Tag: Comedie de Reims

Ghosts In Virtual Spaces

Ghosts In Virtual Spaces

 

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

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

Schauspiel Köln
Schauspiel Köln

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Published on 18 June 2019

David vs. Goliath

David vs. Goliath

At Reims Scènes d’Europe, held between 24th January – 7th February, which presented artistically valuable works in performing arts marked by a diversity in genre, the performance Concord Floral premiered at the Comedie de Reims. Based on the award-winning play by the Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill, this production is part of a project by the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe, #digitalnatives19, which has brought together five theatres – from Cluj, Cologne, Thessaloniki, Vienna and Reims – to work with this play.

The starting point of the project, which commenced last June and is to continue until June this year, is to explore the balance between the digital and analogue world, especially among the teenagers growing up amidst global digitisation. The production at the Volkstheater Wien has focused on how digitisation affects today’s teenagers’ everyday life, as well as on cyber-bullying, while the performance by the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj will concentrate on positive and negative aspects of global digital communication. The idea is to have five interpretations of Tannahill’s texts, all performed by teenagers, amateur actors. It is worth mentioning that the text was created in Tannahill’s workshops with teenagers, that it has been performed both in schools and in theatres. That was also the case with the performance in Reims, which cast ten teenagers aged between thirteen and seventeen.

One of the reasons for casting teenagers, amateur actors, is based on Tannahill’s belief that it is the amateurs who will inherit the 21st century, as he states in his book, “Theatre of the Unimpressed”: “The Internet’s nature of openness and perpetual liveliness makes it a space made for amateurs who are given the chance to make themselves known through creating in innovative, ground-breaking ways”.

Within the frame of the Festival and of the project #digitalnatives19, Comédie de Reims was also the venue of a conference which tackled various aspects of digitisation. The conference was moderated by the anthropologist Elen Riot, while the topic of the amateur art breakthrough on the internet was addressed by Patrice Flichy, Professor of Sociology at the University of Marne-la-Vallee: “The internet produces amateurs, which is something that our society sees as a new phenomenon. Moreover, amateur practices are still developing thanks to the internet. Today, anyone can use creation and sharing tools which used to belong only to professionals. For example, amateurs can learn video editing by watching tutorials on YouTube, thus expanding their knowledge and creations. That is something we didn’t have before.”

Tannhill’s play takes place in an abandoned greenhouse known as Concord Floral, where a group of teenagers discover their torments, desires, dreams, weaknesses, sexual awakening, love of nature, while sharing it all in cyberspace. They have fled into the garden from the social plague, just like the heroes of Boccaccio’s The Decameron, which served as Tannahill’s main inspiration. However, while Florence in The Decameron is ravaged by the real plague, our present world is, in Concord Floral, affected by a metaphorical plague which all the children have escaped from, and decided to use the garden as a haven, a space of freedom, isolated, safe, and protected from their parents’ supervision. The Reims performance is marked by an extraordinary energy of the young performers who have won the audience with their dedicated, energetic, unrestrained, and sincere acting, playing the roles that echo their own lives. Dressed in colourful sequined clothes, they are placed on garish green grass. There are chairs scattered around, while the performers enjoy the rubble in the absence of parental order and supervision. Their play is guided by a DJ in the background, serving as a narrator who occasionally assumes the role of a controller, similar to the Orwell’s omnipresent Big Brother.

After long standing ovations, the director of the Reims performance, Ferdinand Barbet, said that the performance aims at revealing the real world to teenagers. During the rehearsals, they were constantly checking their mobile phones, immersed in various applications: “They keep taking photos and posting them on their profiles, that’s what’s typical for children of their age. They discuss everything quite openly on the internet, that’s what distinguishes them from my generation”, Barbet said.

