Tag: art

Is Athens ready for take-off?

Is Athens ready for take-off?

“Can Athens become Europe’s new arts capital?” wonders the BBC in a recent article on the documenta14 in Athens. A “poor yet sexy city”, according to the correspondent who reported on the creative enthusiasm currently prevailing in the city.

This is only one of the several articles pointing out that despite the deep economic crisis the artistic production in Greece has increased. Especially with respect to theatre, everyone seems to take part in it, either as a creator or as member of the audience. The numbers are revealing; there have been more than 800 premieres since the beginning of the season in October. Besides, during 2016 there were 1,490 performances in the 308 officially registered theatres.

© Irina Klyuev

But before we rush into referring to a reinvention of Athens, we ought to consider the conditions on which such a theatrical plethora appears. Because above all rises the issue of survival, as Irene Mountraki, dramaturg and head of international relations at the National Theatre of Greece, accurately commented in her article published a year ago under the title “Can Greece, home of drama, survive a state of emergency?”

It seems like a tragic irony. Yet the theatrical explosion has occurred with zero state support. Grants have been frozen since 2012 and it was not until March when the new Minister of Culture, Lydia Koniordou, one of the most prominent Greek actresses, announced their reinstatement in the forthcoming theatrical season.

In most cases actors work without contracts; they are not paid for the rehearsals (unless they work for State Theatres or some serious private companies), and often there is no prearranged payment for them besides the commission from the box-office. It is not rare at all for young actors to accept to perform for free, in the hopes of better working conditions in the future. Quite often there is a contribution box instead of tickets, and the money collected is split every night among the participants. Hardship does not discourage the Greek actors with a sweeping 95% unemployment rate, and they often have to do two or three (non-)theatre related jobs in order to make ends meet. There is a lot of flexibility—as long as they can find a way to make theatre.

All Athens is a stage

Due to the freezing of grants, many theatres have been closed. Where there used to be theatre Amore, a point of reference in the most productive theatrical life of the 90s, now stands a supermarket. Not to mention historical Amphi-theatro in Plaka, which is now a souvenir shop.

The need for expression though is huge and the Greek artist becomes a resourceful Ulysses coming up with inventive solutions. Thus, beside the properly equipped regular theatres, appear several other venues which either serve the needs of the performance or serve as a last resort. Over the past years we have watched performances in all kinds of warehouses and former industrial buildings; in bars and traditional coffee shops; in museums, galleries, even old byzantine churches; theatre in bedsits and apartments; in old patios of the city; in the public slaughterhouses; in old wagons and even in moving vehicles. We have even watched a performance in the bathrooms of the Bios multi-purpose venue.

It is significant that many stages on the theatrical map of the city have been named after the function the buildings originally served: Vyrsodepseio (tannery), Synergyo (garage), Fournos (bakery), to mention but a few.

Another current trend are the walking performances, which invite the audience to become familiar with unknown aspects of the city. So you could say that “all Athens is a stage”, paraphrasing Shakespeare’s famous quote.

There is something very attractive in all this; however, there are problems too. How many of these places are appropriate for the specific use? A few years ago the Municipality of Athens attempted to check whether safety protocols are followed, enforcing an antiquated law which could hardly be applied nowadays. The attempt came to nothing.

Festivals within and outside

It is also due to the state’s indifference that the 16 municipality regional theatres cannot function properly and gradually vegetate. This is why when we refer to the contemporary Greek theatrical production, we mainly focus on Athens.

In Thesaloniki there is even more limited potential, since apart from the National Theatre of Northern Greece there are 20 more stages which mainly put on productions from Athens.

The various festivals, which are radically increasing all over Greece, are quite in the same condition. They mainly take place during the summer months, they all share the same programme with a few alterations. One of the most brilliant exceptions is the Philippi Festival in Kavala and Thasos, which selects a specific topic every year and orders new plays based on it.

Nevertheless, when we discuss performing art festivals in Greece, we automatically think about one of the most ancient ones in Europe, the Greek festival, known as Athens & Epidaurus Festival, which during the period 2005–2015 and under the leadership of Yorgos Loukos, clearly succeeded in renewing the scene; there was both an opening to non-Greek productions and a boost to important local voices. This task seems to have been successfully undertaken by the current artistic director of the festival, Vangelis Theodoropoulos, who last year initiated a series of fruitful conversations over the kind of festival we would like to have.

A question that had already been answered over the previous years by innovative choices, such as Beckett’s “Happy Days” with Fiona Shaw in the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus, which usually hosts Ancient drama performances. Several conservative voices considered this choice to be incompatible with this ancient theatre. It was a big success, though. And so was the presence of Pina Bausch, Thomas Ostermaier, Kevin Spacy and even the Noh Theatre from Japan.

