.”
In the map pictured by Tamás Trunk, the digital world is, in a first place, an opportunity to connect with each other. But the most evident feature is that this connection is guaranteed by the choice of ‘to be or not to be’ affiliated with this or that brand.
If the pioneers of media and Internet studies would draw a line between online and offline world, we all saw those borders being rapidly eroded. The advent of social media, integrated with mobile communication, brought the online realm straight to our palms, and we became more and more dependent on the interface, in order to interact with our daily reality.
Immediacy embraced hypermediacy and the combination of the two gradually generated new layers of reality: hardware and software played together in offering the users a new form of virtual
experience which can no longer be distinguished. As Bolter and Grusin wrote in their seminal essay Remediation, today, “digital hypermedia seek the real by multiplying mediation so as to create a feeling of fullness, a satiety of experience, which can be taken as reality.”
In Trunk’s talk, that reality seems to be based on the opportunity of being part of a network. And yet, it’s surprising how, in his vision, such network is essentially shaped on market logic, based on buying and selling, advertising and branding. “Brand” is, in fact, one of the most frequently used words in the young man’s speech.
One of the slides shows a photo of a group of ‘hippies’ from the Seventies. To the speaker, this is a symbol of revolution, to which he compares a contemporary attitude: “Sometimes I hear that my generation doesn’t want to rebel anymore, that we all just want to be the same, and go with the flow. The reality is that, in this digital world, we don’t rebel against the same things, nor using the same symbols, such as alcohol or drugs.” Brands and fashion seem to offer a new way of provoking social attention and promoting “equality and equal treatment for all of us.”
Trunk’s enthusiasm is contagious, and yet it seems to be irresistibly kneeling to the altar of the Market, understanding Internet and the social media as a way to establish a sort of network of consumers. “Brands want all of us to buy their products and we actually like these companies.” These symbols of “a huge consumer’s world” apparently grant a sense of belonging to the younger generations. “Together,” says Trunk, “we can work a lot and create amazing movements and projects that, we feel, are actually ours.”
Thus, these “digital natives” need certain kinds of “movements” and “brands”, to compose “an amazing community”, able to activate a wide “secondary market”, where very young people can start their own business and, reselling items for “way bigger prizes”, make a lot of money. We are suddenly talking about millions of dollars.
Many of these youngsters don’t connect with each other in real life, and yet, in Trunk’s opinion, “online world is an extension of the real world.”
For the question time, moderated by Gergő Mostis from Kreatív Kolozsvár, also the sociologist Valér Veres is invited to the table. It’s the right moment to reconnect the accurate ‘generational study’ conducted by Mária Bernschütz with Tamás Trunk’s passionate storytelling, that some ways presented a case history of his own generation.
In his book The Virtual Communities (1993), Howard Rheingold thinks of cyberspace “as a social petri dish, the Net as the agar medium, and virtual communities, in all their diversity, as the colonies of microorganisms that grow in petri dishes.”
Rheingold’s metaphorical description of cyberspace is proven to be true when one looks at the technological and rhetorical architecture of social networks. Founded as these are on an individual selection of data to be read and written, they represent very complex instruments in charge of managing a large amount of “information as social and cultural objects”. And yet, the development of citizen journalism, net-art and online activism has demonstrated how strong and effective such kind of connections between users can be.
Mária Bernschütz thoroughly summarized how the “generation gap” is still present, and yet, technological development is a process that has no memory and tends to erase the past. In a couple of decades, the so-called “world” (because also this term should be confronted with a still huge ‘digital divide’) is going to be populated by different generations that will have the exact same relation to technology.
Language, so diverse in its references from speaker to speaker, set the tone for a fugitive imagery. In a digitised world, made of weak ties, language and modes of interaction should be considered as a mind-expanding technology; digital media must then be seen as a physical support for the export of language. In the words of Derrick DeKerckhove, in a system of interconnected and composite competences, “the more the discourse gets decentralized, the deeper is the change in the conventional definitions and relations.”
And this could be a good starting point to compose a new view of the “world”. A world defined by connection and relation, in which, really, no one could possibly consider him/herself a “hermit”.
When juxtaposed with the theatre systems of Eastern European countries at the UTE Conference on Theatre Structures in Belgrade, Austria’s situation seems nothing short of luxurious. In every way. Andrea Ruis of the Arts and Culture Division of the Federal Chancellery of Austria and Anna Badora, artistic director of the Volkstheater in Vienna, gave in-depth talks that powerfully demonstrated the significance and prosperity of theatre in Austria.