In a very inspirational introduction to the conference about digitisation, Elen Riot said that Concord Floral was written with teenagers for teenagers, based on documentary material, and born out of young people’s reality: “It is a reflection on young people, on democracy and on the role of new technologies and social networks in their modes of socialization. If you don’t use new technologies, you are outside of society.” Furthermore, Riot mentioned some interesting insights made by Sherry Turkle, who claims that people are nowadays trapped in online exchanges and images they create about themselves. “I share, therefore I am”, has become a ubiquitous mantra, a contemporary response to Descartes’ rationalist thought “I think, therefore I am”. Today, sharing one’s intimate world has become young people’s life purpose, the primary means through which they construct their identities (and it is not only teens but also older generations who have become consumed by the same digital passion).  The phenomenon has been analysed by Steve Dixon, who has claimed that the internet and social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, are no longer mere virtual spaces, but fields of communication that keep gaining momentum, gradually becoming substitutes for real-life exchanges: “Internet communication is turning into a form of virtual performance of one’s self, it encompasses various forms of communication and representative aspects of everyday life. Theatre is being created by a great number of individuals who use the internet on daily basis, through e-mail communication, their personal websites and blogs, Facebook profiles, etc.” (Steve Dixon, Digital Performance. A History Of New Media In Theater, Dance, Performance Art, And Installation, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London,  2007, 4.) Numerous internet profiles and blogs are digital palimpsests of Goffman’s ideas about representation in everyday life, where subject is being progressively erased, redefined, and re-established as a person/performer, within a computer screen as a theatre proscenium: “The world wide web is a space of therapeutic catharsis, and it creates the greatest theatre in the world which offers fifteen minutes of fame to everyone.”(Steve Dixon, Digital Performance. A History Of New Media In Theater, Dance, Performance Art, And Installation, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London,  2007, 4.) That process leads to new configurations of individuality that obliterate borders between the human and the machine. Man becomes a cyborg, the one connected to the machines.

In line with these problems, Riot mentioned some new, alarming statistics published in Le Monde on 19th January, according to which an excessive exposure to monitors can cause problems, which is why young people in particular should learn how to be alone. The article states that intellectual and cognitive disorders have lately risen by 24 per cent, mental disorders by 54 per cent, and speech disorders by 94 per cent, all connected to an increased fixation to screens. Concluding the analysis of Sherry Turkle’s ideas, Riot expresses an attitude that the machines offer an illusion of friendships, without a demand for intimacy.

On the other hand, the teenagers in Reims’ Concord Floral find the value of the tangible, material world, which was also mentioned by Barbet after the performance: “In the play, the children discover the real world, the one which exists outside the internet and monitors, a life in the nature, in grass, the world outside, that is the point of the play. That is why we use real things in the performance: grass, old things, like this couch, objects filled with life, not abstract things.”

The analogue world of theatre is presented here as a ritual, holy space which preserves the reality crushed by the digital machine. It is a physically present stage which is trying to protect the material nature of the world. We recall the metaphor used by the theoretician Peggy Phelan in 1993, while considering the value of the presence in performing arts as opposed to digital art. She saw theatre as a poor David, struggling against the Goliath of the new media and technological capitalism. (Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics Of Performance, Routledge, Florence, 1993, 149) The hope remains that this David will save the old world, in its most valuable fragments at least.

Published on 27 February 2019 (Article originally written in Serbian by Ana Tasić and translated by Vesna Radovanović)

S.O.S. Encapsulation… or the Soul after Victory III

S.O.S. Encapsulation… or the Soul after Victory III

© Herwig Lewy

The riddle of the International Theatre Festival is its name: Interferences. This year’s sixth edition of the biennial tournament for collective representations in Cluj-Napoca, which has been held every two years since 2008, deals with the theme of war. From the 22nd to the 30th November 2018, 16 ensembles from 13 countries met in Transylvania, a cultural interface below the Carpathian Arc since antiquity.

The cultural diversity and multilingualism can be felt at every corner of the city. It is home to various spaces of experience of distant pasts, which in their linguistic expression meets daily today in Hungarian, Romanian and sometimes also in German. The memorial culture of the city with the name triangle amazes and wonders visitors at the everyday overlays, because besides Cluj-Napoca there are also the names Kolozsvár and Klausenburg. Thus, the two city centres, a Hungarian and a Romanian one, are connected with each other by a street on which the sculpture of a myth was placed. It is the myth of the founding history of Rome – a she-wolf feeding Romulus and Remus on a marble-covered pedestal with a portrait of Trajan, including the inscription: Alla Citta di Cluj – Roma Madre – MCMXXI. The visitor is confronted with the question: Is this still young memorial a reminiscence of 1921, staging Rome as a matrilineal origin for the city of Cluj-Napoca?

