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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published on 26 March 2020

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

Governance, Ghosts and Electricity

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.

Boris Yukhananov © Stanislavsky Electrotheatre

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 20^th 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)

Unsurtitled Theatricality

Unsurtitled Theatricality—Three plays at the Volkstheater

Watching performances in a congtext that is the opposite on an international festival situation is quite an interesting experience. A group of non-German speaking journalists affiliated with the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe had an opportunity to just do that in the autumn of 2017, as guests at the Volkstheater in Vienna. We saw three different plays on three consecutive evenings, all without surtitles. In this sense, the present article can be placed in a dialogue with Sergio lo Gatto’s article “Surtitled Theatricality: What language do artists export?” written in connection with an international festival, exploring how much the theatricality of a performance is based (only) on the text and what this means for a foreign audience.

“Wien ohne Wiener”, directed by Nikolaus Habjan at the Volkstheater Wien © Lupi Spuma

Perhaps there could not have been a better time to test Segio’s theory than this: we had an opportunity to watch productions that were not necessarily intended for festivals, in their local setting, without surtitles and with minimal German knowledge. This is by no means an unusual situation, although writing about it is. To be honest, the opportunity to let go of the text often fills me with relief. As it is difficult to resist surtitles, even when one fights to succumb to the temptation: at least I, myself, am so verbally inclined that a scene rarely glues my gaze to the stage, I keep looking up, meaning I definitely miss a great deal of what is happening.

There is another reason why I feel that the situation at hand is the polar opposite of international festivals: I almost feel like a voyeur, peeping at the Viennese in their home, as they watch theatre made just for them. Even from the three plays, even without understanding the text, one sees what there is a market for, and what the artistic director, Anna Badora and the creative circle are intrigued by. One thing is for sure, the Viennese enjoy explorations (seeped in historical identity) about what it means to be Viennese: two of the three performances, Wien ohne Wiener and Alles waltzer, alles brennt dealt with specifically this question. The third production was constructed from two consecutive performances of Iphigenia in Aulis and Stephano Massini’s Occident Express about the post-migration society. This indicates, what may be evident to us, but not to all segments of the theatrical structure: that the Volkstheater is strongly focused on the present. How profoundly and in what depth the issues presented in the play are dealt with is another question. In the absence of text, I can only guess at how thought-provoking, provocative, playful or even didactic these productions were.

However, I am able to give a much more definite opinion on which of the performances had the strongest impact in terms of theatrical language: Nikolaus Habjan’s Wien ohne Wiener, even though this play is the least bit international. The production is a kind of homage to the deceased Georg Keisler, the Austrian cabaret artist who strongly relied on Viennese (Jewish) culture in his songs. On the surface, the context is completely foreign, but it seems contextual knowledge is not necessary for one to feel that the performance is about them. In other words, one does not have to be Viennese to feel Viennese (as someone from Budapest).

Naturally, among other things, it is the puppets in Wien ohne Wiener that make the play seem new, fresh and full of life. With the absence of a lingua franca, the audience becomes immersed in the visual stimuli. Habjan’s puppets offer a real treat: With their bulging eyes and wrinkled faces these figures embody the ridiculousness and petty bourgeois of people who step on our toes on the tram (And those polyester blouses and knitted waistcoats!). And it is as if death had left its fingerprints on all of the faces… The way the puppets move on stage is also exciting. They are actually life-sized, but their limbs are replaced by the limbs of the puppeteers, who fill the empty shirts, blouses, that are the torsos of the puppets with their own hands and bodies. Interestingly, this makes the puppets seem alive; and they seem to be “acting” even when they lay lifeless on the edge of the stage. Adding further colour to the production is that the puppets do not only have separate puppeteers but also separate voices: as one actor moves the puppet the other “dubs” its words. The production exploits the playfulness of this method, each element i.e. the puppets, the puppeteers and voice-over actors, have their own lives and communicate with one another. Funny gags include the “voice” knocking the puppet over the head, the broad-hipped Alpine girl built out of two actresses, and Claudia Sabitzer dressed as a pigeon looking like a puppet herself. And we have not even mentioned the music of the play! It seems that Wien ohne Wiener has such a great impact because it creates its own, new world out of existing texts (none of which I had been familiar with). The whole thing is very grotesque, incredibly funny and deadly.

On the second night, we saw Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis and Stefano Massini’s Occident Express. Anna Badora placed the two plays side by side. It is an unusual, but not unique method, a bit like a curator organising an exhibition of two independent pieces, maybe even from different eras, in a way that the pieces start to interact with one another. Naturally it is the task of the audience to find the link, the reflections of each piece with the other. We have seen examples of this in Hungarian theatre: Gábor Máté used this method at the József Katona Theatre, when he placed a genre-painting like play about gypsies set in the first half of the last century in contrast with a contemporary play about a series of ethnically motivated murders set in the early 2000s in Hungary. This experiment was followed by Csaba Polgár at the Örkény Theatre. He embedded a series of scenes also about murder into the well-known story of seven samurais from Kurosawa’s film. The audience could actually vote to decide the fate of the samurais in the last third of the performance. I remember how my thoughts jumped from one story to the next, how one interpreted the other without the solution being completely obvious.

The memories of these two plays danced around in my head as I was watching Anna Badora’s production; the lack of surtitles actually created a larger space to make these sorts of associations. Nevertheless, my lack of familiarity with the second play made this process more difficult as I did not understand the language. In essence, this method relies on each actor playing multiple roles. As they reappear in the second part of the production, their roles reflect upon each other. As I only had a vague understanding of Massini’s play, I found following this aspect of the production difficult. Rather, I watched the plays as two separate entities (or at least two separate parts of the performance). As a result, and also due to the lack of surtitles, the quality of the acting stood out even more. The difference in the style of the two plays was acutely apparent: the acting in Occidental Express seemed much more natural, reflective and multi-layered. Of course, the premise was also different: the actors narrated some of the play themselves and kept a distance from the story. This was obvious to me even without familiarity with the text, primarily thanks to the quality of acting. The other signs, the recurring motifs, the spilling of the paint, the proliferation of victims worked nicely, but it is again difficult for me to decipher to what degree Massini’s text takes over the story of the refugees, or speaks for them—an angle mentioned at a conference the day before by an artist of Syrian descent.

The production I saw on my third night was Alles Waltzer, alles brennt, which was quite likable even with the language barrier. However, it was during this production that I missed surtitles the most. To be more precise, this performance peaked my interest in the text (while Massini’s play probably was more predictable), it awoke a thirst for knowledge in me (even in an educational sense), and I kept wondering which aspect of the happenings the play dealt with. Irony and humour were quite clearly present, gags thundered through the stage and the story with dizzying speed. And I would like to take this opportunity to say that the solo of singer Eva Jantschitsch was absolutely magnificent.

Well that’s the way it is: if something interesting happens on stage, we notice it even without surtitles.

Published on 20 December 2017 (Article originally written in Hungarian)

30 days with Kirill Serebrennikov

On 17 October 2017, the Basmanny Court of Moscow extended the house arrest for Kirill Serebrennikov, accusing him of embezzling about 70 million rubles from the budget for the development and promotion of contemporary art. The director asked the court to release him at least for the final filming of the movie “Summer” and the completion of the ballet “Nureyev” at the Bolshoi Theater, but he was denied.

Artistic director of the Gogol Center Kirill Serebrennikov was among the nominees of the Russian national theatre prize Golden Mask. Serebrennikov was nominated for the award for staging the opera “Chaadsky” in “Helikon-Opera” and the play “Akhmatova. Poem without a hero” in the Gogol Center. Also the director is nominated in the category costume designer for the opera “Chaadsky“.

One of the most colorful of Serebrennikov’s productions was, as the tag-line informed, about “all shades of black”. Not that Serebrennikov has ever produced anything dull, be it cinema, theatre, TV, or lectures, nor is he producing anything dull at the moment, or will he ever. Men clad in black, men wearing masks, men who have no faces often appeared as characters in his works. Unfortunately, quite recently the director had a chance to make personal acquaintance with these characters of his when they were escorting him into the glass-walled dock in the courtroom. Serebrennikov is nothing like an Ivory Tower dweller, his artistic genius is blessed with social awareness, sensitive to all that is socially relevant, partial to the people for whom “the time is out of joint”. He once was (and has staged the play) “Close to Zero”, and earned some hostile criticism even from those who never saw the show. Dazzled, some by the authorities presumably at play, some by hatred to these very authorities, but equally blind to the real thing, too many failed to see the portents of the final throes to come in that very Shakespearian production, which for the “to be or not to be” dilemma showcases daily routine and jettisoning everything that makes a human human. And no question marks, period. The book ends with the statement: “Anything can be mended,” but the theatre version leaves no room for hope. Yet the optimistically minded director (he has so little time, such a lot of work) neglected his own prophesy, or maybe believed that darkness, however dense and absolute it might be, is still to be won even by the tiniest of lights. Which is quite true. But the costs? The director is in a mousetrap. And now the device is not a Shakespearian one. Today, when the rtist is brought to the trial of public scrutiny, a lot is said about money, people make estimates, they recon, count, calculate. Figures incite malicious rejoicing at another’s misfortune, bear hatred, tempt to shout “tally-ho!”, and pass the verdict “serves him right.” Our people love sums that have many noughts: it lends the feeling of belonging. Meanwhile, leaving playing with numeral and discussing that which happened in the courtroom to the social networks, we suggest that theatre goers and movie lovers (especially those who have never seen any of Kirill Serebrennikov’s productions), refrain from passing judgment on him, but make busy forming an opinion about him, about his artistic accomplishments. So be it 30 days of the month of September with his films, his theatre productions, TV programmes, lectures and interviews – 30 days in his company, 30 days in his support. The following selection contains links and the coming events that are must-sees, and are worth reviewing.