6.09 million tickets were sold in more than 15,000 performances in the 2014/2015 season. With just over eight and a half million inhabitants, this is categorical evidence of Austria’s obsession with theatre. The great theatres of Vienna sold more than 3.8 million tickets, with a population of just 1.8 million inhabitants. In 2016, the Republic of Austria gave an impressive 200 million euros in funding to its theatres. With such a high level of the Austrian “theatrical obsession,” it’s no wonder the federal government passed legislation (Kunstförderungsgesetz) in 1988, making it mandatory to perpetually fund the arts.
It’s no surprise that Austria incorporates all forms of theatres in their national repertoire; everything from the internationally renowned National Theatre to countless cabarets, intimate cellar theatres along with an array of independent artist performances occurring on professional or impromptu stages. With regards to the large theatre institutions, there are state, regional, municipal and private theatres; which together employ more than 5,000 actors, directors and administrative staff that work almost year-round to put on acclaimed works. The terms for these different theatrical institutions have developed historically, and allude to the financial structure behind them.
State theatres evolved from the former Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Royal Court Theatres (k.u.k. Hoftheater). Some of the most recognized names in this imperial branch of theatre include the world-renowned Wiener Staatsoper, the Volksoper, and the Burgtheater, which is the second oldest straight theatre in Europe. In 1999, the Austrian parliament passed the Federal Theatres Organisation Act (Bundestheaterorganisationsgesetz), which required state theatres to be removed from the federal administration. Thus resulting in the creation of the Bundestheater-Holding company (Federal Theatres Holding).
The Bundestheater-Holding group is owned by the Republic of Austria. Its purpose is to facilitate the contact between its four subsidiaries and political players in the cultural field, the business community and the public. The holding company is furthermore responsible for strategic management and operations of its subsidiaries. This includes everything from financial and legal support to contract handling and upkeep of the historical theatre buildings. In addition to three independent theatres (Wiener Staatsoper, Volksoper, Burgtheater; all of them are in Vienna), the Bundestheater Holding also incorporates an association called “ART FOR ART,” which provides creative shops and ticketing, building management and IT services. With a budget of 246.2 Million euros and 2,400 employees, the Bundestheater-Holding is the largest theatre corporation in the world. Its three member theatres attract an impressive 1.3 million spectators every year. Lending such comprehensive support in business management to its subsidiaries, the Bundestheater-Holding allows its theatres to focus on the core of their work: creating high-quality theatre productions.
The second category of theatres includes regional and municipal theatres, which are the main stages in the federal states and its cities, respectively. Federal states also have holding companies, such as the Vereinigte Bühnen in Vienna (Vienna is not only the capital but a federal state of its own), which is composed of the Theater an der Wien, the Ronacher and the Raimund Theater. These three theatres primarily offer different forms of musical theatre in its three venues of 1070, 1040, and 1255 seats. With a combined 644 performances each year, the Vereinigte Bühnen reaches a sizeable audience of musical lovers. In the Styrian province, which is home to Austria’s second largest city, Graz, the Theater Holding Steiermark unites the opera house (including the ballet), the municipal theatre and the children’s theatre and is financed at 50% by the state and at 50% by the city.
Eight out of the nine federal states have a regional or municipal theatre, most of which are former court theaters and date back to the 18th and 19th century. (Court theatres used to be funded and managed by the court, as opposed to the people’s theatres, which were privately funded and publicly accessible). More often than not they are so-called “multi-branch” theatres, which usually comprise opera, drama, ballet and children’s theatre. They are primarily financed by the federal state and the municipality. These theatres are part of the Society of Theatres of the Austrian Federal States and Municipalities. Its purpose is to protect the interests of its members, as well as to propose how to divide federal government funding of 18.7 million euros over the course of five years. Its members, which include the Salzburger Landestheater, the Oper Graz, the Tiroler Landestheater and the Stadttheater Klagenfurt, offer more than 3,000 performances a year to over one million spectators. Altogether, these theatres receive collective subsidies of 136 million euros.
In the 19th century, municipal theatres were flourishing and inspired the architects Fellner & Helmer to specialise in representative buildings for municipal theatres, which they erected in various cities across Central and Eastern Europe. In Austria alone, they designed the opera house in Graz, the Landestheater Salzburg, the Stadttheater Baden bei Wien, the Stadttheater Klagenfurt, the Akadmietheater (part of the Burgtheater), the Konzerthaus, the Ronacher, and the Volkstheater in Vienna. With countless enthusiastic audience members flocked in front of these architectural landmarks each night, municipal theatres prove to be the central theatrical institutions in Austria’s state capitals to this day.
