Tag: hungarian theatre of cluj

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

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

 

András Visky at UTE Fest No. 18
© István Biró

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Published on 26 March 2020

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

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

The Stranger’s Odyssey. Who am I, really?

The Stranger’s Odyssey. Who am I, really?

The fifth edition of the Interferences international theatre festival (for the fourth time in cooperation with the UTE), which was held over 11 days at the end of November and the beginning of December at the Hungarian Theatre in Cluj, staged productions from 14 countries, by means of which the organizers aimed to present contemporary trends in drama. In addition to the predominantly Eastern European works, the audience had the opportunity to see a performance given by South Korea’s Jaram Lee, who had appeared at the festival in previous years, and the J.U.S.T. Toys Production from the USA.

Interferences Internation Theatre Festival
© István Biró

Since the first edition, in 2007, primarily focused on establishing an inter-culture dialogue over the long term, the festival programmes have centred on clearly formulated themes.
Following the seeking of the common roots of theatre and music, the phenomenon of the body and physicality, this year the organizers concentrated on a current social issue – difference, or diversity.
Even though the festival’s secondary title, The Stranger’s Odyssey, obviously alluded to the ongoing migration wave, the programme directors’ intention was to view otherness in a variety of forms and contexts.
The word strange harbours several meanings. It may refer to an individual’s visual or personal distinctions, which make him/her surpass the standard. Connected with this is the individual’s position among and relationship to the majority society. Irrespective of the person’s particular qualities being regarded positively or negatively, and his/her being spurned or, vice versa, put on the pedestal of the recognised values, the person’s social status explicitly differs from that of the others.

A prime example of the ambivalence contained in the word strange is the character of Shen Teh in Bertold Brecht’s play The Good Person of Szechwan. First, the young prostitute is ejected to the margins of society because of her profession; later on, owing to her moral purity. Although spurned by the gods and people alike, Shen Teh represents an exception confirming the strength of the human spirit. Perhaps that was the reason why Brecht’s play featured in the festival in Cluj twice – first in a production directed by Romania’s Andrei Șerban (Teatrul Bulandra in Bucharest), and then in an adaptation by Michal Dočekal, the current President of the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe (UTE), Director of Drama at the National Theatre in Prague and a freelance director.

Dočekal’s piece of theatre, staged with the actors of the Vígszínház theatre in Budapest, was heralded as being the apex of this year’s festival programme. The three-hour-long performance abounded with theatrical ideas and scenographic effects, which incessantly assaulted the audience’s attention and maintained tension, yet in the final form were actually wearisome. Martin Chocholoušek’s sets, dominated by a movable interior with a projection screen, fiercely transformed with every new scene. Similarly varying were Kateřina Štefková’s costumes, which the actors continuously changed, as the roles were taking turns. The scaffolding, conveyor belts, dining tables, shooting cannons and suspended desks with lamps, splashing real water, served to demonstrate the maximum utilisation of stage technology, straddling purposeless self-presentation. For all that, the spectacular setting did not lack visual uniformity and integrated form, which, however, was not the case of the dramatic means. The creators wittingly employed Brechtian cutting and distinguishing between the character forming and the actor’s critical commentary, yet they failed to adhere to the chosen principle throughout the performance. Accordingly, the individual scenes were abandoned and returned to the play without evident logic. The inconsistent differentiation of the roles was the most palpable in the case of Enikő Eszenyi, who portrayed Shen Teh. The actress let herself be carried away by her own energetic involvement, which reflected in overexposed gesture and lack of co-ordinated motion. As a result, Shen Teh did not come across as a moral example, but a caricature of herself. In the final analysis, the performance oscillated between epic theatre, an ironised version of the original play, and a scenic spectacle devoid of a clear-cut staging vision.