#freeserebrennikov #freekirill

1. “The Student”. Film from 2016. Based on Marius von Mayenburg’s play “Märtyrer”, screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the François Chalais Prize. Chronologically the director’s last completed film that garnered a prize at Cannes, and, as it is always the case with Serebrennikov, earned an upheaval of an audiences’ response. An armour piercing projectile sort of a movie about obscurantism that’s hard to die.

2. “The Forest”. Theatre production of the play by Alexander Ostrovsky produced by A.P. Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre. Great theatrical success. The iconic 19^th century Russian play is transported to “the epoch of stagnation” of the 1970s, but curiously is ranked with present-day allusions.

3. "Infidelity”. Film. A man and a woman learn that their respective spouses are lovers. Tackles the theme of infidelity as an overwhelming element of a thriller.

4. “Outside the System” an event in commemoration of K.S. Stanislavsky at A.P. Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre. An anniversary (150^th birthday) celebration event about Stanislavsky by means of quoting the great master’s statements, letters, wires, notes, as well as those of his students and colleagues, both devotees and apostates

5. “Zoyka’s Apartment”. Theatre production by Mikhail Bulgakov (A.P. Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre) // TV show “Cultural exchange” with Kirill Sereberennikov as a guest. Daring and even nowadays topical musical show made after Bulgakov’s 1926 play. Serious talk about time, about projects, and about public mood.

6. “The Murderer’s Diary”. TV show from 2002. The discovery of the 1919 diary of a student, Nickolay Voinov, who confesses in it to have murdered five people, becomes the clue to some horrible crimes of our day. A riveting series with some wonderful actor performances.

7. “The Golovliev Family”. Theatre production based on the 1876 novel by Saltykov-Shchedrin. Features possibly the most hideous character ever embodied by Evgeny Mironov. An absorbing story of spiritual devastation.

8. “Playing the Victim”. Film. A dark comedy based on the Presnyakov brothers’s play of the same title that tells the story of a good-for-nothing 30-year-old man whose job is to act the victim when the police is reconstructing a murder in the course of the inquest, and the job is telling on him…

9. “Some Explicit Polaroids”. Theatre production by Mark Ravenhill (the Moscow Pushkin Drama Theatre). A dramatic tale about a rebel, a hippy, a striptease dancer, a gay man dying of AIDS, about his sexual slave, and about love.

10. “Dark Avenues” based on the 1946 book of short stories by Ivan Bunin, a dramatic performance shot for TV broadcasting (a literary soiree). Invited to stage it by Alla Demidova personally. An austere and delicate theatrical piece based on Bunin’s stories.

11. “Yuri’s Day”. Film from 2008. An opera singer, played by Kseniya Rappoport, before leaving the homeland to reside permanently abroad, goes for a short visit to an obscure, out-of–the-way place to say her last goodbyes to the native country. And her son gets lost there. She loses her voice, and all her old worldviews. Yet she is also granted with some findings.

12. “The Philistines”. Theatre production from 1902 by Maxim Gorky (A.P. Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre). This iconic Russian play that premiered in 1902, in the hands of Serebrennikov undergone a complete change of meaning, yet staying absolutely true to the text of the original play. Which is a dramatic piece about a family crisis. A brilliant Andrey Myagkov.

13. “Naked Pioneer Girl”. Theatre production by Mikhail Kononov (the Sovremennik theatre). A musical-and-battle miracle-play. A study on the role of the woman in war examined in other than a full-dress fashion. Chulpan Khamatova in the title role.

14. “Short Circuit” (novella “A Kiss of a Shrimp”). Film. A collection of five short films made by the leading young cinema directors. Five contemporary tales dealing with the theme which is as old as the world itself. Love. A dramatic piece, a comedy, a farce – genre-wise it’s comprehensive.

15. Rostov-Papa. TV show from 2001. A vertical serial, each episode of which is loosely based on a classical story: “Carmen”, “Orpheus and Eurydice”, “Don Quixote”, “Cyrano de Bregerac”, “Hamlet”…

16. “Plasticine”. Theatre production. Some thundering and fulminating based on Vasiliy Sigarev’s play about a 14-year old boy who has been abused, and is being abused daily.

17. “Ragin”. Film. A version of Anton Chekhov’s short story “Ward No.6”, with Alexei Guskov playing doctor Ragin.

18. Fragments of the theatre production “Scumbags” (Gogol Center) and recording of the director meeting his audience before the performance. Theatre version of Zakhar Prilepin’s prose, complete with its signet revolutionary ardor, drive, and hopelessness. It was awarded with the “Gold Mask”.

19. “Antony and Cleopatra”. Theatre production (the Sovremennik theatre). A spectacular confrontation of the male and the female, the East and the West, the old and the new forms.

20. Fragments of the show "The Metamorphoses" (Gogol Center). A theatrical biopic, in which even silence resounds Classical myths as contemporized and placed in the multimedia environment.

21. “One Hundred Minutes of Poetry”, a poetry reading event. Poetry and music performed at the Polytechnic Museum.

22. Fragments of the theatre production “The Hunting of the Snark”. A tragic-comical musical fairy gala loosely based on Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem.

23. “Substituting Audio Mixing for Dogs”. Film. A rarity – the director’s cinematographic debut, based on La Leçon («The Lesson », 1951) by Eugène Ionesco.

24. A cycle of TV programmes “Another Kind of Cinema with Kirill Serebrennikov”. Talks on the characters of the iconic films of the world cinema, no less fascinating than the films themselves.

25. “Requiem”, a symphonic performance (A.P. Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre). Presented to celebrate the 65^th anniversary of the end of the World War II, this mystery play like production became a tribute to commemorate all those killed in the wars that had tormented Europe since the 17^th century and up to September 1945. It contains instrumental music, vocal, canon Latin texts, and documents of the 1930s and 40s.

26. Open lecture by Kirill Serebrennikov

27. Fragments of the theatre production “Terrorism”.

28. Big interview with Kirill Serebrennikov

29. Documentary “Der Fall Serebrennikov”.

30. Kirill Serebrennikov in court

Published on 30 November 2017 (Article originally written in Russian)

Les Misérables?

In a few days two prestigious theatre awards are to be presented at a ceremonial event: the Europe Theatre Prize and the Europe Prize Theatrical Realities. The leading theatre personalities will get together to honor the winners, and to celebrate their considerable contribution to the theatrical arts of the world. Rome is to host the grand event. Meanwhile “the third Rome”—Moscow, that is—has the director who in a few days is to be named among the best in Europe, not only isolated from the world and cut off from all communication (he is under house arrest), but also in fact banished from his profession, the right to pursue which he has proven with his whole life. Kirill Serebrennikov is prevented from visiting his own theatre, he cannot complete his film though work left to be done requires only five days, he cannot associate with his actors, cannot supervise the management of his productions even through a proxy.

Directing is a tenuous business, the dependence on the tools of the trade is great, and besides, as history demonstrates, the tools of the authorities are also something to be taken into account. Neither thinking nor imagining can be prohibited, yet implementing thoughts and images well might be. The director is not forbidden to think, to make up, to envision his future productions – but no production will come to be without trying things this and that way, without talking things over, without the drive of the collective will. In Le Dernier Métro the hero, while hiding from the Nazis in the cellars of his own theatre, still was able to control the staging of the shows. He was cut off from the world, but not from his art. Serebrennikov is allowed to take walks in the vicinity of his residence, but the place where his heart lies – the theatre – is the forbidden grounds for him. Two new shows have already opened in his theatre without the director climbing the stage for the curtain call. Neither will he be on the stage to greet the assembly that will have gathered to present him with the prize. Konstantin Stanislavsky once, in conversation with Solomon Mikhoels, remarked: “To fly, the bird first and foremost needs to breathe freely…” Serebrennikov is denied the access to the air-supply. Yet other theatre people are not all that free-breathing either.

History is sarcastic. It was shrewd of Marx, when elaborating on Hegel’s idea about everything in history occurring twice, to specify that it occurs “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce”. Only three Russian directors have been awarded by the European Commission before Serebrennikov: Lev Dodin was awarded the Europe Theatre Prize in 2001, and Anatoly Vasiliev and Andrey Moguchy each won the Theatrical Realities prize. I think that Serebrennikov, when his life will have returned to normal, will be glad to have become the number four on this list. Buddhism teaches there are four Noble Truths, the fourth being the way leading to the consolation of all kinds of grieves. In Italy, they are only preparing to remind the public about all the winners of the past years—but in Russia they never forgot…

COLTA.RU got hold of a memorandum that is believed to have been written by Vladimir Aristarkhov, the Minister of Culture’s First deputy, and addressed to the Secretary of the St Petersburg Cultural Forum, that lists the unwelcome participants of that Cultural Forum. Among those unwelcome Dmitry Krymov, Lev Dodin, Anatoly Vasiliev and Kirill Serebrennikov are mentioned. Presumably the list features some other names too—several rogues for each art. Russia is so fecund when it comes to bearing talents, but having produced them she mostly rejects them. If she doesn’t devour them Saturn-like outright, she chases them away, expelling them from home. To be proud of them later. Much later.