In a third category, there are the so-called private theatres, such as the Volkstheater, the Theater in der Josefstadt and the Theater der Jugend. They collectively show more than 1,500 performances a year for more than 600,000 spectators. Broadly speaking, the Volkstheater offers more innovative approaches to critical spectators, while the Theater in der Josefstadt caters to a more conservative and traditional audience. Meanwhile, the Theater der Jugend shows ambitious literature for young people.
The private theatres were originally founded by benefactors as an antithesis to the court theatre. However, today their money no longer comes from benefactors but from the municipality and the federal government (approximately 60% and 40%, respectively), which effectively renders the term ‘private theatre’ obsolete in Austria. From a legal perspective, private theatres have been transformed from private corporate entities into foundations, associations, or limited liability companies.
Since, the majority of funding for these theatres comes from the federal government and the municipality, the artistic directors are nominated by the culture secretary (as of 18 December 2017 it’s Gernot Blümel) and the city councillor for cultural affairs (currently Andreas Mailath-Pokorny). One of the major benefits of having these private theatres registered as limited liability companies is that legally the artistic and managing directors are entitled to make independent decisions. That means they can manage their budget completely freely; they can autonomously hire and fire their staff; and they have complete control over their programme. As Anna Badora, Artistic Director of the Volkstheater in Vienna stated, “I may be as bold as to argue that this is the best system for theatres in the world.” Indeed, the Volkstheater’s strong financial position coupled with vast managerial and artistic independence is a privilege most theatres in the world would envy her for.
However, the seemingly ideal Austrian theatre system comes with understated flaws. Subsidies for theatre institutions remain the same every year, while fixed costs, such as rent, electricity or fees and salaries increase every year. Each theatre has to cover this gap in costs with money from their own pocket, usually through ticket sales. However, most of them already reach a high percentage of seats sold. Theatres therefore have to come up with new ways of generating money—which can easily become a distraction from fulfilling their original purpose.
Furthermore, the competition amongst theatres is big, especially in the capital, and relations amongst each other as well as with political stake holders need to be carefully handled. Subtle ambiguity and scheming happen of course, like anywhere else, inhibiting the productivity of theatre managers.
From an employee perspective, theatre contracts, although decent by international standards, are still not perfect. Actors, especially young ones, have little protection, much less so than stagehands, for example. It is customary that a change in directorship goes hand in hand with an exchange of the permanent acting company, thus customarily leaving actors, especially newcomers, without a job whenever a new artistic director takes over. Nonetheless, even young actors have a privileged situation in Austria in comparison to a lot of the countries present at the conference in Belgrade, where a permanent contract for an actor is something you can only dream of.
Back to Austria’s theatres, though. Vienna is, of course, the centre of the country’s diverse and compact theatre landscape. The capital’s culture budget amounts to 84 million euros, which far exceeds the rest of the federal states. Its main three theatres alone attract more than 1.3 million people a year. Vienna has more than 90 theatres, and an estimated 500 independent groups. It is home to the most prestigious theatres of the country and has multiple theatres that are considered as highly significant.
Often simply referred to as “Die Burg” (the fortress), the Burgtheater is a unique cultural phenomenon. Under the reign of Josef II, the theatre world in Vienna flourished, and he declared the Burgtheater “the German National Theatre”. Instead of opera and ballet, drama was now put into the limelight, with a particular emphasis on European literature. Austria’s National Theatre is the largest and one of the most prestigious theatres in the German theatre realm: the Burgtheater employs approximately 550 people, 74 of which are permanent actors. Additionally it regularly hires 38 guest actors. For comparative purposes, Germany’s largest theatre—the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg—has 47 permanent actors, and approximately half the Burgtheater’s budget.
Based on the sheer volume of its permanent actors and budget, the Burgtheater has the largest company and is the most well-funded theatre in the world. Specifically, this goliath received more than 46 million euros in public funding during the 2015 season. It attracts the highest number of spectators in continental Europe with an average of 850 performances a year on four different stages (one of these stages is located in a different theatre building altogether). After the Comédie Française, it is the second oldest straight theatre in Europe, and the largest German speaking one. Currently, Karin Bergmann is the artistic director of the Burgtheater, and will be followed by Martin Kušej in 2019.
