Tag: conference

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

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

Theatre Worlds Clashing at the UTE Conference of Theatre Structures in Belgrade

Editor’s Note:

This is a follow-up on an article by our Portuguese journalist that also covered the UTE Conference on Theatre Structures in Belgrade. This article offers our Greek’s journalist’s perspective 

Theatre Worlds Clashing at the UTE Conference of Theatre Structures in Belgrade

“Can we all move to Austria?” This rhetorical question posed by Alexandru Darie, the artistic director of the Bulandra theatre in Bucharest, humorously interrupted a series of speeches full of numbers and information regarding the theatrical structures of seven different countries in Europe. It was a natural and spontaneous reaction, since so many different systems clashed in this conference in order to understand and detect each other’s similarities and differences.

Conference on Theatre Structures at the Yugoslav Drama Theatre in Belgrade, Serbia

Despairingly similar or chaotically different? The difficulties to be dealt with in the theatre by countries such as Bulgaria and Austria or Russia and Luxembourg, may be at the back of our mind, however, when they are put on the same table, they can be impressively revealing.

We had this chance on Sunday, 17 September 2017, thanks to the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe, which unites twenty different—not only—European theatres, from east to west, from north to south. Artistic directors from seven theatre members of the UTE, from Greece, Romania, Austria, Luxembourg, Serbia, Russia and Bulgaria, had fifteen minutes each to enlighten us regarding the way theatre works in their respective countries.

The place where this second meeting took place—the first one having taken place in May 2016 in Milan—was the welcoming though blocked off Yugoslav Drama Theatre (the Belgrade Pride Parade took place at the same time).

“It is quite impossible not to fund theatres in Austria. Our politicians realise how important it is”, said Anna Badora of the Vienna Volkstheater and Andrea Ruis of the Arts & Culture Division of the Federal Chancellery of Austria, describing a system—to be further analysed in conflict-zones.reviews soon—that sounded almost ideal.

Contrary to that, “More freedom in decision-making” is what is needed in Romanian theatre, says Alexandru Darie. “We need to ask permission for everything from the city of Bucharest which we are part of. Even something as small as hiring a person”. He, too, mentioned a terrible law about private funding, according to which 4% can be given to sport and only 2% to art, depending on the choice of politics. He also said that there’s “unfair competition” between public and private theatres. “We can’t pay the actors the same salaries since we are obliged to pay all taxes and rights. Private theatres never do that”, he said

Our biggest problem is that “we make it”, emphasized Stathis Livathinos, the artistic director of the National Theatre of Greece explaining that funding has dropped from 12 to six million per year. “Since you can get by on that amount, next time we’ll give you even less; this is how politicians think”. Some sponsors give financial aid. “They often complain because they want their name to be placed next to the brand name of the National Theatre. But this must not happen”, he said.

Margarita Mladenova of the Sfumato Theatre in Sofia has the same concern. “Over the past eight years we have been under the dictate of the market. Every theatre needs to sell more and more tickets in order to survive. This is why they hire so-called bear actors—famous TV stars”. In Bulgaria, there are fifty-five national theatres, which is quite impressive. “This is a good policy. What is not good is that they all share the same structure, and this does not allow us to be creative. We need more flexibility”, she noted.

Some new conditions, according to Tamara Vukovic Manojlovic from Serbia, are the free market laws which are being imposed on the theatre, the bureaucracy, as well as the constant budget cuts and the change in the audience’s behaviour. The Yugoslav Drama Theatre is funded by the city of Belgrade by 40–80%, and 20% of its budget comes from tickets.

The Theatre in Luxembourg deals with completely different issues, says its artistic director and founder, Frank Hoffman. “One hundred and sixty nationalities are involved in our productions. We certainly are an international theatre!” he proudly stated. “Nevertheless, the issues that arise have to do with identity, and are of an existential nature. Who am I? What’s my mother tongue?”

Boris Yukhananov from the Stanislavky Elektrotheatre in Moscow expressed concerns about the current situation in Russia. “All the changes that have occurred in our country over the past fifty years have also affected the theatre and its future is uncertain”, he said, while referring to the recent scandal of the great Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s (Gogol Theatre, Moscow) persecution.