Innovation and conservatism: two opposite forces

Indeed not only a few times have the conservative voices in Greece frustrated creative enthusiasm. Last year, Stathis Livathinos, the current artistic director of the National Theatre who keeps active international contacts such as with the Vakhtangov, had to cancel the performance of the Nash Equilibrium both due to political and social reactions, as the play included excerpts from a terrorist’s book. In the case of the Corpus Christi performance in Chytirio, the performance was reproached for religious reasons. While in the famous case of Jan Fabre’s startling resignation from the leadership of the Athens Festival, it was the artists themselves who objected to a Belgium oriented programme.

The Greek Theatre seems to be fighting two opposite forces. All these cases are very significant yet they coexist in the general context of renewal that had been prevailing in the past few years, since Yorgos Loukos’s decade of running the festival coincided with Yannis Houvardas’s leadership of the National Theatre (2007-2013). Houvardas was also a director who showed great interest in international productions, with its high being the Odyssey directed by Bob Wilson, in a co-production with the Piccolo Teatro.

Moreover, in 2010 a new powerful player joined the field and advanced became a catalyst for the whole Greek theatre scene. The Onassis Cultural Centre (Stegi) invites famous artists to Greece, while at the same time it finances Greek theatre tours abroad.

Over the past few years, this private organisation has been the only one to make an important effort to promote the contemporary Greek civilization abroad, especially in the field of performing arts, which normally ought to be carried out by the state. As a result, the work of the experimental Blitz company or the very young Dimitris Karantzas, has travelled and participated in important festivals and theatres of the world.

Exclusively based on his own powers, Thodoros Terzopoulos, the only truly international Greek director, has worked hard during the past thirty years to finally become internationally acclaimed, and has increased the fame of both his method and his theatre, Attis.

In search of a cultural policy

As mentioned earlier, the lack of cultural policy is tangible not only with respect to the promotion of the Greek artistic product abroad, but also with respect to national policy as such, as in the case of the grants. However we can also see it elsewhere; in the field of education.

there is not even a stage directing school in Greece. Nevertheless, there are 26 recognised drama schools (two of which are national) offering a four-year programme; 24 in Athens, four in Thessaloniki and one in Patras. Every year dozens of young actors graduate from these schools and enter this open job market, trying to find an outlet for their creativity.

This uncontrollable desire to create is definitely quite impressive, but it also entails some major risks. The improvisational and spontaneous way in which things usually happen often lowers the standards; only few out of the 1,500 performances of the season stand out. Very often poorly prepared performances are presented as avant-garde works, or bad imitations of foreign performances lead to disappointing results. It rarely reaches the poetic depth anymore that could be found in performances by artists, such as Lefteris Vogiatzis, one of the most influential directors of the modern Greek theatre world, who died four years ago.

In conclusion, the prevailing creative enthusiasm provides the ideal conditions for something very fresh and interesting to emerge. , in the context of the financial crisis, the wind blows fair for the Greek theatre. Yet, the take-off cannot succeed if the plain is not on the runway and doesn’t get support from a control tower—in other words, theatre cannot thrive in the absence of national cultural policy.

 

Published on 15 June 2017 (Article originally written in Greek)

Art, Economy, Europe. Strategies against dystopia

Art, Economy, Europe.
Strategies against dystopia

In the magnificent hall of the Mosteiro de São Bento da Vitória in Porto, the Teatro Nacional São João (TNSJ) and the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe (UTE) called a roundtable conference on the theme “Economics, Art and Europe”.
In the context of the three-year project Conflict Zones, the conference — among the side events of the UTE General Assembly, together with a showcase — was opened in front of the delegates from all the 18 member theatres, an opportunity to put up a more and more urgent reflection in the context of an international setting.

The speakers’ table dug the pathway to a complex and compelling discussion, able to cross different and yet complementary areas of work. The researcher Tomáš Sedláček (Czech Republic) is a man of science in the first place; the artistic wing was represented by the director of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano – Teatro d’Europa, Sergio Escobar (Italy) and the artistic director of the TNSJ, Nuno Carinhas (Portugal); the political realm was represented by the mayor of Porto, Rui Moreira. The president of the administrative board of directors of the TNSJ, Francisca Carneiro Fernandes, moderated the discussion.

When one tries to establish a link between the three topics, an immediate response comes from the fact that economics and arts have always been closely tied to one another, with artists’ lives fed to rich patrons, the whole artistic expression at the mercy of public or private funds, or the cartel of the collectors reigning over this or that trend in visual arts. One of the questions raised by such a conference could easily be: which kind of influence can derive from Europe as a political and socio-economical environment?