Stefan Bachmann, Andrea Breth, Roland Schimmelpfennig and Michael Thalheimer are just a few of the renowned directors to work at the Burgtheater in the past. Paula Wessely, Attila Hörbiger, Josef Meinrad and Paul Hörbiger were once some of the most famous names to perform at the Burgtheater. Today, Kirsten Dene, Maria Happel, Klaus Maria Brandauer, or Peter Simonischek must be mentioned when talking about the prominent cast members of the “Burg”. The highest honour for an actor in the Austrian theatre world is to be called a “Burgschauspieler,” which solely connotes that you are a permanent actor at the Burgtheater. In fact, Thomas Bernhard dedicated one of his most famous novels, “Woodcutters”, to the high social status of the “Burgschauspieler.”
Demand to see the creme de la creme of Austrian theatre live on stage is extremely high, and there’s usually a long line meandering from the ticket booth inside all the way to the front of the building. While the Burgtheater was once only frequented by the aristocracy, today it is accessible to anyone, with a standing ticket as cheap as €3,50.
Historically, the Volkstheater was founded with the mission of being the exact opposite of the Burgtheater. Its name says it all: “People’s Theatre.” Its purpose, as Mrs. Badora pointed out during the UTE conference in Belgrade, “is to bring theatre to the people on its main stage as well as on its second stage and its 19 theatres in the districts.” The Volkstheater includes both entertainment in its repertory but also, and most importantly, innovative theatre that is critical of socio-political developments.
Complementing the two biggest straight theatres in Vienna, there are other important institutions that also need to be briefly considered. These theatres offer different content and aesthetics than the Burgtheater or the Volkstheater, and partially cater to a different audience altogether. The Theater in der Josefstadt, which opened in 1788, is the oldest theatre in Vienna to continuously have been in use since its founding. Its focus, as suggested earlier, is on classical Austrian theatre, including contemporary literature and light comedy. Since 2006, Herbert Föttinger has been the theatre’s artistic director.
The Theater der Jugend, with Thomas Birkmeir as its artistic director, has two stages, the Theater im Zentrum and the Renaissancetheater. It mainly produces plays for children and adolescents, although the theatre has also had the responsibility of generating audiences for other theatres.
Next to theatres that have a greater focus on music theatre (Theater an der Wien, Ronacher, Raimundtheater), there are numerous other theatres in Vienna, such as the Schauspielhaus Wien and the Rabenhof Theater, to only name two famous ones. Smaller stages are also very frequented by Austrian theatre goers. One of the most highly respected and popular types is the socio-politically charged cabaret genre. The most renowned stage is the Kabarett Simpl, the only cabaret that dates back to the 19th century that is still open today.
The diversity of Austria’s theatrical institutions delineated here demonstrates the high demand of Austria’s adept theatre audience that enjoys this art form in all its shapes and sizes. Accordingly, Austrians also highly value their independent theatre scene. Since the 1990s, the scene has boomed tremendously, especially due to the high influx of students of theatre who opt to stay in Austria after graduation. Even though Austria’s most prestigious drama school, the Reinhardt Seminar, only accepts 3-12 students a year, there are still more than 50 drama and music schools which attract a high number of students from abroad. The (former) students’ sundry backgrounds, and their offbeat and experimental approaches, make the independent scene particularly attractive to the versed spectator.
Federal and municipal funding for the independent scene occurs in three ways: for a year-long programme, a specific project, or for production exchanges or tours abroad. An external advisory committee is made up of individuals who are active in the arts. The committee members’ primary responsibility is to select viable applicants from the countless proposals that come in every year. This committee studies all incoming applications based on a series of rigid criteria (quality, target audience, innovation, new forms of theatrical creation, realistic budgeting, etc.), reaching an exclusive selection of productions and projects that promise the highest artistic quality and greatest sustainability. In 2016, these projects were funded with approximately 1.5 million euros. Roughly 400,000 euros were used for fourteen one-year long projects and a little over one million euros was awarded to 120 troupes. Additionally, the city of Vienna funded the independent scene with four million euros.
Vienna offers “co-production locations” to the independent scene, which are companies that don’t produce themselves but offer their premises to independent artists. The most famous of these are the Tanzquartier, the brut, and the Dschungel Wien (the latter being for children’s theatre). While rehearsals often last up to six weeks, “productions frequently aren’t performed more than two or three times”, Ms. Ruis lamented at the conference in Belgrade. This is why the federal government encourages independent artists to take their shows abroad, as tours can be granted additional funding.