Totally different in form was the production Stranger’s Song, based on Gabriel García Márquez’s Bon Voyage, Mr. President. The tale of a poor married couple and a dying statesman was depicted using pansori, the traditional Korean genre of musical storytelling. The narrative nature of Asian theatre and its blending of playfulness and specific technical execution inspired the European avant-garde, including Brecht’s epic theatre. In the case of Stranger’s Song, the audience’s experience entirely depended on Jaram Lee’s precise work with her voice and movement co-ordination. The performer stylised herself into several personages, expressed by means of effective gestural contraction (a hunched pose, erect or cautious gait), without forfeiting observational distance or the awareness of her being in the role of the narrator. Jaram Lee was accompanied on the almost empty stage by two musicians, whose aim was to provide rhythmic underpinning to the drift of the narration.

In my opinion, Stranger’s Song was the zenith of the final third of the festival programme. Owing to its minimalistic, precisely built theatrical form, as well as its title, it most closely expressed the festival motto – otherness was viewed through the lens of a forlorn young couple who, notwithstanding their poverty and low social status, retain a high degree of morality, and through the eyes of a privileged politician, who rediscovers his humanness in the twilight of his days. The two seemingly incompatible parties are forced to find a common parlance, by means of which they duly succeed in breaking down the established barriers. The fact that the Colombian author’s work was staged by Korean artists with regard to Western European theatre conventions represented another parallel, fulfilling the theme.
The programme selected for the fifth edition of Interferences entirely complied with the set theme. The final third of the festival agenda was dominated by productions of plays by Beckett, Gogol, Ionesco, Brecht and a theatrical remake of Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, whose characters are generally perceived as embodiments of otherness, external and personal deformation, the individualised (and problematical) self. The organisers’ endeavour to place the festival within the context of the current society-wide processes, whereby the meaning of the word strange must be constantly redefined, was more than welcomed. All the more striking, however, was the mediocre quality of some of the selected productions, which many a time only superficially illustrated the original literary or film work, instead of seeking a peculiar theatrical key.

(Days reviewed: 2 – 4 December 2016)

Translated by Hilda Hearne

 

Published on 16 December 2016 (Article originally written in Czech)

“Our theatre, such as this festival wants to belong to the whole city”

“Our theatre, such as this festival wants to belong to the whole city”

In the most central position of the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj, next to the main entrance, hangs the portrait of Gábor Tompa, artistic director of the theatre for the past 26 years. He also founded and runs the ‘Interferences International Theatre Festival’, for the 5th edition of which (24th November-4th December) we – the Journalists of UTE´s Online-Magazine Conflict Zones.Reviews – visited the second largest city in Romania, the picturesque Cluj, 324 kilometres north of Bucharest.

01_interferences_bi-4042
© István Biró

After receiving the first snow of the season, the city is frozen and decorated with numerous flags due to the Romanian National day (every 1st of December they celebrate the unification of Valahia, Transylvania and Moldavia in 1918). The atmosphere inside the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj – member of the «Union des Théâtres de l Europe» since 2008 – is definitely much warmer. Dozens of volunteers joyously take care of every single detail and the theatre lovers of the city enjoy discovering performances from all over the world.

Such as the Korean performance, the curtain of which has just fallen, receiving the warmest rhythmic applause from the audience. It naturally takes the artistic director of the theatre and the festival, Gabor Tompa, longer than usual to cover the distance from the stalls to the main entrance, as he is constantly engaged in greeting friends and in brief conversations.

What if governments change at the speed of light in this idiosyncratic city of the Southeast Europe? Gabor Tompa remains in the same position. “We often happen to have three different Ministers in a year. This is one of the obstacles we have to overcome in our work, which I have always considered as a long-term project” he explains as we cross the stage, where some technicians are occupied with removing the set of the performance which has just finished, and preparing for tomorrow morning’s rehearsal. A busy beehive.

A staircase at the back of the stage leads up to his office. The walls are decorated with mementos and awards of a journey that started in 1990 and still goes on. “We had to modify contracts, build a team, a 36-actor ensemble and a repertory. But we also had to be international, build a ‘studio’ and a team of young actors. I always feel all this is too fragile to be abandoned. Of course, the administrative issues are far too many, so I am deprived of a significant part of my energy. I always try to find the pleasure in what I am doing” he says and carries on.

“Where I do locate the source of pleasure, I would say that it is basically found in the team of young people who work with me and who are quite independent, since they can make their own decisions without having to get my approval all the time.