This memorandum, quite nasty as it is, looks somewhat absurd for having come from inside the ministry that is supposed to stand for cultural and humanitarian development. The style, the language, the labeling are quite scary, yet the consequences of such memoranda might be even more frightening. What has been written with a pen cannot be wrenched out with an axe, as the saying goes. But one sure can effectively wield an axe over culture, after the manner of Lopachin dealing with the Cherry Orchard.

Where, in what universities do they teach the art of portraying theatre directors in this particular way?

On Serebrennikov: “[…] contributes to eroding the traditional Russian spiritual and moral values, and to weakening the unity of the multi-national people of the Russian Federation (including deliverance of the low-class mass-culture produce); there were attempts to falsify Russian history”.

On Vasiliev: “Considerable part of his creative work are vanguard experimenting, as well as radical interpretations of literary sources, that aim at deconstructing the national theatre artistic tradition, as well as the traditional Russian values. He has a tendency to choose those forms of art that shape the depressive model of mind-set.”

On Dodin: “In his creative endeavors, Dodin tends to erode the traditional Russian spiritual and moral values, as well as to attempt to falsify the history of Russia. He apparently shares the political views of the ‘opposition’.”

The memorandum really reads like an indictment; so much so that one actually expects a sentence to be passed. And, indeed, texts like this are “guilty verdicts” of sorts. But whether they brand the persons mentioned, or the persons that have written them remains yet to be seen.

It is quite possible that the ministry will disavow this memorandum, claiming it is a fake. One can only wish they would, and that it were a fake. Yet the very fact that people so easily believe in its authenticity is symptomatic… The way that the cultured community is used to looking at the Minister of Culture makes one wonder whether the words they both have for a modifier are indeed derived from the same root, and it is a significant and alarming fact. Considering “culture” initially meant “tillage”, why, we may well go from digging in the vegetable gardens to digging trenches, and from weeding the grounds to purging the ranks… That’s our theatre reality, our theatre prize. What have we done to deserve it?

Considering it is all about the Gogol Centre, this calls for quoting Gogol’s work: “Answer me! But no answer comes…”*

Autor’s note: UPD According to the information of the St. Petersburg online newspaper “Fontanka.ru“, the Minister of Culture, speaking at the Cultural Forum, called information on blacklists an “anecdote”. “Andrey Moguchy has been reassigned by the director of the Bolshoi Drama Theater, he now leads the “Theatre” section at the Culture Forum. “We are building the second theatre to Lev Dodin (the second stage of the Maly Drama Theatre – Ed.). This is the largest construction of the Drama Theatre in St. Petersburg or Russia. They are handwritten notes (the names of Dodin and Moguchy were added to the list of the Ministry of Culture by hand. – Ed.) Do you seriously think that this is true? Do not laugh,” the minister answered.”

* “And you, Russia of mine—are not you also speeding like a troika which nought can overtake? Is not the road smoking beneath your wheels, and the bridges thundering as you cross them, and everything being left in the rear, and the spectators, struck with the portent, halting to wonder whether you be not a thunderbolt launched from heaven? What does that awe-inspiring progress of yours foretell? What is the unknown force which lies within your mysterious steeds? Surely the winds themselves must abide in their manes, and every vein in their bodies be an ear stretched to catch the celestial message which bids them, with iron-girded breasts, and hooves which barely touch the earth as they gallop, fly forward on a mission of God? Whither, then, are you speeding, O Russia of mine? Whither? Answer me! But no answer comes—only the weird sound of your collar-bells. Rent into a thousand shreds, the air roars past you, for you are overtaking the whole world, and shall one day force all nations, all empires to stand aside, to give you way!”. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol.

Published on 21 November 2017 (Article originally written in Russian)

Talking theatre and changing socio-political landscapes with Gorčin Stojanović

Sundays are meant to be calm and relaxing. Yet, the third Sunday of September wasn’t that at all in the capital of Serbia, Belgrade. Instead it was a day, charged with anxiety, hope, fear, politics, and visions for the future. The day concluded with the FIBA’s EuroBasket 2017 finals, where the Serbian national team lost to the Slovenians; and everyone was watching, including everyone in the theatre. At the same time, since the early morning, the city centre had been preparing for the Pride Parade, which later made it to the headlines as the first event of its kind in the region, led by Serbia’s prime minister. Last but not least, the second part of the UTE’s Conference on Theatre Structures took place at the Yugoslav Drama Theatre (A/N Jugoslovensko dramsko pozorište in Serbian, wildly known as JDP).

In the middle of this busy Sunday, when the thickness of the boundaries between politics, society and theatre happened to be so tangible in the context of this city, I talked to Gorčin Stojanović, since 2001 the artistic director of our kind host theatre. And since it seemed to me that his position required a great ability to link what happens on the stage, inside the theatre, to what is going on outside of the building, on the street or into the stage of politics, without letting it harm the artistic autonomy and esthetics, he felt like the best person to speak to this day.

Let’s start with the most obvious questions: Yugoslavia as a political entity is gone but the Yugoslav Drama Theatre is still standing and its name as it was declared by Josip Broz Tito in 1947, when it was established, remains unchanged. How come and what is the message behind that?

Gorčin Stojanović: It’s very simple: this theatre is too much of a brand to be easily renamed. I don’t like using the word “brand”, and I am not doing in ironically, but I need to in order to explain this. And I am talking as a businessman on purpose. It’s just that you don’t rename good products. There are two big brands in the field—the Yugoslav Drama Theatre and the Yugoslav Cinematique, the third cinema factory in Europe and the fourth in the world in terms of funds. And it’s also still called Yugoslav Cinematique because if you changed the name you’d have to start all over again, and you’d delete a 70 year-old tradition.

In the case of JDP, there was some public discussion regarding its name, though not all too much and there hasn’t been any strong pressure to change it. But it’s probably interesting to note that those comments into that direction were not coming from the far-right but from the moderate nationalists instead. And when nationalists ask this question, I always answer one and the same thing: you know that in Berlin there is a Maxim Gorki Theatre. Probably they could have called it Leo Tolstoy or Fyodor Dostoyevsky but they didn’t and named it after Maxim Gorki because he represented an ideology as well. And after the Berlin Wall came down no one thought of changing its name. Because it is a brand and very famous. You don’t rename it simply because the state has changed. So the Yugoslav Drama Theatre will not be renamed either, at least not during our time.

What you just said also exemplifies the complex relations between nations, as imagined communities, culture, political representation and various structures. That naturally leads to the next question, which might be slightly politically incorrect. But, omitting crucial contextual factors and focusing on structures only, you have this experience of living in a transnational union like Yugoslavia, where different nations coexisted. Today we have the European Union, which in a very broad sense also tries to create a larger, overarching structure, covering many different nations, though the process of becoming part of it is completely different. Given your experience, what are the lessons learnt—for good or bad—which should not or should be repeated?

Gorčin Stojanović: Absolutely! And the politically incorrect questions are my favorite ones. Four years ago we held a small conference at the JDP, at the same place where we are today, particularly on this question. Its intention was precisely this: to explore the question of this multinational, multicultural, multi-whatever bodies. And the main thesis was very simple: the Austro-Hungarian Empire was demolished due to nationalism—and here I am talking only about the structures, not about political systems. The Austro-Hungarian state, as we know, was reaching out to some parts of our world, and some of the roads and the railroads that we still use were built back then. The modern infrastructure came with them. Afterwards came the first Yugoslavia (n.b. Kingdom of Yugoslavia) and then the second Yugoslavia (n.b. Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). And it developed everything further. The building that we are sitting in at the moment was erected during this period. So, in terms of structure, Yugoslavia bears resemblance to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And it also collapsed. So what makes us believe that European Union will stand forever?

That is why in 2013 I brought three people together—Dubravka Stojanović, a great historian specialized in the Serbian history after the Vienna Congress in 1878 till the First World War, who is leftist in her political views; Predrag Marković, another great historian, who is more right in his political views, you might even say a mild nationalist, but a great scientist and would not make any compromises with the facts; and Milica Delević, an economist and European Union expert. And on the grounds of what had happened before from a historical perspective and what was the situation at the moment, they were able to predict a lot of what happened later: the rejection of the EU Constitution in The Netherlands and France, also Brexit. All of the things that people knew of and preferred to ignore.

Even some early origins of the Conflict Zones project were envisioned in this conference. The UTE president during this time, Ilan Ronen, even suggested that Belgrade should be the headquarter of this project, but the Serbian Ministry of Culture did not realize its potential. And this is the long story, trying to say that of course there is always something good and bad in these structures. But what the Yugoslav Drama Theatre still stands for in the region is that we do collaborate and have always collaborated with each other. We may not have invited that many Croatian directors during the war, for instance, but still the JDP was the first theatre which went to Croatia and Bosnia without any mediation.

As a matter of fact, that was the second part of my question that you already started answering—what is the role and place of arts and theatre in particular in these structures, and how are they implemented through representative institutions such as the Yugoslav Drama Theatre?

