Tag: elfriede jelinek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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)