Many independent artists are members of the IGFT, the League of Independent Artists, which was founded in 1989. It’s a network of more than 1,600 independent theatre and dance artists that lobbies for the independent scene. The IGFT covers cultural politics, consulting, public relations, infrastructure, networking, and controlling of funding and social security allowances, as well as general services to independent theatre makers (taxes, dues, etc.) The league receives funding of 300,000 euros from the federal government.
For theatre institutions, funding is tied to the principle of subsidiarity. That is to say that a theatre must receive subsidies from the municipality and the state in order to receive funding from the federal government. This way of financing is firmly established in the federal constitution, and aims at decentralizing accountability and forwarding it to those closest to the subsidized institution. Therefore, the main responsibility when it comes to theatres lies with the state and/or the city, and only to a lesser extent with the federal government; thus granting more freedom to the local institutions themselves. The subsidies for state theatres, regional and municipal theatres, the Vereinigte Bühnen Wien and the Viennese private theatres amounted to around 353 million euros in the 2014/2015 season.
To receive federal funding, theatres are held accountable for their cultural responsibility. Tending to classics of the German language and of international theatre as well as fostering contemporary and innovative art are amongst their core responsibilities. Furthermore, the Federal Theatres Organisation Act states that theatres should embrace artistically risque productions; should transmit art and theatre to the young generation; should enable a vast variety of people to have access to theatre; should fight for international collaboration; should be active year-round; and should offer a repertoire based on having a permanent company of actors.
This funding system does go a long way, as Austria proves to have a high number of new openings each season: the Burgtheater alone started the season with a programmed 21 premieres on top of its regular repertoire, the Volkstheater will have 18 opening nights, the Schauspielhaus Graz 22, the Stadttheater Klagenfurt 10 and the youth theatre of Graz, Next Liberty, has 15 scheduled. This productive output is definitely only possible thanks to the theatres’ high and effective public funding.
Each year, the theatres’ efforts are rewarded when their artistic contributions and creative minds are nominated for a “Nestroy”—the Austrian theatre prize. Inspired by the Parisian theatre award “Molière”, the “Nestroy” aims at highlighting Austria’s artistic ability by honouring the most creative and innovative actors, directors and playwrights as well as in-house productions by festivals.
Festival season is what makes the culture-loving Austrian survive the summer, when theatres are generally on a break. That’s why the majority of festivals take place in the spring and summer. With Austria being a country known for its rich musical tradition as well, a lot of these festivals combine the disciplines of music and theatre, such as the world-renowned Salzburger Festspiele.
Salzburg almost triples its population during the six weeks of its festival, which takes place every year in July and August. More than 250,000 people flock to the city to see the legendary festival’s 200 events. Max Reinhardt and Hugo von Hofmannsthal are the forefathers of what is today considered one of the world’s most relevant festivals for music and contemporary art. At its foundation in 1920, Reinhardt and Hofmannsthal envisioned a festival that would contrast the renowned Bayreuth festival by not only celebrating one single artist, but a myriad of artists from opera, orchestra music and drama. Ever since the very first edition of the Salzburger Festspiele, the festival has opened with its flagship production: Hofmannsthal’s “Everyman”. Today, the festival’s artistic direction is in the hands of Markus Hinterhäuser.
Since 1946, the Bregenzer Festspiele, artistically directed by Elisabeth Sobotka, has offered a vast variety of productions in five venues, drawing in roughly 200,000 people every year in July and August. It is most famous for its floating stage on Lake Constance, where a larger-than-life set that usually incorporates the lake in one way or another is the backdrop for a massive operatic undertaking. Drama performances and concerts are held in nearby venues.
Another highlight of the festival season is the Wiener Festwochen festival, which attracts 180,000 people with a programme of drama, opera and dance during the course of five weeks in May and June. Tomas Zierhofer-Kin, artistic director of the festival, and his team manage around 175 performances and 70 concerts each year.
Innovation is the first concept that comes to mind when thinking of the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, whose artistic direction is in the hands of Gerfried Stocker. The festival is at the interface between art, technology and society. It is one of the world’s most important media art festivals that attracts around 35,000 visitors each year.