Gorčin Stojanović: In 1995, the JDP had this production “Powder Keg”, a play by Dejan Dukovski from Macedonia, directed by Slobodan Unkovski, which was invited all over the world, from Colombia to Rome. But the most important thing is that the first time something ever went from Serbia to former Yugoslavia, to Croatia and Slovenia, it was “Powder Keg”. And the first time a major theatre went to a festival in Sarajevo, again without any mediators, it was again the Yugoslav Drama Theatre with “Powder Keg”. Later, Slovenians came with seven productions to two theatres in Serbia. We were joking that this was a Slovenian invasion. And one of their main actors told us, “Well, we had to come to Belgrade, as Belgrade is the main city”.

What is more, I have calculated that in the past 15 years, the JDP has gone to Zagreb more frequently, and Croatian theatres have come to Belgrade significantly more than before, when we were, so to say, one. And that tells you something. Everyone needs their state and that’s politics. But culturally we are so much connected and that is something different.

And when you prepare the artistic programme of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre today, who are the envisioned audiences? Or, if we go back to business language, who are the target audiences?

Gorčin Stojanović: I can give you a very precise answer. Our audience members come here not only because of the sensuality of theatre but also for its intellectual dimension. I strongly believe that whatever JDP does it has to unite those two dimensions. In different proportions, but both have to be present. Sometimes I really like to laugh and to direct bedroom farces which do not keep me alert that much. However, the audience at the JDP comes for something more. If we try to do something stupidly commercial, they would not be interested. And our directors, actors, set designers… everything is too good for that. Which means that we cannot do cheesy theatre even if we want to.

And this is because the tradition of the Yugoslav Drama has always been a combination of several things. First of all, a high-level of performance skills, meaning the best actors. JDP was based on the model of The Moscow Art Theatre and conceived by taking the best actors from all over Yugoslavia. That was the model but it changed rather quickly. The first premiere of the JDP was on April 3^rd and by the end of June we broke up any relations with the Russians. So the model was not maintained from here on in, but the elite of actors and this idea stayed. Secondly, it has always been a director’s theatre with strong directorial figures, doing daring work. Some of our most daring and politically engaged productions, like “Powder Keg”, lasted on stage for more than 10 years.

In 1969 the only official ban of theatrical performance happened. It was a performance on the dramatization of Drajoslav Mihailovij’s book “When the Pumpkins Blossomed”—one of the best Serbian novels turned into a very artistically and not politically daring piece of theatre at that time. It included one sentence—the kid is addressing the Communists, who came in 1948 to arrest his father and says, “You are worse than Germans” and adds something like, “Russia sucks”. And Tito, who never saw the production, referred to it in a speech and it was banned. And from this moment on something was broken for the next four or even ten years inside the theatre. Not artistically but internally.

In 1985, Jovan Chirilov, a very prominent figure in our theatre history, was elected by the younger members of the troupe and became part of the second management of the JDP. And he was part of the theatre before, thus always working for the Belgrade International Theatre Festival (BITEF), so he was quite knowledgeable. And what he did was to formulate four pillars, that were already there, but he stated them clearly and made them part of the official structure of the repertoire: foreign classics, domestic classics, foreign contemporary plays and domestic contemporary plays. Yet, the requirement was that the classics should always be done in a daring way. It should be a new reading of a classical piece for theatre. Thus, he insisted on bringing in young people—I was one of them. And I did my first production when I was in my 3^rd year of the Theatre Academy.

So now you are paying it forward?

Gorčin Stojanović: Yes, exactly. My only mission for the past 17 years that I have been around the JDP artistically has been to do that: to enable young people to develop. And the idea of excellence is always there. No doubt that you cannot always reach it but you definitely need to strive for it. Even more so in time of crisis! In good times, when you can have seven or eight openings per season, you can probably sacrifice one or two of them. Of course, even then you still do your best, though it might not turn out to be the best. You just cannot limit yourself to trying to fulfill someone’s very specific need but you have to try to do your best. Every compromise is good except for the main compromise of doing something without an artistic reason. The artistic reason could also be wrong sometimes. For instance, I may not agree with everything we have produced artistically, yet I still stand behind everything, even the greatest fails. Luckily, due to this very precise planning, we haven’t had many of them. So my idea is very simple: I am trying to pay forward the chance that I was given as a young director by Jovan Chirilov. This means that directors now come to my office and we talk and talk and exchange thoughts, ideas, and plays. Because, like in soccer, if you do not do well in this team you will end up in some other, group “B” club, which is not Manchester United. So I try to keep that from happening, young people being sacrificed that way. Because this is what we had with Jovan Chirilov—this care and concern, pushing us to make good productions and not to have time to sleep.

And what is next? What should we be looking forward to seeing on the stage of the JDP in the upcoming seasons? And what are future directions that you are envisioning?

Gorčin Stojanović: Right now, we are working with Slobodan Unkovski, a very well-known director in this part of the world—from Athens to Ljubljana. He is working on, what I call a fifth column in our repertoire that appears from time to time, the experimental stuff. The production is called “Einstein’s Dreams” and is based on Alan Lightman’s book, which is not necessarily a piece of fiction, as the author himself is a scientist.

The second upcoming production is “The Mercy Seat” by Neil LaBute, staged at the Studio JDP by the young director Jana Maricic.

Then we will have a new premiere by Iva Miloshevic, who is staging Ivan Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country” with the very renowned Mirjana Karanovic. Then we will do a play by Ivan Cankar, a Slovenian classic, “The King of Betajnova”, which actually was the first performance done at the JDP in 1948. And I think this is a nice illustration of what I have said earlier because this production will be staged by a young, promising director whom I invited to talk to. After a while he told me that he wanted to stage this play. I asked him whether it was because of the anniversary, but he did not know about it and got embarrassed. And I told him, “Even if you lie, I don’t mind because the play is a great choice, and the JDP is the place to do that.”

And the dream is always the same: to have and keep what I called our three “Es”: exclusivity, excellence and esthetics.

Published on 26 September 2017 (Article originally written in Bulgarian)

An Unfortunate Tale Of Not Finding the Truth

It was on Sunday, 17th of September 2017, when several incidents changed the daily routine in Belgrade. The streets of Serbia’s capital were full of police guarding the area where the Pride Parade was about to start, and by noon Kralja Milana Street was already filled with loud beats and pop music. All passers-by were met by countless colorful balloons, rainbow flags and the generally positive vibe of the relatively small gathering outside the Yugoslav Drama Theatre.

PetrovićAt that time, in the same building, the UTE held the second part of its Conference on European Theatre Structures, which was attended by directors, cultural journalists, politicians and artistic directors from theaters of Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Russia, Serbia and Luxembourg. An evening performance of Luigi Pirandello’s Right You Are, If You Think So, directed by Jagoš Marković, was also part of this two-day programme. The theatre production had already premiered earlier this year in July to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the birth of this Italian Nobel Prize laureate for Literature. The play itself, as for its interpretation, greatly corresponds to our current post-truth society, and provides a considerable potential for communicating directly with the audience. In short, life in a post-truth world represents a kind of an existential model, where a person distortedly perceives their surroundings due to the overwhelming amount of information or their own laziness to think critically.

Right You Are, If You Think So, directed by Jagoš Marković | Yugoslav Drama Theatre in Belgrade © Nenad Petrović

Regarding the characters of Pirandello’s drama, it is certainly their laziness that drives them into the wheel of sensational suspicions and scandalous wishes that mask their lack of identity and absence of personality. As they are trying to find out the truth, which—from their perspective—stands for a clear resolution, a simplified solution or just a clarification of the storyline they’ve plotted (and which therefore has no solution), their actions are used to demonstrate something disturbing about the human mentality and men’s weakness. Pirandello’s characters are so-called prominent citizens from an unspecified town who have the permanent need to pester someone, and to define others solely because of their changing mood, desires and suspicions. The trigger for this social fuss is a strange married couple and a mother-in-law that newly moves to town, awaking its citizens from their daily apathy. Once they are awake, so is their nosiness, and they are adamant about finding out personal details about their new neighbours.

The theme of identity is symbolised by a huge golden standing mirror, placed unwieldy to the left side of the forestage, vertically to the audience. However, considering its size and symbolic meaning, it’s odd that it’s only used once by a single character, a rather provocative old man Lamberto Laudisi. The scene where he’s staring at his own reflection, doubting not just his clarity but also identity, serves as a manifest of the incapability to recognize the truth. Other characters ignore the mirror with great confidence and, instead of looking at themselves in the reflection, they intensely aim their focus on somebody else.

Besides the mirror, there are only a few other objects on stage, such as several upholstered chairs and a chandelier, once used as a secret microphone. At the very end of the performance, Laudisi climbs on the chandelier, then he’s lifted up a few meters and hangs there as a sign of insanity that took over all of the characters. At the same time, the upset group of citizens is having a fight; meanwhile the stage walls made of green velvet screens collapse, revealing the backstage and the theatre machinery. This abstract scene, designed by Jagoš Marković himself, may at first evoke an interior of a distasteful parlour or a forest, where the characters are lost. After the breakdown, it may then refer to the general chaos and inability to distinguish between reality and illusion.

The costumes designed by Bojana Nikitović support the stylized caricature form of acting, reminding us of Gogol’s collective of small-town officers from The Government Inspector, similarly trapped in their own idiocy. A rather traditional caricature approach strengthens the comedic nature of the characters’ actions; however the form of conversational salon comedy is quickly exhausted, especially on such a big stage. The spectator promptly follows the narrative based on the constant changing of “facts” and their negations. It’s difficult to stay focused , even in just about 90 minutes. Sadly, the show doesn’t offer a vision of the idiocy of society in a contemporary context. It follows the original story without any adaptations that would attract the viewer’s attention, nor does it provoke them to ponder the content. Regarding the production’s aesthetics, the abstract set rather reminds us of socialistic theatre productions from the late 50s than a space related to today’s reality. In the end, this theatre piece keeps its distance to today’s spectator and real life, despite its very lively and topical message.