Time is Convention

Anyone looking at the sculpture from outside looks for words to understand what kind of représentation finds expression here. Judging by everyday political standards, it may well have been the intention to create sense to meet the challenges after the turn of 1989/1992. However, a link to the founding myths of the nation-building process after Romania’s founding one hundred years ago as a result of the Versailles peace negotiations has attracted too much social attention. Festival director Gábor Tompa, at the opening of the festival in the Hungarian theatre of Cluj-Napoca, gives a hint, both in his address in the festival catalogue and in his personal address: the theme of the festival is war. One hundred years has passed since the end of the First World War, whose peace negotiations dramatically and tragically rearranged the map of Europe. At the same time, however, they also prolonged warlike conflicts indefinitely until today. – In his speech, he directly asks the audience the question: “How can we remember war in ways other than that losers remember losers? – Because in a war there are no winners,” says Tompa.

From the spectator’s point of view, his suggestion makes the facets of the festival programme comprehensible much more quickly. The chosen season in the festival calendar is the time of mental heaviness in Europe. Autumn passes into winter and the days become shorter. And outside only fog circulates. Theatre as a festival needs such a stable sacred anchor, which is realized anew in a periodic sequence depending on the season. The word “sacred” floats in my mind as I listen attentively to Tompa’s words in the auditorium as I leaf through the catalogue, creating a certain sense of time and space. I’m thinking of Henri Hubert’s essay on La représentation du temps dans la religion et la magie from 1904, read recently on my tablet. Those who get involved with the festival events leave the normal space-time feeling of everyday life. The sacred space-time order captures a feeling of infinity and immutability. Such a joint search for sense in theatre competes with the fixed memorial culture, which wants to present stability as an unchangeable factor for everyday life as obligatory; a demand that is strived for in everyday life, but rarely fulfilled.

The theatre, which has its origins in magic, has its own unfixed foundation of meaning. It is an open project, a search for sense. If one accepts the festival from the spectator’s point of view, one agrees with sacred space-time. Tompa’s choice of pieces is based on this common search for meaning under the sign of a shared time and a shared space when he writes in his address in the festival catalogue: With the various types of war, it is important to speak of a theatre of fright. The terrible trauma caused by violence would call for an individual and collective “exorcism”. The fixed point of the search for meaning lies in the similarity between war and theatre, for they are the reciprocal actions of two opposing forces.

Scrape That Fiddle More Darkly

The selection of the various directorial manuscripts from different theatre families in Europe stands for the side of change, self-assessment and collective responsibility. Absorbing a few festival days demands a higher level of attention from visitors from outside and the admission that they can’t see everything. The simultaneous presence of English, French, Romanian and Hungarian, the languages of the guest performances, such as German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian and Serbian, will also be added. There is a closely timed main programme in the main hall and in the studio. There is a supporting programme in the Tiff House, in the Tranzit House, in the Paintbrush Factory and in the Quadro Gallery. There are exhibitions and concerts. And for the first time there was a technical interference called Digital Hermits. This conference at the Tranzit House tried to explore the use of digital technologies and their impact on the coexistence of people in our world. A contribution on war that takes into account the consequences of the Cold War, when the Internet was born, to ensure communication between entities after a nuclear fallout. The focus was on user interfaces – also known as new media – and their own spaces of experience in and with time and space. It was seen as problematic that the dialogue between the generations leads to a dichotomy between the group of people who live completely without digital technologies and the group who no longer want to shape life without them. The connection of passions to the filter bubbles and echo chambers of the digital world unfortunately failed to materialize.