The first and biggest sponsor of 700 theatres in the country is the Ministry of Culture, which funds big theatres, such as the Bolshoi or the Mariinsky, on a yearly basis. The funds go up to 12 billion rubles, which still cannot cover the cost of their existence. He also mentioned the existence of “benefactors” and not just sponsors in the theatre, which still remains non- commercial in Russia.

“There’s definitely more than one conclusion,” the president of the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe, Michal Dočekal from Prague, said, summing up the conference. He pointed out that theatre is undoubtedly part of the European cultural heritage, and that is exactly why the issues discussed here were of far more than of mere academic or practical interest.

 

 

Published on 23 October 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)

Theatre structures in Europe. Arts between economy and identity

Theatre structures in Europe.
Arts between economy and identity

In the context of the Conflict Zones Network programme of the UTE, the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, Italy hosted a conference on theatre structures in Europe and the Mediterranean on Friday, the 20th of May.

Six speakers gathered in a room of the theatre school dedicated to the late great stage director Luca Ronconi: Francisca Carneiro Fernandes (National Theatre São João, Porto, Portugal) Sergio Escobar (Piccolo Teatro di Milano, Italy), Enikő Eszenyi (Vígszinház Theatre, Budapest, Hungary), Michal Dočekal (National Theatre of Prague, Czech Republic), Fadhel Jaibi (National Theatre of Tunisia), Armin Petras and Jan Hein (Schauspiel Stuttgart, Germany) and Ilan Ronen (Habima Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel). Various funding and management models, organizational systems, production structures, and theatre regulation systems were analysed and compared, with a view to better understand how the general principles guiding national and cultural policies can impact the way theatres are structured.
Whilst awaiting a more detailed report, here we try to collect the main topics and points of differences that came out of the presentations, proposing an overall comment.

A financial overview

It goes without saying that the general budget represents the biggest difference between the theatres. Nevertheless, as any member of the artistic world knows, money is not the only issue, and an insight into the lines of work of the single structures can compose a mosaic of many other details, revealing certain important cultural peculiarities.
The Staatstheater Stuttgart can count on a 100-million-Euro-state budget dedicated to the performing arts. And yet, with 94% of it bankrolling opera and ballet, according to Armin Petras “the drama season is financed with only six million.”
In the strategy adopted by the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, private sponsors play an important role: since only 17% of the general budget (around 20 million) comes from the Ministry of Culture and the Chamber of Commerce, the rest is provided by the municipality, private institutions and, according to Escobar, “50% of self-financing from ticket sales.”
Despite the presence of a Central State Funding (FUS), the management models of Italian theatres change radically depending on the regions, each one being characterized by a different level of private participation.
The Czech landscape, on the other hand, appears much more centralized and, in Michal Dočekal’s words, is subjected to “an out-of-date administration system that is fifty years-old.” Those theatres that are supported by the municipalities don’t receive money from the Ministry of Culture, but they are paradoxically more efficient than the national theatres, which are experiencing profound difficulties in programming the seasons due to a longer bureaucratic process that causes severe delays in the distribution of the funds.
As well as in the Czech regulation, the Portuguese system (with a budget of only 175 million for all cultural institutions) cannot count on a collaboration between national and municipal theatres either, with the latter working independently. This blocks the three Portuguese national theatres (one in Porto and two in Lisbon, including the opera house) and the smaller but active theatres.
A very delicate political situation in Hungary is responsible for the tough struggle of the Vígszinház Theatre in Budapest. Only 37% of the general budget comes from the state, and it’s necessary to raise a lot of money from sponsorships and ticket sales. According to the tax credit law, certain economic companies can deduct their support to culture from their own taxes, but only in December do they know if in the past year they were profitable or not, so liquidity is a huge question.

Independent companies and schools

Among the seven countries invited to present their theatre structures at the conference, Tunisia shows a strong presence of independent theatre companies (around 600). The National Theatre in Tunis is currently trying to find a way to invite some of them for collaborations and co-productions: Fadhel Jaibi’s artistic direction is hiring as many young people as possible and, at the same time, is fostering the establishment of a valuable training institution. According to Jaibi, founding a theatre school for actors, playwrights and stage directors represents the fundamental access to creation, as long as it has not a purely academic approach, but rather a very practical one, led by professional practitioners.
A theatre school seen as a nest for future talents is also the guideline of the Piccolo, where the school—founded by Giorgio Strehler and now named in memory of Luca Ronconi—is one of the best in Italy, a hotbed for the next generations of actors, directors and playwrights.
The interaction between professionals and theatre students is a core topic also for the Schauspiel Stuttgart that collaborates with two acting schools, with more than 40 students enrolled. As Armin Petras explains, “the aim is to promote a form of cooperate productions, thus the teachers also work as talent scouts. Exchanges between schools are very important and much easier than the one between theatres.”