Published on 25 September 2017 (Article originally written in Czech)

KORŠUNOVAS IN ROME. THE QUEEN, THE SERPENT, AND THE REFUGEE INFERNO

In the context of Union des Théâtres de l’Europe (UTE) Decentralised Academy, Lithuanian stage director Oskaras Koršunovas directed a masterclass for young professional actors, organized by the Teatro di Roma in cooperation with the Lithuanian Embassy in Rome (2-12 March 2017), with an opened delivery based on Elfriede Jelinek’s “Charges (The Supplicants)”. An account from inside the workshop.

From left to right: Maria Quintelas, Manuel Capraro, Giuliana Vigogna, Luisa Borini, Eleftheria Angelitsa, Jenny Paraskevaidou, Francesco Iaia, Alessandro Minati, Giordana Faggiano, Oskaras Koršunovas, Antonio Bannò, Milica Gojković, Gabriele Zecchiaroli, Gianluca Pantosti, Katalin Stareishinska, Silvia Quondam, Alessandra Calì, Federico Benvenuto, Luís Puto

It’s a bright early spring day in Rome, not a cloud in the sky; a stretched but sweet wind passes through the former industrial site in front of the gasometer. On a Saturday afternoon, the Teatro India is silent, like a desert abbey by the river Tiber, sprinkled with sparkling sun beams.
On my arrival, a bunch of young people sit at a wooden table among the green fences. A technician drags a flight case across the wide white gravel yard; he looks around, leaves the case in the centre, like the carcass of a wild animal captured after a long hunt.

It’s the last day of rehearsals. Ten students of the Acting Training School of the Teatro di Roma, together with six colleagues from five European countries sent by the UTE, are waiting for Oskaras Koršunovas to come back from his lunch break. The Lithuanian stage director—who was invited to give a masterclass as a part of the Conflict Zones network programme, co-founded by Creative Europe—chose to work on Elfriede Jelinek’s text “Charges (The Supplicants)”, translated into English by Gitta Honegger.
An intense laboratory opened its doors on Sunday, 12 March for an itinerant presentation that accompanied the audience inside and all around the Teatro India.

A day earlier, I followed the group through a first and single run-through of the entire voyage. The young actors sit in the Teatro India studio in the light of the afternoon sun; I can hear Italian and some Portuguese and Greek. Koršunovas enters and keeps silent for a long minute, before starting to recap the list of the eighteen scenes that will mark the path of this journey through the “European Inferno”.
The titles for the scenes make a weirdly varied bunch of keywords, such as “mirror”, “the war in the toilet”, “the ship”, “masks”, “the fairy tale”, “the European cow”.
“The structure is there,” Koršunovas concludes, “now we are going to run through every link, don’t worry: any problem is only in your head.”
Speaking with some of the actors, I learn about the first few days of the masterclass, when the director took them through a bulk of psychological inputs, and long talks on political identity, and the refugee crisis.
Now the whole material is going to take on the shape of a chain of performances: the audience will be guided by a sort of Dante’s “Virgil” through the whole area around the venue, facing many different perspectives on migrant flows and European responsibility, crawling as a “serpent” from station to station.

“Egle, The Queen of Serpents” is in fact the title of the project—already presented last autumn at the 13th International Theatre Festival Sirenos in Vilnius and now molded to a different group of performers. It comes from a traditional Lithuanian fairy tale, this time delivered by an actress wearing a burqa, who tells the origin of five trees: oak, birch, ash, poplar and spruce (in Lithuanian, “egle”).
Egle is the name of a young girl who accepts to be given as bride to the King of Serpents. Using a trick, Egle’s brothers will kill the Serpent (who happened to be a fair and gentle human magician) and this will bring Egle to expiate the crime of having revealed the secret, transforming herself and her children into trees. The moral of this fable is that “what comes from the sea stays in the sea and will never be accepted by what grows and lives on Earth”; and the other way around.
Koršunovas uses this folktale as a metaphor for the refugee inferno.

“We are alive, We are alive. The main thing is we live and it hardly is more than that after leaving the sacred homeland. No one looks down with mercy at our train, but everyone looks down on us. We fled, not convicted by any court in the world, convicted by all, there and here.”
These are the very first lines of Jelinek’s text, delivered in a loud voice by the whole group, sitting on chairs placed in the brand new open stage of the Teatro India. The performers are wearing weird colourful masks (such as a chicken, a devil, a rabbit, a clown or a skull); the crowd will disperse, frightened by a young man in a blue suit, who was apparently trying to reassure them. Then the journey begins.
A couple of policemen in black balaclava chasing a ravenous Arlequin across the whole yard will be a sort of leitmotiv to keep the acts of persecution and xenophobia in the spectators’ minds. Yet, the core of this project stays in its variety, in the contrasting tones and styles of the single performances, pushed beyond Jelinek’s play and into the improvisation.
A cynical irony, for example, emerges evidently in the “Hate Fair” scene, where the audience is given a gun and invited to shoot different “samples of junk humanity”: a communist, a homosexual, a “negro” or a Chinese; the same goes for the church scene, where a placid priest would exalt the terrorist attack in Utøya urging the audience to shout “Heil, Breivik!”.
There is something rather cruel in the way the same priest celebrates the wedding between the spectators and the “European cow”—referring to the cow impregnated and kidnapped by Zeus in the founding Greek myth of Europe—, and it also resonates in the corridor scene where Egle wanders through the crowd in search of a God, a hug, a kiss.

As with almost any other Jelinek’s play, “The Supplicants” presents itself as an intimidating flood of words, with neither characters nor lines, and scarcely a full stop and a new paragraph. In Hermann Schmidt-Rahmer’s production at the Schauspielhaus in Bochum in 2016, the spectators were overwhelmed by those words that seven actors and actresses threw from the stage to the stalls.
Koršunovas attempts a new way, going through and beyond the text, cutting the images, tailoring them to an international group of actors and engaging the audience. A perfect form and a refined setting seem not to be the goal of this project, which rather served as a moment of discussion on the opportunities for a new politics of the performance art. By also taking advantage, here and there, of the certainly successful stratagem of physical and verbal explicit violence, the operation preserves its nature: the result of an acting training session, creating a cruel playground where to challenge one’s attention to such worrying drifts as indifference and superficiality.
“We came but we are not here at all.” These words echo inside our minds during the last performance, where horrible footage of starving Africa—not without a hint to Syrian refugees—is projected: the audience is invited to sit in the playhouse, joining one actor bathed in amber light. Keeping a grin on his face, he is compulsively devouring popcorns.

Published on 15 March 2017 (Article originally written in Italian)

Looking for a strange language

“It’s about speaking your own language in a way that other people are inspired to speak their own language. We rely on the difference between languages and the friction of the images that are moved by these languages. An idea is developed through everyone speaking and a mode of conduct that cannot be traced back to a single person. The whole is neither more nor less than the sum of its parts. It’s different, yet the same.” (Dirk Baecker)(1)

We can only find these lights in the darkest depths. They magically attract us; the closer we get to them, the more dangerous and simultaneously fascinating it’ll be — until we, before we believe to grasp it and simultaneously recognize its shape, find ourselves again in a large ghastly mouth. In hindsight, in your own solving, we then come to realize that the light was only a trap, a deception, that we have fallen victim to. Now that we have landed in the stomach of the fish, now that it’s impossible for us to be with the light, we are in it, as it were. It’s this moment that unites the deep sea fish with a theatre of the foreign, where we believe to have realized something only to then become aware of the fact that we can merely look at it but never see through it.

In recent times more and more international theatre groups have emerged, and reflect on their ‘own’ cultural and societal differences, and thus the conditions for their collaboration. It has been noticeable that these groups have very different approaches to their linguistic and cultural differences. As soon as various language and cultural realms meet in theatre, how we deal with the foreign is not only an important indicator — after all it has always been one, even without multilingualism or the like on stage; what’s more, how we deal with the foreign determines the relation to theatre which either serves as a self-affirmation machine, when you want to make the foreign understandable, or else can be seen as a space that allows for boundary experience, when we look to admit the foreign. That raises the question of how we can develop a language through the collaboration of international theatre troupes that grants the foreign to loom large. Not as the part of a foreigner played on a stage or as a key subject of a festival, or even a theoretical panel in the foyer of a theatre that decorates the repertoire; rather in the way of collaboration, and in the way of how we understand and organise our artistic practice, and how we reflect and include the (pre)requisites for our own work.
This question is germane both to national theatres as well as independent theatre companies, and also to independent production groups, that I consider myself to be a part of. It concerns artists of all kind insofar as they don’t rely on sure-fire success mechanisms and want to make art for the sake of art. It particularly applies to internationally active theatre artists as these types of cooperations reveal differences that need to be dealt with, such as linguistic and cultural distinctions as well as those between the various educational (theatre) backgrounds. How can we deal with the non-common, without standardizing it in favour of a common ‘multi-cultural language’, and to have it dissolve in a commensurable international mishmash by making it fully understandable?
I want to plead for the theatre as a space that allows boundary experience; a place where institutions and groups of artists don’t deprive themselves of their ability to surprise themselves. Both through an art scene that tries to calculate the uncertainty of cultural conceptions and positions a bit too much, as well as through an artistic attitude of being all too sure of one’s procedures. I imagine a theatre that may continue to appear foreign to itself.