The steirischer herbst is another internationally acclaimed festival for contemporary art. Founded in 1968, the festival brings together all forms of art, from theatre to visual arts, film, literature, dance, music, architecture, performance and new media. The programme of the steirischer herbst exclusively shows original works, world premieres and commissioned works. Since 2006, Veronica Kaup-Hasler has managed this renowned festival, but will pass the baton to Ekaterina Degot next year.
Other relevant but smaller festivals include La Strada (street art festival in Graz), ImPuls Tanz (Vienna’s prestigious dance festival), the Festspiele Reichenau, Sommerszene Salzburg, SCHÄXPIR and spleen*graz (the international theatre festivals for children and youth theatre in Linz and Graz). The list of festivals goes on and on. What would otherwise be a theatrical dry spell in the summer turns into a sea of artistic events to quench Austrians’ thirst for theatre.
Since the Baroque age, and in particular since the era of Joseph II, theatre has been a central cultural institution in Austria. But it’s the combination of tremendous respect for this art form as well as a happy financial position that allows for the continued prosperity of Austria’s creatively (and otherwise) rich theatre landscape—a privileged situation that everybody at the Conference on Theatre Structures seemed to long for. That became blatantly obvious when Alexandru Darie of the Bulandra Theatre in Romania asked, “Can we all move to Austria?”
Published on 5 January 2018 (Article originally written in English)
The bassline of the day remains unsaid: United in diversity. Artistic directors of UTE theatres came all the way from Athens, Bucharest, Luxembourg, Moscow, Sofia and Vienna to the Yugoslav Drama Theatre, Belgrade, on 17 September 2017. After a first conference in Milan last year, the focus of this exchange on different theatre structures was on Eastern and South Eastern Europe. For the first time, Boris Yukhananov from the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre in Moscow also attended. Meeting the newest member of the UTE.
The dialogue about theatre structures, about its specific problems in Eastern and South Eastern Europe, took place in a location which, until not too long ago, was a European centre of the Movement of the non-aligned states. At this spatiotemporal crossroads, the collision of two governance models carried weight, which has unfolded in the past 28 years in the course of the eastward expansion of the European Union. Inês Nadais writes in this online magazine about the consequences of this development by focusing on the contributions on the diverging financial settings of theatres in Europe. We could also add Naomi Klein’s popular description of this clash in her book about the shock doctrine, and ask an additional question which many participants in the discussion in Serbia probably were wondering about:And to add a question that probably crossed most people’s minds at the conference: Who even knows the content of the Eastern partnership programmes? Who knows about the subjects of association agreements?
The free space of physical encounter
Once again it became evident how important mobility is for artistic exchange. The personal encounter of theatre makers on this and the other side of the stage does not halt whatever the “bodiless” exchange of ideas bottles up worldwide in the digital age in the form of a collection of emotions on social media or the comment columns in the online publications of small and large media houses. Governments have been soaring ever more frequently to curb these accumulations in a morally impeccable way through legislative packages against “hate speech” and “fake news”. Upon physically entering the conference hall, I have to think about Kadett Pirx who has served as the prime example of such conflicts of the body with the “virtual reality” in so many of the Polish writer Stanisław Lem’s literary parodies. A “reality” for which in 1963 Lem already coined the term “phantomisation” in his book Summa Technologiae. It’s fascinating that the ideas of science fiction writers are put into reality in the Silicon Valley—however, without taking the ethical concerns into account. Worked into the cybernetics and convinced of the game theory, these oft-celebrated innovators of the “inventors” of the digital era frequently remain far behind the revelations which Lem centrally formulated in Summa: “The ‘change’ from one personality to another is possible neither in a reversible nor in an irreversible process, because between such metamorphoses, there is a period of psychological destruction which is equal to the termination of the individual existence.”
Will legal packages be able to counter the protest against the preservation of the individual existence? — Admittedly, Lem’s reflections accompany me in the course of the conference like a stream of consciousness. But once awakened, they stay for the whole day. From the perspective of the theatre as a medium, there is an entirely different quality of the “social medium” in relation to Silicon Valley. The interpersonal sphere shaped by metamorphoses is a theatre maker’s daily routine. Metamorphoses happen all the time on this and the other side of the edge of the stage, always as a physical event, though. We could not imagine a theatre event without them. “Phantasm” alludes to the knowledge about the body as a place for ghosts. Through the passions of the soul they famously carve their expression. Love, hate and desire are their main “tools”. While game theory only knows desire, and forgets about love and hate, theatre needs a complete tool box in order to freely embark upon new endeavours.