In the words of Francisca Carneiro Fernandes, and of the all three speakers, “Europe” is almost always paired with terms such as “in crisis”, “shifting” or “under threat”, and the major question is most likely how culture and arts can or cannot lend a helping hand in such a scenario.
The Czech essayist and lecturer Tomáš Sedláček, author of the bestseller book Economics of Good and Evil, is saluted as one of the most groundbreaking voices in contemporary economics, especially because of his inspiring ideas about “economics as a cultural phenomenon.” Far from considering stock markets and indexes a mere system of an addiction to numbers, Sedláček’s conception promotes a reconceptualization of the whole ratio about macro-economics, leading to a realm where economics is the endemic factor of societies, closely attached to the collective production of myths, religions and philosophies.

THE INVISIBLE HAND OF THE SOCIETY

Showing a fundamentally positive attitude, Tomáš Sedláček admits that certain “regulatory mechanisms” might not be perfect — still incapable to avoid bloodsheds and wars — but they are in fact guaranteeing a stable situation. And yet, in such a view, the relatively stable situation of societies is not regulated by the “invisible hand” of economics: that presumed eminence grise, silent and mysterious, is in fact the result of a complex net of material relations, it’s a product of our own culture. The society itself reacts almost spontaneously to certain drifts of economics, giving birth to “a generation of hippies” that counteracts a too profit-oriented economy or to a Kafka that stood up against an excessive fascination of the Austro-Hungarian Empire towards bureaucracy. Another bright example comes from Sedláček’s homeland, with the “Velvet Revolution” in which arts saved politics from a total collapse.
The key to this mysterious balance seems to then lie in the awareness of such interconnections between areas that react to one another following a subterranean turmoil of an action-reaction process. The Czech economist poses the core of such turmoil in cultural movements, stating that the actual role of intellectuals and thinkers is “to keep these channels clean for communication.”
“European / American civilization is based on democracy and capitalism”, Sedláček continues, “two things that, so we were taught, are supposed to go hand in hand. And yet, the Western world has managed to export capitalism but not democracy”. This turns out to be a huge failure. Even Karl Marx argued that “capitalism is the strongest machine to make nations rich”, but the mere act of exporting capitalism is not enough to bring wealth, and can be extremely dangerous when it doesn’t come with the “handbook” of democracy.

THE RELIGION OF ECONOMICS

One should not trust a totally deterministic definition of economics as “a technical analytic science/physics-oriented area”, while it is in fact “ideology covered in disguise of mathematics.” Those very ideologies end up autonomously defining the good and the evil of certain attitudes in administrative and governmental policies.
One of Sedláček’s powerful examples is corruption, which historically used to be considered bad practice because of being directly associated with the act of stealing. Today, instead, it needs an economic reasoning to be seen as wrong. This is because — and here is the other major statement of Sedláček’s above-quoted book — the greatest part of our evaluations on economic phenomena is nowadays confronted with GDP growth.
Quite evidently, the most dangerous risk is to use GDP growth as a touchstone for all socio-cultural manifestations. As the speaker underlines, arts were never supposed to speed up the economy of a nation, but they can slow down the pace of a profit-driven society and give people the extraordinary opportunity of a pause, a hiatus that favours the blooming of thought and knowledge, of emotions and understanding.
In other words, while Gross Domestic Product measures the material growth or decline, arts and culture mark the time of a spiritual florescence. As a matter of fact, the explosion of totalitarian and anti-democratic regimes as foreseen by dystopian literature found its root in the ban of arts and culture, which are to be considered as a barometer for the integrity of societies; a function which is very hard to visualize, because art in some ways escapes the responsibility of being directly useful. Nevertheless, it holds the innate ability to produce meaning, when confronted with the effective expectations of growth claimed by the individuals and, consequently, by the social structures that they compose.
Sedláček’s point is that we are living in a world that is totally based on the act of producing. Nothing around us can be called “natural”, everything is “artificial”, everything was built by humans: even the possibility to travel the world is submitted to artificial material processes (technology and identity regulations).“Our work”, Sedláček says, “is never done, it keeps on growing and growing with no reaching a point.” Finding its way through this chain-reaction of implementing reality, art may be a sort of bell that announces a ceasefire.

SUBJECT-OBJECT REVERSAL

An example from contemporary mythology is brought up to explain this process. In J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Mordor, the villain, created the ring putting “so much power in it that its destruction brings destruction to Mordor himself: the Lord of the Rings is the ring itself” This is very similar to what has happened with economics: we have defined our lives by economic standards, so much so that they have taken complete control over our lives; essentially, economics has become the master of humans. In this sense, putting one’s faith and, more importantly, one’s mind on the things that can face and balance this absolute power is crucial: in a crisis such as the one we had in 2008 and 2009, “if a certain help hadn’t arrived from the area of politics, finance would have destroyed our civilization, exactly because it is based on it.”