The theatre of the deep sea fish

Bernhard Waldenfels says in “Thinking the Foreign” that the radical foreignness is only tangible in a paradox way as it escapes our clutches. I cannot see myself where I am not. The radical foreign is walking in front of me, like an invisible ghost, and I still cannot overtake it. It can’t be alienated, but it stays foreign and can only be grasped as an experienced impossibility. At the same time, it has always been part of the own:

“We learn our mother tongue through listening to the language of others that precedes our own speech. The name we are given is the name we got from others; the same goes for our habits, customs and traditions. All ideas of purity are shattered thereon.” (2)

The subject never really owns him or herself; nevertheless he/she is with him/herself abroad as a ‘not-just-me’. They will only find access to themselves through the foreign, which, however, they can never grasp. This dilemma can lead to great frustration as you never find yourself where you want, namely with yourself. On the other hand, it can also lead to a gesture and attitude that opens up to the unknown, which can touch on security, uncertainty and knowledge. The attempt to take over the unknown seems to only succeed through a never-ending approach, and through knowing that it is never quite conceivable. This approach can only occur as long as the supposed obvious knowledge about oneself and others is also perceived as a linguistic, social and cultural construct. Only then can there be a theatrical approach.

What goes for the subject goes for the bourgeois theatre; the subject who ever since Freud can no longer feel at home in his or her own home, as he or she only represents the tip of the iceberg; and deep sea fish lurk in the unconscious who dare to stare at us every once in a while in our dreams with one eye that is similar to our own and one that is profoundly dissimilar and strange. It can no longer consider itself as a bourgeois situation of enlightenment as the status of the supposed tangible knowledge that should be enlightened has become questionable. Especially since the static knowledge has never really been like this in enlightenment; however, at least there used to be certain bourgeois ideals that ought to have been reached for in order to experience freedom as an independent autonomous individual.

The theatre has always been dealing with representations — just like every person that speaks, thinks and therefore abstracts. The scrappiness of these representations, however, can never be completely hidden, no matter how adept the fourth wall. In theatre we pretend as if there were no abyss where said deep sea fish bustle — between every term and every phenomenon that has to be named; between every actor and his or her character; as well as between the aspirations of a theatre and its reality. A great part of contemporary theatre still largely practices a type of theatre whose means are hierarchical and used for the purpose of an idea in order to depict the world in the broadest sense, without questioning the conditions for this logic of depiction. What’s more, a different artistic practice has been established for a long time already where the central means have taken on a life of their own and become autonomous. Brecht had declared war on suggestions, the opium dens for the people, in order to expedite the attempt of an epic theatre. He did so through making the familiar appear unfamiliar again through the means of theatre, so that things that appear recognized could move out of their inconspicuousness and could be looked at in a different way. It must have been about pointing out the phantasmal content of societal mechanisms, but not without applying them themselves. Brecht seemed to know that theatre doesn’t allow the circumvention of the illusion, and that you can only win over it by climbing down into the “opium dens, the hatchery of the illusion (…)” (3). Nothing works without illusion.

Theatre as a machine of surplus

If it’s no longer ostensibly about theatre offering subjects the possibility to make sure of themselves through the identification with illusions, it can suddenly be about something else entirely. The terms ‘post-dramatic theatre’, coined in the 1960s by Hans-Thies Lehmann as a reaction to artistic theatre practices, eliminates the hierarchy in theatre by breaking up its centre of the literary basis and its interpretation by the director and releasing the means of theatre in order to attribute them an autonomy (again). Light, sound, image, costume, voice, video and text are equal means, and are participants of a performance act that is paid more attention to (4). Theatre as a location of tangible assembly steps into the foreground again by no longer reducing the theatre text to the dramatic text; rather the theatre performance itself creates a text through the “shared time spent in the shared air we breathe in the room” (5). This text is able to reflect the foundations of theatre, and addresses the status of its illusory reality. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we shed the illusion, because it will always be there, no matter how cool you are standing on stage. It’s much more about enduring the ambivalence of the theatre, which always refers to something else, as it has always more than one ground there. Everything is at least doubled. Even a fly that crosses the air and light of a performance suddenly becomes a different fly. There are now at least two flies.

Which brings us back to the deep sea fish. Those beings who lurk in the abyss of representation, and who are on the one hand dangerous and eerie, and on the other can be this fascinating and intriguing precisely because of that; because these mechanisms of representation are displayed in the very moment when the performance itself is addressed. The fly can no longer count as a representation of an ordinary fly, but becomes something else. Yanking up the representation exposes a space that is not yet occupied and doesn’t have a solid form but that means opportunity. And since we can only describe this space through a symbolic, phantasmal which can never only name what we want to name, we have to send eerie deep sea fish into the abyss as a metaphor. They lurk everywhere: between the name and the person who is meant by that name; between the term ‘tree’ and the thing that we point to when it has a trunk, twigs and a few leaves; in our dreams and finally in itself as a metaphor. What do these deep sea fish have to do with the foreign now?

“The foreign can only be conceived indirectly; as a deviation from the normal and as a surplus which exceeds the normal expectations and demands. Talent, gift and forgiveness are some examples; excesses of hatred and violence as well as agony and traumatisation are also part of it. We encounter them on the verge of the ordinary and the extra-ordinary. Without the effect of trans-cultural surpluses, every culture ends in culturalism which revives the old aporias.” (6)

Theatre which continuously refers to itself is as interesting as a conversation in which the conversation partner has to point out that you’re having a conversation, thus blocking the actual conversation. Displaying for the sake of displaying doesn’t seem to be a good concern for interesting theatre. Nevertheless, reflecting on the act of performance is liberating because it can open the space for potentiality as you can strive to think and perceive the conditions of your own thinking and perception. You may think that you cannot completely think everything, and you may perceive that you cannot perceive something as a whole. Room for imagination yawns that allows for something foreign to appear. The foreign is precisely what I cannot denote with the deep sea fish as a term, but what I need to and have to denote. The deep sea fish thus permanently change their form as they repeatedly challenge other descriptions and other terms; they are truly there — behind the light that they carry in front of them like a fishing rod — where you cannot see them until they cease to be deep sea fish, but have always been something else. In a linguistic approach to phenomena of this world we continuously produce surpluses. These are words, images or signs in general that overstate what they want to denote, as they cannot hit it, and they cannot be realised in what they want to hit. The foreign may seem indirect in the light of this surplus; namely as a rest that cannot be realised in the understanding of this thing or this phenomenon, which was to be denoted or ascertained. Theatre permanently deals with signs and images and in doing so produces a surplus, because everything appears doubly and nothing can only mean that one thing. The theatre is a surplus machine. The surpluses, however, are only visible once they are perceived in the act of overshooting.

An artistic practice that manages to get on to this foreign or, to stay with the metaphor, these deep sea fish, and to discover it in the surplus, that don’t defer to a complete understanding of things, meets a changed understanding of subject. This is because it finds less of the ‘I’ of oneself rather than the subject of the unconscious, as Hans-Thies Lehmann comments in the post-dramatic theatre. You need an appropriate location in order to suffer the ambivalence of the subject; to rejoice in it; to play with it; and to experiment with its possibilities and dangers. And the theatre can be this location. Not the cinema, or painting; not the fine arts — the moment of the here and now of a real gathering of all actors is missing here. No, the theatre is the only vehicle, as Samuel Weber describes it, that can be ‘on location’.

This theatre on location doesn’t draw its power from a message that it wants to convey, or from one meaning that it wants to establish; rather it is more open towards the effects it produces as it pays more attention to the moment in the here and now. It sees itself more like an experiment with an open outcome, and tests phenomena rather than merely puts them on stage. The focus does not lie in the depiction of the world rather than in the implementation of the world. However, in this implementation we may and must work with depictions, as the illusory imaginations are indispensable to even imagine anything. It’s less about the understanding of something than about the (alien) experience.

This experience of the foreign is also due to the kind of artistic collaboration. In parallel to the emergence of the term “post-dramatic theatre”, moving the method of working away from the director to collectives and director duos has become more established, especially in the German independent theatre scene, such as done in, for example, the Rimini Protokoll, She She Pop, Gintersdorfer Klaaßen, Auftrag und Lorey, Hoffmann und Lindholm or Monster Truck, and many more. These methods put a plurality of voices in the foreground that allow for an outside perspective instead of following the one genius interpretation of a single director. Heiner Goebbels writes, “Not seeing one’s own lack of competence as a weakness and covering it up but using it as a strength in order to broaden the artistic perspective and to thus broaden the view of the other — this is the core of the collective work.” There therefore is room for the possibility of opening up to something foreign not only in terms of form and aesthetics and its effects on an audience, but also as space can open up in the method itself.

The international theatre collective ISO or (un)learning how to speak collectively

Such artistic collaboration — the kind of collaboration as such, that is — strives to approach foreign or strange space. ISO (International Super Objective Theatre) (7) , which is still evolving, can demonstrate how these spaces can be felt out in the context of artistic, international collaboration. This collective was born out of various masterclasses, organised by the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe (UTE), an association that chiefly unites big national and municipal theatres from European countries. It’s all the more amazing that experiments are being embarked upon here as well through attempting the collective work between members of various language and cultural realms, facilitating space for something new and unknown, also in terms of finances.