The unrigged ghosts of the Stanislavsky method
When theatre makers meet to discuss the conditions of their work, the ghosts of the past are also in the ranks of the audience. The physical presence and with it the internalized ways of acting of culturally different geographical realms thus have limited space for individual expression. Their uninvited attendance can rather be compared to a bassline that all participants have tacitly gotten themselves into, and befittingly attempts to describe the motto of the European Union with the words United in diversity. The influence of the Stalinist Papal State had a standardising popularity with the Stanislavsky method in the theatre systems of the Eastern and South Eastern European countries. Very different from the intentions of one of the founders of the Moscow Art Theatre, Konstantin Stanislavski, around 1900, this acting method was about a rigid exegesis that was based on an appreciation of naturalism. Playwrights, such as Anton Chekhov or Maxim Gorki, had to pay for this in order for a “socialist realism” as a formal aesthetics programme for the education of the “new human” and for the development of a “new society” to be declared. The miles of shelving of publications of books and magazines in libraries are still evidence of the fruitful intellectual engagement during the time of the so-called East West Confrontation. But only there; in Eastern and South Eastern Europe, this oft-quoted “Moscow influence” has long disappeared. And not just there. Since the precipitated implosion of the Soviet Union, which resulted in the turn of eras of 1989/92, diverse structural changes have taken place in the former centre as well, for which the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre sustainably stands.
Cultural politics could have definitely taken a different direction for Moscow, the former European metropolis, now a megapolis, after the Russian director Anatoly Vasiliev lost his theatre, which the municipality gave up for new housing space, shortly after the millennium. The same thing could have happened to the Stanislavski Drama Theatre, the final place of activity of the Russian theatre reformer Konstantin Stanislavski, when it burned down in 2003 and 2005. As a housing space, or as a theatre with its glitzy logo of its founder’s name gutted of its actual artistic work, it would have been sufficient for the city’s marketing to organize a commercially successful company for guest performances, which surely would have worked well according to the principle “communism in the museum”. Instead, the former minister of culture called a competition, which Boris Yukhananov won in 2013. At this point, Yukhananov was 56. He has had a long artistic career, which started in 1974 as an actor at the Moscow State Puppet Theatre. It falls right into the 80s, after his studies at the Voronezh Art Institute. Those times were shaped by Glasnost and Perestroika. He took additional directing classes with Anatoly Efros and Anatoly Vasiliev, and assisted in their productions. His first experiments as a director includes his most famous “Capriccios”, based on court documents of a lawsuit against Joseph Brodsky. Yukhananov isn’t a stranger in the independent scene either, since he founded the first non-government funded theatre group “Teatr Teatr” in 1985.
Just how multi-faceted the structural changes were that took place in the Russian Federation after the turn of eras in 1989/1992, is described by Yukhananov in his contribution to the conference from the perspective of a theatre maker. In doing so, he focusses on the two European centres in Russia, St. Petersburg and Moscow. And we find out that they traditionally have always had their own form of financing. The ministry of cultural affairs first and foremost supports big theatre institutions, such as the Mariinsky Theatre or the Bolshoi Theatre. Under the tenure of the former secretary of culture, new theatre buildings were constructed. Since the year 2000, numerous cultural processes have taken off that are unstoppable. Theatre people felt the freedom, the diversity and the cosmopolitanism. The open borders facilitated interactions with Asian and European cultures, leading to an intermingling that helped the theatre cross borders. In doing so, the theatre was not burdened by commercial doings. Research and theatre laboratories also contributed to great changes in educational institutions. Many young and interesting directors have since entered the stage. There is now a wide range that no longer has anything to do with the stereotypes of the Stanislavsky method. You can’t take back these processes, which is why today there are two systems within the structure that compete with each other. One dates back to the tsar era; the other is a modern one, resulting in a diversity of problems that Russia’s theatre has to deal with today.
Magic in Moscow
Just how tightly the structural changes are tied to the processes of renewal of the actual theatre work is what the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre symptomatically stands for. Anybody who lent their ear to Yukhananov was chastened by his explanations later in the conference. A fundamental approach in the understanding of theatre work was revealed that already sees the sources for artistic production in the architecture of the building: “I completely reconstructed the theatre, from the bathrooms to the stage.”, Yukhananov said, “We have a very modern stage and modern lighting, which is why we’re called Electrotheatre. We invested around half a billion roubles into the reconstruction. The stage can be transformed in various ways. We also have an open-air stage that fits 400 people. But we’re not just a theatre. We actively work with many different events on a daily basis. We also offer lectures and concerts.”