One question that has always been virulent for the two-thousand-year history of theatre is: How do people behave in war? – In a collapse crisis, laughter and crying not only alternate, they can also occur simultaneously. One person’s suffering is the other’s only short joy until the perspectives change and the persecutor becomes the persecuted. Milo Raus shows with his work Compassion. The history of the machine gun an impressice teichoscopy, to which the dramatic elements of the Greek tragedy are reduced. In it, this change of perspective is performed in a loop. The actress Ursina Lardi from the ensemble of the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin plays herself as a young development aid worker in Rwanda, where she witnessed the Hutu genocide of the Tutsi. Later she finds out that the person she helped became the perpetrator. The Belgian actress Consolate Sipérus also plays herself. As a baby, she was adopted by a Belgian couple. More than the country of origin, Rwanda, and the catalogue with the baby faces that can be chosen for adoption are not known to her. From the viewer’s point of view, this enormous amount of social facts is hardly bearable. And Lardi tells of the theatres of war with impressive power of speech and physical presence, as if she has just observed this quantity of irrational actions.

By représentation, Hubert means exactly this sacred time level. Just as in the auditorium on my tablet I work on an over one-hundred-year-old text in order to pursue questions of understanding about what is happening on stage, Lardi and Sipérus create a public sphere. Not just a public speech act, that is, one that can be seen by everyone, is performed here, at the same time an understanding of the event opens up for other group members who are not directly involved in the actual action. Now and here we take an insight into the events that took place on another continent in 1994. This is the quality of the festival, with which the riddle of the name, Interferences, is solved: it is the coincidence of all time levels in the concept of humanity. The model upheld in Europe since the Renaissance breaks itself in the face of the horrors of precisely this persistent humanity, no matter what skin colour, language, culture or religion it claims to be right and good for itself. The Greek drama models serve this quality.

Anna Badora of the Volkstheater Wien (Vienna Volkstheater) has created a link between antique representational drama and post-dramatic attempts to cope with the European present in Renaissance style. She stages an Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides in the format of the Golden Ratio, in which Iphigenia is actually sacrificed at the end of the first part, with which the tragedy of Euripides, which for us has only been handed down as a fragment, ends. The war really begins with Badora. While the battle rages, we spectators go to the toilet or to the fresh air. From the two thousand years in the past we fall in the second part into the Syrian present. Here, Stefano Massini’s text Occident Express serves as the basis for a play for the same actors who are now making their way to Europe as civil society from the war zones in Iraq and Syria.

It is said that waves of crisis lead to a learning process. Gabor Tompa shows in his in-house production of William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice that limits are inherent in this learning process. The fact that both actors, Gábor Viola and Zsolt Bogdán, can play both the role of Antonio and that of Shylock as respective double casts bears witness to the deep empathy for the characters that is necessary to represent sacrificial rituals. Antonio, whose sadness at the beginning may not be revealed to the audience until the end of the piece – at the beginning it is not business or love that causes his suffering – it is the quotations of the milieus and their internal morals made by Tompa in his soundscape installation, who let Antonio be as obviously sad as the mirror-inverted despair of Shylock, whose sacrifice in the end – analogous to Iphigenia’s sacrifice – is needed to restore that very internal morality after the group has gone through a common crisis. Antonio, like his alter ego Agamemnon (father of Iphigenia and at the same time commander who sacrifices his daughter), represents in this sense the permanent depression of a human being who knows that it always seeks the good, but at the same time always creates the bad.

Fatherland

The “exorcism” of the festival, which was the goal, took on a physically concrete form collectively and practically with the staging Vaterland in the choreography of Csaba Horváth and the stage design of Csaba Antal. The Forte Company presents text elements from Thomas Bernhard’s The Italians in a rhythmic and sporty sequence of scenes that gesturally play the timbres of Bernhard’s model. Bernhard, who in his will still wanted to ensure that no text, neither novel nor stage text, narrative or poem, would ever appear in Austria, was at war with the eccentric way of his fellow countrymen dealing with National Socialist traditions. The staging succeeds in allowing Bernhard to be regarded as the master of plastic surgery of collective passions that are unquestioned in memorial culture or devotional objects. Whether a geographical space is assigned a patrilineal or matrilineal original character is actually uninteresting.