The group largely consists of actors and only to a small extend of directors. Some of them work in the independent scene, while others are employed. Everyone has a different educational (theatre) background, speaks a different mother tongue, and lives in different theatrical contexts. It took a while until I could see the fact that we hadn’t found each other ‘organically’ as an advantage. Now I see this fact as an advantage because you collaborate with people who, normally, you would otherwise never work with. On the one hand, that’s because you dally over different aesthetics and are used to different production processes; on the other hand it’s because you tend to move within your national borders when it comes to work. This foreignness amongst each other has led to long discussions on working methods, aesthetics and terms in the course of the residences and masterclasses, which we still have today. It challenges your own understanding of theatre and art, and repeatedly leads to questioning your own ideas. ISO is a theatre thinking space, and a source of friction where we continuously renegotiate what theatre can be. The members’ different educational backgrounds (8) lead to the fact that various working methods come together. One person is used to starting with the text, while the other is used to developing the text in the course of rehearsals; yet another is used to putting the actor at the centre of the work, while another focuses on the image, and the third starts with the situation. This shows: ISO doesn’t want to present homogenous aesthetics; it is an aesthetic experiment. The various working methods aren’t suspended in favour of one working method, but are tested one next to the other, which oftentimes leads to lines between, for example, performance and representative approaches being blurred and starting an open exchange between each other. During an open rehearsal at the Sfumato Theatre, where ISO chose Manet’s painting “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” as the starting point of their work, the performance approach was at the foreground, as we played a game of imagination next to a comedic role play that mocked its own ‘role-ness’, next to a psychologically motivated play. The performance was put in the context of an open rehearsal; types of theatre are rehearsed here as well. ISO’s joint understanding of theatre is not founded in a joint interest of one aesthetic; on the contrary, it’s founded in jointly working on what initially doesn’t unite us, on what’s between us. The factor that unites ISO is the common interest in the diversity, and the desire neither to dissolve these differences nor to insist on them. This is why it’s important for ISO that we don’t always get along on stage, as different languages are spoken; French is next to Portuguese and next to German, next to Arabic, next to Greek, next to Bulgarian, next to Romanian. The working language is English, but the various languages play an important role both in the artistic form as well as in the working process. ISO therefore often discusses terms, such as form, role, character and phenomenon. The word ‘form’ for the other can mean форма, forme or formă. Thus, through not understanding, we repeatedly are made aware of the construction of our own language. The word that makes you think will hit exactly what you mean may be a different one. You want to talk about one thing but can only talk about many things. Thus, ISO can never only mean one thing; it always means a contradiction and examination of the not understandable.

ISO’s vision lies in finding a common theatre language. You could also call it a European theatre language since the members, with one exception, are all from Europe. The common theatre language doesn’t mean a negation of all (theatre) languages in favour of one understandable and closed one where all others could be realised. On the contrary: for ISO the opportunity of a joint European theatre language can only exist through ambiguity and the impossibility of translating it. Contrary to a policy of borders and clear differentiations, ISO seeks the dissolution of boundaries — the dissolution of various forms of theatre, languages and identities. They bank on a collective working method rather than the takeover of one person, and multilingualism. The attempt lies in trying to jointly learn how to speak. It seems, though, as if you could only learn how to speak this language by simultaneously unlearning it. You can learn that your own language is a foreign language, not by forgetting it but by becoming aware of its own foreignness; much like staring at your own hand long enough to get this fascinating eerie feeling that it might not be your own at all. It’s less about coming up with a new language than about designing the path to this joint speaking in a way that everyone can speak their own language while perceiving it as a foreign language. On stage this path can for instance lie in using language not only as a means for understanding through which we can explain things. Instead it can lie in making language appear as something foreign by putting the focus on its melody, its rhythm and its tonality, as for example done in ISO’s most recent open rehearsal at the Teatro Nacional São João do Porto where we approached Karl Kraus’ text “The Last Days of Mankind” precisely through the various languages.

Probably the most important aspect of ISO’s theatre work therefore seems to be founded in allowing space for the foreign, the unknown. Characteristically, the collective will deal with Ovid’s Metamorphosis in its upcoming project. For ISO, metamorphosis can be the result of transcultural collaboration which is dependent on a certain openness for the new and unknown. Once on the level of collaboration by allowing the co-existence of various working methods, thus allowing for another, a third working method through this juxtaposition. And also on the level of aesthetics which relies on not dissolving the not understandable, especially with respect to language, and instead maintaining and playing with it.

It seems as if this was a climate where deep sea fish feel comfortable and where they would dare to show themselves in the cracks and abysses. They are rarely marvelled at; we can only see their light flash for brief moments. We don’t want to create a theatre that you watch and then say, “That’s it. That’s the foreign!” We can only keep the promise, or as Lehmann put it in relation to Adorno who, when it came to the arts, considered what was opened up to be more relevant than what was achieved: “Great theatre delights more as a promise rather than the upholding of the same. Aesthetic experience notices the flashing of something else in what is happening, a possibility that is pending and in a utopian way upholds the condition of something announced that is undefined.”

[1] Dirk Baecker: “Das Theater als Trope“. In: “Theater der Zeit“ – Arbeitsbuch 2011, No. 7/8, p. 15.

[2] Bernhard Waldenfels, Das Fremde denken, in: Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, Online-Ausgabe, 4 (2007), H. 3, URL: https://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/3-2007/id=4743, (20 December 2016)

[3] Frank-M. Raddatz: “Das Theater der Täter”, in: same pbl.: “Brecht frisst Brecht”, 2007, Henschel Verlag, p. 17 ff.

[4] Cf.: Samuel Weber: “Vor Ort”, in: G. Brandstetter, Helga Finter, Markus Wessendorf (pbl.): “Grenzgänge: Das Theater und die anderen Künste”, Thübingen, Gunter Narr Verlag, 1998, p.31 ff.

The predecessors of the bourgeois dramatic theatre had not yet banned this moment of the performance, as Samuel Weber explains with view to the Aristotelian term of the unit of time and location, which, according to Weber, was first in relation to the dimension of the performance, not the plot.

[5] Thies Lehman, Hans: “Postdramatisches Theater”. Frankfurt am Main, 1999, Verlag der Autoren, p.12

[6] Bernhard Waldenfeld, Das Fremde denken, in: “Zeithistorische Forschungen / Studies in Contemporary History”, online edition, 4 (2007), H. 3, URL: https://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/3-2007/id=4743; (20 December 2016)

[7] The collective came together under the guidance of the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe (UTE) and has been supported by funds from the European Union. Currently the collective is composed of: Petya Alabozova, Balazs Bodolai, Bilyana Georgieva, Khawla Ibraheem, Aglaia Katsiki, Boris Krastev, Benjamin Lew-Klon, Sophie Lewisch, Vincent Mejou-Cortes, Luis Puto, Angélique Zaini, Kim Willems.

[8] The various educational institutions are: ESAD (École Supérieure d’Art Dramatique de la Ville de Paris); Szentgyörgyi István Faculty of Theatre Arts at Târgu-Mureş in Hungary; National Academy for Thatre and Film Art “Krastyu Sarafov”; Acting and theatre studies rom the University of Haifa; National Theatre of Northern Greece Drama School; media and cultural studies at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf; theatre direction at the Academy of Performing Arts Baden-Württemberg in Ludwigsburg; CEPIT (Regional Conservatory for Drama); Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique in Paris; Escola Superior de Música, Arte e Espetáculo do Porto; Institute for applied theatre science in Gießen.

Published on 22 February 2017 (Article originally written in German)

Role(s) Of Arts in Migration Europe?

“/…/The legendary ping pong club is being restaged at mumok in order to reactivate Július Koller’s goal of transforming art and its institutions. Visitors are invited to play, exchange shots, opinions, and positions. In the light of our current crisis of democracy, Koller’s fair-play game seems all the more topical today.”

These are the last couple of sentences I read on one of the white walls of the 5th floor at Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (MUMOK), overhearing the reverberating sound of the ping pong ball, echoing distinctively in the hall as a group of visitors is playing on one of the tables behind me. It feels like the fading away resonance of each ball is gently asking a question, taken up by the next one. The soft, but insistent rhythm of this respectful discussion sticks to my mind for the rest of the day. Then I leave the Museumquartier, cross the slightly slippery, frosted street and enter into Volkstheater, where the Democracy in a Migration Society roundtable is to take place.

While the participants are getting seated and some of the chairs on the stage of the Rote Bar are producing cracking noises, I am still thinking about Július Koller. About his artistic presence; his boldness in transforming himself into an object of art; his fine irony; his healthy connection to the current socio-political context and its various layers; his ability to preserve his personal navigation system, despite the abrupt changes he witnesses. Born in former Czechoslovakia in 1939 and died in Slovakia in 2007, he is among the most influential conceptual artists of the epoch. He lived and created in both a Europe that was disunited by the Iron Curtain and in a Europe that was united by the European Union. But, in an impressive manner, he managed to preserve his artistic neutrality and the needed critical distance so that he could illustrate and comment on what happens in everyday life, the world of art and politics, and how they are intertwined. What is more, he also succeeded in accomplishing his attempts in reconfiguring the principles of the familiar, by inventing new, temporary “cultural situations”, as Koller calls them; and he does it through minimalistic, simple yet right at their place gestures.