“This helps me a lot since I have to spend a lot of time in Los Angeles where I teach acting, as well as in other countries where I direct. Then, pleasure lies within the opportunity I am given to invite directors I admire to come and work with us. Not few artistic directors choose to invite weaker artists than themselves. On the contrary, not only do I want to invite people whose work I admire, but who I also believe to happen to know something about the theatre which I ignore.

“I see that as a supplementary procedure” he explains. As for whether he would miss the office in which he has spent almost a lifetime: the answer is astounding! “I most certainly believe the reason I am still here is because I don’t actually care about the position as such”.

We are one step away from the closing of this year’s festival and he confesses having gained this: “The pleasure of having almost doubled our audience and of beginning to succeed in what we had really wanted in the first place: uniting the people of Cluj.”

And he explains: “There is this pretty common phenomenon here that has to do with the division of communities in everyday life: Romanians, Hungarians, Germans, Jews, but also people of different religions or social backgrounds.

“This theatre, founded 224 years ago, in 1792, is the oldest Hungarian theatre in the world. But we really want it to belong to the whole city and to people who gather here in order to encounter one another. This is why, not only now during the festival, but all year-round, we translate our performances into at least two more languages: Romanian and English, as our company performs in Hungarian. This helps win the trust of the Romanian community, so the proportions are now 65%-35% or 70%-30%. Moreover, there are seventy thousand students in Cluj who are the best audience.”

So if the goal set is so big, with what criteria does one choose the performances that are to be included in a two-year international theatre festival?

«First of all, we begin by choosing the subject, which this year was “The Odysseys of a Foreigner”. We have already found the subject of the next festival, two years from now. It is going to be “War Memories” since it will take place 100 years after the end of World War I. Among others we are thinking of inviting Ivo Van Hove, the new artistic director of the Comédie-Française.

“The performances I select approach the subject from different aspects, so as to complement one another. Of course, it is impossible to have only masterpieces. And actually, this is not the objective. Yes, there are performances which happen to be enthusiastically received by the audience and others which shape it. My experience has proved to me that the audience can be educated. The most important thing is to move on and take risks.

“We try to invite all kinds of performances: from well established companies to small independent ones. For instance, this year we invited a performance called ‘It’s Not the Time of My Life’, which was the first adaptation of a film that won this year’s award in Karlovy Vary. An utterly independent performance with absolutely no budget.”
He insists that he does not believe in the separation between independent and repertory theatre. “This is a plain nonsense for obsessionals and critics. In this case, we are rather concerned with ourselves than with the theatre as such. No, we need to let ourselves out of the picture.”
What about his personal point of view as far as this year’s subject, the Foreigner, is concerned? “It is not restricted to the immigration and refugee issues which are pretty hot. There is a more philosophical approach to it. What does it mean to be a foreigner? What does it mean to belong? What is the European identity? Which us, the East-Europeans almost have or believe to have? I think that solidarity nowadays is not powerful enough. Although the world is becoming smaller and smaller. For example, something happens here as we speak and people all over the planet find out about it in a few minutes. However, we still believe we are not affected by it. This is wrong. Everything that goes on involves us. We are to be found in every story. On the other hand, of course, we live in a period of a completely hypocritical political correctness and you can see the result. We witnessed it recently in the US elections. We ought to analyse what brings this about” he says.

Our conversation carries on about the qualities of the renowned Romanian directing school, which as he explains to us “puts forward the concepts, proposing each time a strong choice of play and a strong directing approach, from which are derived all the supplementary elements” and ends up to the Greek theatre as a plentiful source.

“What is very important is that the ancient audience did not use to go to the theatre to listen to stories. They were all acquainted with the story of Antigone or Medea. They did so in order to taste the actual experience. Nonetheless, it’s not just the drama itself that teaches us a lot” as he says. “The Dionysia was the first festival ever. A celebration in which the whole city took part. And this is something we always need to keep in mind.
“Max Reinhardt, who re-invented the festivals in Europe, wanted the Salzburg Festival to be a celebration of the whole city, like in ancient times. When everyone would take part.”

 

 

Published on 15 December 2016 (Article originally written in Greek)