POLITICS AND CULTURAL MANAGEMENT

After such a prolific theoretical introduction, it’s perhaps interesting to compare the contributions of the Mayor of Porto, Rui Moreira, on one side and the Director of a national theatre such as the Piccolo Teatro, Sergio Escobar, on the other, to understand some of the strategies carried out by two crucial actors in this scenario.
Escobar introduces the concept of the “improbable” to focus on the role of the arts. Quoting the French composer, writer and programmer Pierre Boulez: “Culture is that human activity that makes inevitable what is highly improbable.” In Escobar’s view, a reply to the refrain that “art is useless” is that “criteria for usefulness are self-referential towards economics”, while the role of culture is namely to put in crisis certainties and stable knowledge, “which are able to freeze the probable”. It was Edgar Morin who said: “The unexpected is possible, the metamorphosis is possible. Hope is the possible not the certain.”
Culture seemed to be at the center of mayor Moreira’s project when he was running for the elections in 2012, and it’s his concern to underline how finances have been growing through the current mandate, not without completing some important tasks as the creation of the Rivoli Municipal Theatre, a playhouse of and for the city.
In Moreira’s political perspective, culture has to be put next to two other accesses: economics and social cohesion, capable to “free the genie from the lamp and lead to a rebirth of the city.” The key seems to be in a basic change of attitude, from being mere “spectators” to becoming “actors in the change”, not following individual agendas, but rather acting as a collective, as a community of individuals. If Moreira says that “the city itself can be an actor”, Escobar talks about the “sensibility of citizens”, a very subtle category to take care of.
For both speakers, and referring to Sedláček’s talk, the question of bureaucracy is certainly crucial, because all contemporary democracies are going through hard times in terms of the functionality of an institution and a deep crisis of political representation, two themes that are responsible for a civic application of cultural conscience.
Escobar doesn’t believe that bureaucracy is the cause of the faults of the EU, most likely a sort of closure towards international relationships that produced “fear, then egoism, then nationalism”, a situation that is also reflected in domestic affairs and particularly in cultural management. Moreira still looks at bureaucracy as a barrier towards a healthy and correct perception of democracy, and he argues that a better understanding of the current media and communication environment might be a key to at least locate the centre of the problem. “With the end of traditional forms of communication (newspaper, TV, radio) and the advent of social networks, we are hitting disinformation. Using devices that can execute everything we want exactly in the way we expect it, we no longer need representative democracy.” And here’s the most dangerous obstacle to social cohesion.
“Culture is then going to replace what was served to us through the media and information.” Moreira underlines how Europe, no matter what the GDP states, still can boast leadership in the cultural production and heritage: a collective act of preservation should be the starting point to prove to the rest of the world that this record doesn’t come from a false perception.

THEATRE IS AN ART OF TIME, LET’S GET TO WORK!

If before “the business of business was business”, according to Tomáš Sedláček, the role of economics is changing. If one wants to sell beer, a brewery won’t be enough: the business of a brewery is now most likely “to harvest beer culture.” Culture is free to produce beauty and richness for the soul when one realizes that it’s first of all an act of harvesting.
Nuno Carinhas’s quiet and discrete voice brings up a strong allure of passion, that in some ways introduces his latest production of Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind, when it presents theatre as “a space for the free movement of people’s ideas and meanings”, “a democratic taste for sharing in opposition of the fashionable representation of unanimity of taste.”
Thus, theatre can become a useful instrument against a neglected memory, to organize a more aware idea of the future. But, as an “art of time”, it must represent the opportunity for a change of pace, a moment of reflection that injects a different time in such a voraciously rapidity-oriented everyday life. “When the world is nothing but silence, there will be narratives for clandestine listening”, but we need to awake our needed time, a special momentum entirely dedicated to listening, instead of a frenzy search for permanent virtual connection. In a media-filtered reality, Carinhas invites everyone to remember the Europe of the Rome Treaties, signed 60 years ago, “before fear” and suspicion of the other.
One might argue that looking at the past as an era with no fears is dangerous: the tensions were profound also at the dawn of Europe. However, Carinhas’s talk goes beyond that; it is a quest for a contemporary model based on the power of free speech in the first place, in these very months where we feel a certain threat by certain politics of repression.
“My Europe”, he argues, “is the Europe of authors, because it is through them that I can perceive the present time. And then, how can we accept that authors are still censored and persecuted in Europe? How can we admit that the other, the different, the foreigner is put into question and negated? We know that negation will haunt us in coming times as a labyrinthian network of walls supported by the complacency of the cynics. So, let’s get to work: Europe is a favourable ground to built communion and usury, fanaticism and freedom of thought, destruction and remorse, populist rhetoric and poetic indignation. We will all have to understand how to live together before a series of collapses defeat us.”

 

 

Published on 13 December 2016 (Article originally written in Italian)