The Ping-Pong Club exhibition, originally shown in Bratislava in 1970, and now restaged at the MUMOK as part of his retrospective, is just one example. In it, Koller invites the visitors to play table tennis in the exhibition room, to pass on to one another the ping pong ball based on the preexisting set of rules of the game, which guarantee its equality and fairness. And propels participants forward into consideration of rules as foundation of human relations on both interpersonal and collective level. This way Koller transforms the well-known sports game into a multifaceted metaphor; but also poses many questions. And, as his fans know, the question mark is not just an artistic tool in his work, but an important, aesthetic gesture that he employs repeatedly.

Interrogative sentences turn out to be the prevailing linguistic structure used by the participants at the roundtable – Meera Jamal, Ioanna Petrisi, Tina Leisch, Monika Mokre, Vlad Troitzkyi and the moderator Corinna Milborn – as well. Similarly to the ping pong game, the organizers have managed to ground the debate on a solid, preliminary agreed on basis. An essential component of which is the insistence not to look at the current situation of flux of people, coming to the continent from the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa, as a crisis, as a singular, extraordinary event, that needs to be resolved in order to return to normality. Instead, the perspective chosen is the one, admitting that this situation is already a fact, this is the new normality and that means that the attitude towards it, the approaches and the solutions should be long-term ones, and not at all momentary.

For the purposes of even more thorough and constructive rationalization of this notion, it might have been wise to consider some example of the extremely rich, migrant past of Europe. Stretching through the poles of history of domination on continents outside, through the specific relation inside between East and West, North and South, it all offers a significant amount of food for thought. Yet the span and the attention of the roundtable focus on the topic of the refugees as the most acute situation that needs urgent actions and strategies. Logically, at first the conversation sets off from the most painful and pressing issues that are often commented: protection of human rights, access to information, and mechanisms for their enforcement, conditions and services available at the detention centers, procedures for refugee status determination.

Slowly, but yet visibly, as opinions and examples are being exchanged over the table as ping pong balls, a second layer of questions begins to sneak in and gradually shifts the perspective. Inevitably issues of identity are touched upon and the topic of who/what is Europe and who “we” are is already here. It arises most clearly after Vlad Troitzkyi’s statement, in which he metaphorically describes Europe as a library, precious with its collection, in which everyone is welcome to choose a book and read it, yet all readers have to respect the rules and should not bring in any food or beverages, for instance. Tina Leisch in turn suggests that she prefers to think of Europe through the imagery of the supermarket, which is largely accessible for citizens from all walks of life and everyone can contribute to its shelves.

And there is a moment of silence; at least in my head; because a large, important space is opened up for the reconsideration of several major topics. Particularly crucial is the logic of the recognizing that we are already living in migration societies, and this is how it is going to be. To begin with, this is the starting point of the very old but still needed discussion on the access to culture, elitism, and the intellectual exclusivity of certain areas of the environment and given institutions. Then, this is the moment to initiate the talk on the role(s) of arts in society, especially in the frame of new pressing social issues. At this point of the debate the following questions also belong: what is the role of theatre, with its various forms and subgenres, in the different European societies today in relationship to their own members; what kind of hierarchies are present; and what could be the theatre’s involvement and contribution in the process of integration of newcomers; how should various theatrical structures react that are different in size, funding and presence, ranging from the state-run theatres and independent collectives to individual artists; where should the stage itself direct its gaze, and what artistic means are best to be employed? And, of course, many, many other questions, that are already anticipated, briefly mentioned or elaborated by the speakers at the round table.

Again, none of them is a new one, but the changed social reality has produced a new “cultural situation” which casts a different light; and offers fresh opportunities, but also requires us to negotiate the given rules of the game in order to be able to play it together. And not at all to claim that anything is a tabula rasa, but rather to be honest first of all with ourselves about the state of affairs, and then to attempt to openly state rules that, to the greatest extent possible, are fair and acceptable for everyone.

Furthermore, directly or implicitly, the roundtable offers some initial potential directions where to look for the answers. To begin with, I just simply slide my glance up and down the still preserved, though beginning to decay at certain spots, lavish interior of the 19th century building of Volkstheater, where we are. Its name literary means “people’s theatre”, and it is among the major institutions of its size and kind in Vienna. And this particular institution, together with Union of Theatres of Europe, a prominent trans–European network, is organizing such a roundtable for the second time. This in itself already is a clear telltale sign.

Other two possible directions to look for some hints are alluded by the two participants in the discussion, who are, among other things, theatre professionals. Vlad Troitzkyi emphasizes the fact that theatre is one of the spaces where challenging social questions can be posed due to its ability to profoundly unfold and express troubling social situations. And it does so exhaustively, including the aspects that often remain unsaid in personal and political talks. Tina Leisch builds up on that by confirming her belief in the effectiveness of theatre, but only when it succeeds to break out of the elitist, intellectual bubble, which many of the prominent theatrical institutions inhabit.

And a step further would be to look into the own practice of the two speakers quoted above. Troitzkyi is the artistic director of the prominent Ukrainian independent theatre DakhaBrakha. During the protests at Maidan Nezalezhnosti in 2013-2014 in Kiev, the troupe and its leader were actively involved in what was happening outside the theatre building. Tina Leisch is among the founders of “The Silent Majority” artistic collective, gathered to support refugees in their fight for rights and improvement of their conditions. Troitzkyi’s latest production is the opera-circus Babylon at Nova Opera Theatre in Kiev. It explores the tower as a metaphor and determining myth, while parodying the classical opera as a genre. Meanwhile Leisch is involved in rehearsals for the musical Traiskirchen (homonymous to the Austrian town, near which the biggest refugee camp in the country is set), for which actual refugees are casted.

This is how the ping pong ball stays in the air: on one and the same table, but also in between different tables, when needed. And among its tranquilizing, repetitive bounces, we can clearly hear the message that arts, and theatre in particular, can and may play many roles in today’s migration societies. There’s no cure-all, but questions need to be posed — again and again. And rules need to be negotiated.

Published on 31 January 2017 (Article originally written in Bulgarian)

YOUNG EUROPEAN JOURNALISTS ON PERFORMING ARTS

Category: Theatre & Art

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

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

Governance, Ghosts and Electricity

Governance, Ghosts and Electricity

Unsurtitled Theatricality

Unsurtitled Theatricality—Three plays at the Volkstheater

30 days with Kirill Serebrennikov

30 days with Kirill Serebrennikov

Les Misérables?

Les Misérables?

Talking theatre and changing socio-political landscapes with Gorčin Stojanović

Talking theatre and changing socio-political landscapes with Gorčin Stojanović

Let’s start with the most obvious questions: Yugoslavia as a political entity is gone but the Yugoslav Drama Theatre is still standing and its name as it was declared by Josip Broz Tito in 1947, when it was established, remains unchanged. How come and what is the message behind that?

As a matter of fact, that was the second part of my question that you already started answering—what is the role and place of arts and theatre in particular in these structures, and how are they implemented through representative institutions such as the Yugoslav Drama Theatre?

And when you prepare the artistic programme of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre today, who are the envisioned audiences? Or, if we go back to business language, who are the target audiences?

So now you are paying it forward?

And what is next? What should we be looking forward to seeing on the stage of the JDP in the upcoming seasons? And what are future directions that you are envisioning?

An Unfortunate Tale Of Not Finding the Truth

An Unfortunate Tale Of Not Finding the Truth

KORŠUNOVAS IN ROME. THE QUEEN, THE SERPENT, AND THE REFUGEE INFERNO

KORŠUNOVAS IN ROME. THE QUEEN, THE SERPENT, AND THE REFUGEE INFERNO

Looking for a strange language

Looking for a strange language

The theatre of the deep sea fish

Theatre as a machine of surplus

The international theatre collective ISO or (un)learning how to speak collectively

[1] Dirk Baecker: “Das Theater als Trope“. In: “Theater der Zeit“ – Arbeitsbuch 2011, No. 7/8, p. 15.

[2] Bernhard Waldenfels, Das Fremde denken, in: Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, Online-Ausgabe, 4 (2007), H. 3, URL: https://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/3-2007/id=4743, (20 December 2016)

[3] Frank-M. Raddatz: “Das Theater der Täter”, in: same pbl.: “Brecht frisst Brecht”, 2007, Henschel Verlag, p. 17 ff.

[4] Cf.: Samuel Weber: “Vor Ort”, in: G. Brandstetter, Helga Finter, Markus Wessendorf (pbl.): “Grenzgänge: Das Theater und die anderen Künste”, Thübingen, Gunter Narr Verlag, 1998, p.31 ff.

The predecessors of the bourgeois dramatic theatre had not yet banned this moment of the performance, as Samuel Weber explains with view to the Aristotelian term of the unit of time and location, which, according to Weber, was first in relation to the dimension of the performance, not the plot.

[5] Thies Lehman, Hans: “Postdramatisches Theater”. Frankfurt am Main, 1999, Verlag der Autoren, p.12

[6] Bernhard Waldenfeld, Das Fremde denken, in: “Zeithistorische Forschungen / Studies in Contemporary History”, online edition, 4 (2007), H. 3, URL: https://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/3-2007/id=4743; (20 December 2016)

Role(s) Of Arts in Migration Europe?

Role(s) Of Arts in Migration Europe?

Europe: A library or a supermarket?