In this way, the festival creates a concrete link to the themes of past years. Whereas in 2014, for example, it was still necessary to report on the stories of the body, this year the theme of war captures the passions in a way that suggests new approaches to the content of security policy measures, which are often difficult to understand in everyday life. The experiment on the formal side, such as Milo Rau’s, of exclusively exhibiting teichoscopy, seems all too minimalistic. We do not know whether the actress Ursina Lardi was really in Rwanda and whether Consolate Sipérius was really adopted. Here documentary theatre finds its limits in fictionality and has to compete with the classics, the timelessly valid dramas since antiquity. Mere indignation could perhaps have been problematized in connection with the digital filter bubbles and their echo chambers. But then the acting characters, whose limitations and weaknesses in Euripides or Shakespeare were excellently designed and presented in their plot constraints and intentions, would also have had to have been worked out more precisely in Milo Rau’s work. There are no spaces free of experience, even if the widespread contemporary encapsulation à la New Media and the generation conflicts associated with it might suggest it.

When a ship is rescued, the SOS emergency call is made beforehand and the bodies are rescued. The Interferences International Theatre Festival reminds us that the purpose of the SOS emergency call is to save souls. It demands their participation, a shared attention. An encapsulation in technical terms or as usual in analogue memorial culture, on the other hand, leads to isolation with fixed values of collective internal morals and their obligatory victims. By rejecting such tendencies of isolation, the theatre festival leads the search for meaning and sense in Cluj-Napoca.

Contrary to what the sculpture of the founding myth of the city of Rome and its staged history of origin suggests for Cluj-Napoca, the theatre has understood the origo principle. Florence Dupont can read about this punch line on the “monument” to Romulus and Remus: Rome – city without origin. The punchline is: there is no origin. There is only one diversity in mutual respect and recognition. This is what the origo principle stands for. Interferences is also the name for an unfinished search for sense. Theatre is and remains an open project, both in terms of content and form.

Published on 21 January 2019 (Article originally written in German)

Digital Hermits

Digital Hermits

© Valik Chernetskyi

“Digital Hermits”. Quite an oxymoron. Because, nowadays, no one could possibly consider him/herself a “hermit” within the digital realm. We are always tracked, chased, captured by complex calculation systems aimed to define us on the basis of what we like, what we look for, what we would desire to be, instead of what we actually are.

Digitisation I: Digital Hermits was the title of a very dense and compelling conference, the first of four: organized in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) in the frame of Digital Natives, a cooperation project between five of the UTE’s member theatres—Volkstheater Wien, Comédie de Reims, Hungarian Theatre of Cluj, Schauspiel Köln and National Theatre of Northern Greece.
Concord Floral by Jordan Tannahill (which premiered at Schauspiel Köln on 16 November 2018) is “a play about teenage identity and interactions, the power of perception and technology.” Each of the five theatres involved is going to stage a production or use the themes of the play as the basis for workshops with amateur teenage actors. A series of “digital experiments” will be the outcome of such collaboration and three other conferences will take place throughout the course of the project.
During the Interferences Festival 2018, produced by the Hungarian National Theatre in Cluj, three speakers were invited to share their thoughts about being part of this “new” digital turmoil: Mária Bernschütz, Tamás Trunk and Valér Veres. Three very different contributions, able to draw a multi-coloured picture of the numerous ways to approach digital cultures.

We all know our birthday, there’s no doubt about it. And yet, how sure are we about our role in the digital society? How closely are we watching the technological evolution, how aware are we about our influence in establishing a shared model of “living in the digital era”?
Mária Bernschütz presented an executive summary of which are the generations involved in the digitization process. Based on the so-called ‘generational theory’—initiated by two American historians, William Strauss and Neil Howe—Bernschütz’s speech tried to inscribe our “agency” in five categories, through which we should be able to locate our presence in the development of digital culture.

