Tag: Ines Nadais

From Serbia to Syria

From Serbia to Syria

With the open wound of the refugee crisis itching in the background, Vienna’s Volkstheater has clearly come forward as a place halfway between East and West in its first gesture as a member of the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe. There will be no borders here, says artistic director Anna Badora.

Scene from POKOJNIK / THE DECEASED. A guest performance of the JDP at the Volkstheater Wien. Photo © Jelena Veljković
Scene from POKOJNIK / THE DECEASED. Guest-performance in context of the Serbian November at the Volkstheater Wien. Photo © Jelena Veljković

A spectre — the spectre of a refugee wave that is apparently out of control — was haunting Europe the evening the Volkstheater opened its flash-season exclusively devoted to the home country of one the biggest expat communities in Vienna (about 156,000 people, of which 70,000 still keep a Serbian passport, disembarked in Austria’s capital city looking for shelter from historic poverty and unemployment, the claustrophobic socialist regime led by Tito or, up until quite recently, the on-going wars that stormed the Balkans).

Yet another spectre — the spectre of terrorism as an epidemic of unprecedented proportions — haunted Europe one day later, in the painful aftermath of a terrorist attack that mortally wounded both the Western way of life, shooting at close range at some of its core representations (football, the entertainment industry, the good life).

Caught between the two crises, a theatre institution operating right in the centre of Europe, right at the crossroads where East and West have for centuries been coming together and drifting apart, kept doing what it has always done — and let the show go on. Still, “show” may not be the best term when it comes to the Serbischer November (Serbian November) festival — an event that took over several stages of the Volkstheater for four days. Yes, there was a party, and a time to eat, drink and dance the pain away, but then again there was also a time to confront — albeit in a comedy-cushioned mood —  Yugoslavian socialism’s nepotistic record (Branišlav Nusić’s Pokojnic, directed by Igor Vuk Torbica), the tragic body count of the last Balkan Wars (Olivier Frljić’s Aleksandra Zec, directed by Olivier Frljić) and the more and more acute European cultural shock (which by now you’d expect to have become more and more obsolete) between the rich and labour-importing North and the impoverished and fatally emigrant South (Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Katzelmacher, directed by Bojana Lazić).

These are traumatic issues, weighing on a country where democracy is still quite a new experience. Traumatic issues for Serbia, and, though on a different level, also for Vienna, considering that it was a Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip (1894-1918), who unleashed the First World War — putting an unappealing end to the Austro-Hungarian Empire — through the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914. But that was just the beginning of the 20th century; once it was over, Vienna had again become one of the biggest cities of the Serbian diaspora (or rather: one of the biggest Serbian cities). In the meantime, psychoanalysis came forward to help digest that and some other traumas.

So why pick the subject now that one hundred years have gone by since Austria and Serbia’s most violent and bloody confrontations took place in the battlefields of the First World War? Well, precisely because it’s about time to go past the trauma. And also because, as the Volstheater’s new artistic director Anna Badora pragmatically puts it, the Foreign Affairs Ministry wanted to promote 2015 as the Cultural Year Austria-Serbia: “Each and every season the Volkstheater must have an international focus. Since the Serbian community is extremely big in Vienna, even compared to the German one, I thought that this programme could perfectly combine all the interests at stake: the Ministry’s, the city’s and of course the theatre’s.”

Sold out performances and a “The Serbian community, just like other communities in Vienna, must be brought into the theatre — as a topic and as an audience. In Vienna, the majority of the people you will meet behind the shops’ counters don’t have German as their mother tongue. The Volkstheater, which is by definition ‘the people’s theatre’, must go out and look for them.”

In fact — and although the programme has clearly stated its intention was to outline and give visibility to the new generation of Serbian theatremakers, and the topics it has been able to freely deal with, after Tito, the war and Milošević —, other conflict zones, and not strictly Serbian ones, did stand out in this Serbischer November. First of all, the big North-South divide which the European sovereign debt crisis, and especially the bailout programmes imposed on Greece and Portugal, lately aggravated — an irresistible way of reading this almost 50-year-old play where Fassbinder staged the social and sexual tension induced by the arrival of the Gastarbeiter in post-war Germany (after all, emigrants from those two and other “peripheral” countries did write part of the German Economic Miracle story…). Secondly, the terminal disagreement among the members of the European Union over the refugee wave that the war in Syria and the struggle for survival in territories such as Sudan or Eritrea have exacerbated these past few months — a dangerously dividing topic even before made this new appearance in Paris that now risks dooming any foreseeable deal concerning the European borders.