Networking and international communities

When an event for networking such as this conference casts a light on all these differences in structures and funding possibilities, one can wonder about the opportunities for various countries to work together in co-productions and exchanges.
For Jaibi, this “could help establish new synergies and put the younger generations in touch with international opportunities, considering their profound difficulties in traveling.”
Indeed, an international exchange policy—along with an attentive activity in hosting foreign performances—might be useful so balance and refresh the repertoires of the national theatres that differ from one another also by the presence or absence of a resident ensemble.
Italian state subsidized theatres have no such stable companies, and the same goes for the national theatres in Porto or in Tunis, while Prague employs 50 people only for the drama ensemble alone, and the Habima—even without a permanent repertoire—does have a stable company as well.
As much as the general economic situation and access to public funds, these different sets of resident artists and technicians sometimes influence artistic views, because they dependent on severe regulations in terms of contracts and employment arrangements.
The Schauspiel Stuttgart is challenged to safeguard “a sort of equilibrium between avant-garde and tradition: to satisfy the audience it takes a conservative repertoire, but in order to keep the actors in the city, a clear vocation to the experimental languages is needed. Some Schauspiel Stuttgart productions are well known and appreciated abroad, able to gather much more audience than in Stuttgart itself.”
In Ilan Ronen’s words, “one of the most important steps for me as an artistic director was to understand how crucial it is for a national theatre to work with international communities, which improves the level; and to work with young people.” For the Habima, collaborations between theatres and international co-productions have become frequent.”

National identity and political intervention

Another interesting difference lies in the history of these theatres; that sometimes defines their identity and influences their line of work.
While the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, with its almost 70 year-long history, is the oldest and the first public theatre in the country (before 1947 there were no public theatres in Italy), the Vígszinház Theatre in Budapest is a 120 year old theatre founded and funded by private people, where the director is not nominated by the government but designated by the previous director.
As for the Habima National Theatre of Israel, that derives from the work of an independent group of twenty young students in Moscow during the Communist Revolution in 1917, founding an avant-garde Hebrew speaking theatre in Israel was a primary aim that still stays at the top of the list of intentions since it guarantees a national identity.

Speaking of identity, for every state subsidized institution, that thus must rely on governmental support, there is the crucial issue of freedom of speech, once again related to the history of the single theatres and their relative countries. As mentioned above, the situation of strong privatization lived in Hungary forced the public theatre to be dependent on private companies; the Habima, instead, depends on government loans, which threatens their independence. Recently, the newly appointed Minister of Culture in Israel made some dangerous public declarations about the political issues that must or must not be addressed by theatres. With special reference to the long-lasting Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “any discourse that even loosely put the integrity of Israeli government under critique”, reports Ronen “is to be banned or discouraged. So the Ministry announced a form of supervising process over every arts institution.”

Dočekal denounces a different form of political intervention: “Some traces of the nationalistic thought that was characterizing Europe at that time seems to be kept alive nowadays and inspires our politicians. The national theatre is not censored or obstructed by political orientations, but the system of hiring and dismissing general directors is not properly regulated.” In Dočekal’s opinion, this doesn’t put the artistic direction in the position of programming a coherent season.
The political situation in Tunisia is also critical, albeit in an entirely different way. As Jaibi puts it, “the theatre that we inherited from the revolution was almost completely lacking an identity”. The Arab Spring (between 2010 and 2011) complicated many things someway, since it had conveyed no artistic or cultural projects. Even though the newly gained freedom of speech has had an effect on media and theatre, the means to foster such a freedom appear very poor. As Jaibi explains, worse than the state censorship is the one that comes from the audience: it’s a sort of ideological, moral and religious censorship.

 

Published on 24 June 2016 (Article originally written in Italian)