Ms. Bernschütz is Assistant Professor at the Department of Management and Business Economics (Budapest University of Technology and Economic), she teaches marketing media and research methodology. Her vivid contribution was aimed to show how technology influences individuals in their everyday lives. Feeling sorry for a rather rough generalization, Mária Bernschütz presents a sort of rationalistic scheme, that reveals how technological development could be used as a barometer for measuring generational gaps, according to age range.
“Do you know which generation you belong to?”, that’s the basic question of this inquiry, which is based on an in-depth qualitative research conducted on Hungarian society.
According to the results, the “Veterans” were born before 1946; the “baby boomers” were born after the Second World War and are the most involved in the reconstruction of the world after that disastrous event; they are evaluated as “the most technophobic” group. Generation X—between 1965 and 1979—is considered as the one of the “digital immigrants”: they came in touch with technology as adults. Generation Y—between 1980 and 1995—gathers people who were attending secondary school or were just enrolled in university when they have learned about “new media”; they are now quite used to smartphones and tablets. Members of the Generation Z were born between 1996 and 2000: they don’t even use pens or pencils anymore, Internet has been a part of their everyday lives from the very beginning. The latest one is the Alpha Generation—including children born after 2010—who is already in charge of teaching their parents how to deal with technology.
Ms. Bernschütz talks about “tasks” and “advantages”, which seem to be two fundamental categories to distinguish between our personal and private attitudes to technology and our willingness to be part of it.

Beyond any possible kind of generalization, the reality looks much more complicated: we are all addressed by a sort of ‘collective call’: we all hold a special responsibility in translating our own cultural values into comprehensive statements, devised and conveyed through technological tools. A brilliant example is suggested by the way the performing arts are communicated, today, in the frame of the so-called ‘information society’. On the one hand, the good health of the theatrical system could be evaluated through its capacity in engaging audiences and attracting fresh theatregoers; on the other hand, it would be really hard to detach the virtual communities from the physical ones, that, however, prove to be vivid and tenacious. They underline the very essence of theatricality, the fact that artists and spectators share the same space during the same time.

Mária Bernschütz’s speech, even though deriving from a very specific research sample, was crucial in gaining an impartial view of how different generations of ‘users’ currently deal with the digital environment; and yet, everyone in the room was asked to develop personal insights, trying and locate themselves in this or that generation, becoming part of a sort of ‘common sense’ of participation.
If Generation X is labeled as “very enthusiastic”, responsible for initiating “the revolution” and refusing “strict rules within their working space”, the members of Generation Y “don’t respect the leader’s judgmental language” and are not always able to “find what they are looking for”, locate their own values, establish their connections with other colleagues and “understand how one could actually be ‘disconnected’”. They want trust, and, in this quest, they experience a sort of anxiety. The members of Generation Z are already much more “money-oriented”, because they were “born after the global crisis”. And, by now, they only want to succeed.
It’s not very easy to detect which generation we belong to, until a young man, an honest citizen of the ‘Z-realm’, takes the stage.

As he grabs the microphone, Tamás Trunk definitely looks like the ‘minister’ of Generation Z. He speaks a very good English, with a clear and smart American accent; he handles a remote control to show us a brief yet effective gallery of slides on the wide screen at the rear of the stage; which he doesn’t even look at, but he masters beautifully.
His tone is colloquial, fast, high-pitched, rhythmic and captivating. Tamás Trunk is passionate with sneakers and youngsters’ culture, he’s a ‘professional YouTuber.’ As a matter of fact, he’s an ‘influencer’, and he looks like one, although he doesn’t wear sneakers this particular day, but a fashionable and elegant outfit, laced shoes under a big smile on his face.
He refers to the “grown-ups”, as if he wanted to mark a distance; he himself grew up “globally and digitally”, his generation was the first to be “completely connected”. The easiest impression, he reckons, is that Generation Z can “consume, drink, and eat the same food and beverages and use the same products all over the world.”