These are pieces of a mosaic that fragmentarily assembled into a picture of contemporary theatre in Russia. Yukhananov explained that it’s a given that Russian society highly values theatre work. And both national as well as multi-national theatre is taking place. There’s an unabated interest in theatre, both with regards to civil society as well as the public authorities. This, however, also harbours its problems. One is the case Kirill Serebrennikov. Others have to do with theatre financing. Financing happens on the municipal level, on the level of the provinces, which Russia is divided into today, or on the level of the federation. A theatre’s own resources are also appreciated. No theatre, though, can exist solely based on the ticket sale. There are also sponsors and founding advisers who distribute money within a private structure on a yearly basis. This, however, has to do with preferences and interests, where theatre work has to compete with sport events. This aspect of gratuitousness has to be taken into account, especially with regards to creating a repertoire.
The pre-Stalinist foundation of the structure already hints to just how multi-facetted the new building that houses the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre embodies the diversity of the national and multi-national societies and declares their artistic ambitions, always with the stipulation of the artistic heritage. It opened as one of the first cinema palaces in 1915 in Moscow, the ARS Electrotheatre. Afterwards it was home to Konstantin Stanislavsky who established a studio for opera and drama there. His head forms part of the theatre’s logo today against the backdrop of rays. They seem like a tribute to Aristophanes, as if the one-hundred-year old ghosts of the past were laid to rest humourously in the theatre’s name and logo. The ensemble looks like a bell of a light bulb that has died out in Europe that may provoke flashes of genius. These inevitably are a credit to Lenin’s slogan that Socialism were Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country. The theatre strives to live up to the threefold use of the location also today—as a cinema, as an opera studio and a drama theatre. To deal with the objectives of the theatre requires sensitivity for magic. It must be a magical place, since they obviously succeeded in liberating the ambitions of the founding figures of the Moscow Art Theatre of more than one hundred years ago from the burdens of Stalinism. Ambitions which have been tied to the roots of theatre in Europe, which is demonstrated by the inclusion of opera: “Personally, I think that it’s really significant to work with contemporary composers”, Yukhananov concludes his contribution to the conference. “We are slowly developing a new face of our theatre. I’m sure you’re just making a sketch of the head right now. Then come the eyes. In theatre, we thus create a body. Through the reconstruction we also got a new body. For drama theatre, it’s now important to also be able to listen. So we have to add ears now.”
In the tradition of the Art Theatre
The Stanislavsky Electrotheatre opened its first season after its reconstruction period with a production of a subject matter whose control text Stanislavsky put on stage in the Moscow Art Theatre in 1908: The Blue Bird by the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. Yukhananov directed this text as a theatrical journey of three days that also includes a Boeing 777, which may remind you of the plane that crashed in Ukraine. And just as Yukhananov said during the conference: “We are open for dialogue, and we want to cooperate.”—thus visiting theatre makers have a long-standing tradition with the Art Theatre. Stanislavsky once invited Edward Gordon Craig to rehearse Hamlet with the company. Under Yukhananov’s tenure, Heiner Goebbels realised Max Black, Theodoros Terzopoulos developed The Bacchae by Euripides, and Romeo Castellucci rehearsed his production of Human Use of Human Beings together with the Electrotheatre’s company. The online trailer of the first season, which started in 2016, sets out with humour and ends humorously: Through the masks of the expectation to see Russia’s goats in women and bears in men a multi-naturalism likely presents itself that is so different from the known naturalisms of the 20th century that new research will surely be introduced into academic considerations as well. The theatre delivers early impulses. The dramatic and the postdramatic theatre, the performative and that which has been theatre since antiquity, which is opera, seem to have newly assembled into a concept of acoustic ecology under the magical direction of Boris Yukhananov. But in order to find out we should follow the invitation made in the online trailer: “Visit us—Tverskaya Street 23”.
Published on 28 December 2017 (Article originally written in German)
Herwig Lewyworks in Leipzig/Germany as a cultural journalist.
The Rich and the Poor: Coming Together and Drifting Apart in the European Theatrical Landscape
Theatre Worlds Clashing at the UTE Conference of Theatre Structures in Belgrade
Greek perspective on the Conference on Theatre Structures in Belgrade
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this. OKRead More