Is this what being connected means? Are we actually all the same? Do we really look alike?
“No, this doesn’t mean that we are all the same”, says Trunk. “We are probably the most diverse generation ever. And, yeah, we actually love to show that.”
In the map pictured by Tamás Trunk, the digital world is, in a first place, an opportunity to connect with each other. But the most evident feature is that this connection is guaranteed by the choice of ‘to be or not to be’ affiliated with this or that brand.
If the pioneers of media and Internet studies would draw a line between online and offline world, we all saw those borders being rapidly eroded. The advent of social media, integrated with mobile communication, brought the online realm straight to our palms, and we became more and more dependent on the interface, in order to interact with our daily reality.
Immediacy embraced hypermediacy and the combination of the two gradually generated new layers of reality: hardware and software played together in offering the users a new form of virtual
experience which can no longer be distinguished. As Bolter and Grusin wrote in their seminal essay Remediation, today, “digital hypermedia seek the real by multiplying mediation so as to create a feeling of fullness, a satiety of experience, which can be taken as reality.”

In Trunk’s talk, that reality seems to be based on the opportunity of being part of a network. And yet, it’s surprising how, in his vision, such network is essentially shaped on market logic, based on buying and selling, advertising and branding. “Brand” is, in fact, one of the most frequently used words in the young man’s speech.
One of the slides shows a photo of a group of ‘hippies’ from the Seventies. To the speaker, this is a symbol of revolution, to which he compares a contemporary attitude: “Sometimes I hear that my generation doesn’t want to rebel anymore, that we all just want to be the same, and go with the flow. The reality is that, in this digital world, we don’t rebel against the same things, nor using the same symbols, such as alcohol or drugs.” Brands and fashion seem to offer a new way of provoking social attention and promoting “equality and equal treatment for all of us.”

Trunk’s enthusiasm is contagious, and yet it seems to be irresistibly kneeling to the altar of the Market, understanding Internet and the social media as a way to establish a sort of network of consumers. “Brands want all of us to buy their products and we actually like these companies.” These symbols of “a huge consumer’s world” apparently grant a sense of belonging to the younger generations. “Together,” says Trunk, “we can work a lot and create amazing movements and projects that, we feel, are actually ours.”
Thus, these “digital natives” need certain kinds of “movements” and “brands”, to compose “an amazing community”, able to activate a wide “secondary market”, where very young people can start their own business and, reselling items for “way bigger prizes”, make a lot of money. We are suddenly talking about millions of dollars.
Many of these youngsters don’t connect with each other in real life, and yet, in Trunk’s opinion, “online world is an extension of the real world.”

For the question time, moderated by Gergő Mostis from Kreatív Kolozsvár, also the sociologist Valér Veres is invited to the table. It’s the right moment to reconnect the accurate ‘generational study’ conducted by Mária Bernschütz with Tamás Trunk’s passionate storytelling, that some ways presented a case history of his own generation.
In his book The Virtual Communities (1993), Howard Rheingold thinks of cyberspace “as a social petri dish, the Net as the agar medium, and virtual communities, in all their diversity, as the colonies of microorganisms that grow in petri dishes.”
Rheingold’s metaphorical description of cyberspace is proven to be true when one looks at the technological and rhetorical architecture of social networks. Founded as these are on an individual selection of data to be read and written, they represent very complex instruments in charge of managing a large amount of “information as social and cultural objects”. And yet, the development of citizen journalism, net-art and online activism has demonstrated how strong and effective such kind of connections between users can be.

Mária Bernschütz thoroughly summarized how the “generation gap” is still present, and yet, technological development is a process that has no memory and tends to erase the past. In a couple of decades, the so-called “world” (because also this term should be confronted with a still huge ‘digital divide’) is going to be populated by different generations that will have the exact same relation to technology.
Language, so diverse in its references from speaker to speaker, set the tone for a fugitive imagery. In a digitised world, made of weak ties, language and modes of interaction should be considered as a mind-expanding technology; digital media must then be seen as a physical support for the export of language. In the words of Derrick DeKerckhove, in a system of interconnected and composite competences, “the more the discourse gets decentralized, the deeper is the change in the conventional definitions and relations.”
And this could be a good starting point to compose a new view of the “world”. A world defined by connection and relation, in which, really, no one could possibly consider him/herself a “hermit”.

Published on 16 January 2019

Identity, Sexuality, Language and Power

Identity, Sexuality, Language and Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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