With no dénouement in sight — and up until then eventually threatening to break Europe in two conflicting halves —, the refugee crisis was the topic the Volkstheater decided to address in a roundtable at the Rote Bar (a joint effort with the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe in the context of its Conflict Zones network program). It would be hard to ignore it anyway, in a city that just saw thousands of migrants being pushed into special trains by Austria’s neighbouring countries and flooding its main stations. The summer crowds have now vanished, but for hundreds of stranded refugees the Westbahnhof and the Hauptbahnhof still remain some kind of limbo halfway between asylum and repatriation — a limbo where at least they can find shelter, food, medical assistance and other support (translators, for instance, a basic necessity for many) provided by individual volunteers and organizations like Caritas and Train of Hope. It’s easy to spot them: they’re the boys reloading their SIM cards and aimlessly wandering around the Hauptbahnhof’s wide and desolate corridors, the little kids feeding the pigeons in the plaza just outside the station, and the fathers smoking at the entrance of the Westbahnhof’s executive lounge, now a temporary kindergarten for Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan babies and children. Not too far from here, in Spielfeld, on the border with Slovenia, Austria seems ready to build a 3.7 kilometre fence to “help manage” — i.e. “to slow and discourage” — the flow of thousands of migrants that demand its territory on a daily basis.

In a political landscape where the far right had already gained a very significant terrain (reaching 20.5% of the vote in the 2013 general election), the on-going refugee crisis further strengthened the Freiheitliche Partei (Freedom Party). In September, it doubled its score in the country’s third-largest state of Upper Austria; a month later, it reached a record result and nearly won the city election in Vienna, a long-standing social-democrat bastion — so is the audience of the Volkstheater, Anna Badora says “An old and old-fashioned audience”, she adds, and one she would love to “enlarge and diversify”, making way for “younger and more open” spectators to attend the theatre too. Still, the audience that filled the Rote Bar to take part in the roundtable dedicated to the dangerous liaisons between The refugee movement and right-wing populism — featuring political scientists Chantal Mouffe (University of Westminster) and Anton Pelinka (Central-European University, Budapest), anthropologist and Vienna Museum director Matti Bunzl, International Amnesty Austria’s spokesperson Daniela Pichler, chairman of the NGO Asyl in Not Michael Genner, and Kurdish-Syrian playwright Ibrahim Amir, a resident of Vienna since 2002 — seemed neither old nor old-fashioned. And the event that Anna Badora marketed as an effort to “raise the issues and find solutions” eventually became a strong statement for the emergence of an alternative (and therefore left-wing) narrative about the migration wave and what to do with it.

Anna Badora, artistic director of the Volkstheater Wien. Photo © www.lupispuma.com
Anna Badora, artistic director of the Volkstheater Wien. Photo © www.lupispuma.com/Volkstheater

Is it rightfully part of a theatre’s mission — namely one of the main theatres of a city that has historically been a destination for migrants and refugees — to make such a political stand? “Indeed”, says Anna Badora. “Particularly in times like these, it’s important to work explicitly against the right-wing prejudices and propaganda, so that the audience will refuse to be manipulated by them.” The Volkstheater’s artistic director then quotes one of the speakers at the roundtable, Chantal Mouffe, to emphasize theatre’s own ability to generate the positive emotions that so far the left-wing parties haven’t been able to oppose to the “narrative of fear” (placing the immigrant as “the enemy”) the far-right is insisting upon.

Anyway, the Serbischer November’s roundtable is far from being the only approach the Volkstheater is taking on the refugee issue. The institution has also been working on other fronts, one of them being the Ausblick nach oben programme developed by the educational service, which is bringing together Austrian, Syrian and Afghan teenagers (some of which are not even German-speaking) and challenging them into forging a common language out of shared experiences of socioeconomic frailty. Homohalal, one of the current season’s productions, was yet another take on the topic: it is based on a play written by Ibrahim Amir together with some of the refugees who promoted the Sigmund Freud Park’s mediatized Refugee Protest Camp back in November 2012, claiming the right to remain and to work in Austria, along with improved living conditions.

We therefore ask Anna Badora if we should expect a Syrian November to follow this Serbian November in 2016. “I’d love it personally, but these programmes must be articulated with the Foreign Affairs Ministry, which has already stated its intention of focusing on Bosnia-Herzegovina in the coming year. It was once Austro-Hungarian territory, so there’s a relevant common history.” The Volkstheater director, herself an outsider in Austria (she was born and grew up in Poland), vividly underlines that the first season she created for the Viennese theatre is overwhelmingly “international”. Foreign-directed productions by directors coming from different countries of the European and Mediterranean space (Israel, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Greece, Switzerland) clearly outnumber the shows being staged by Austrian directors. But the Volkstheater will eventually reach Syria sooner or later. Maybe later: “At this stage, it would be very difficult to organize such an event with war-stricken Syria; it would definitely be impossible to bring local productions to Vienna, which is actually what the programme stands for. But we can find alternative lines of work.”

 

Published on 26 November 2015 (Article originally written in Portuguese)

A contagious story: How a Fritz Kater play contaminated a whole festival

A contagious story: How a Fritz Kater play contaminated a whole festival

The iconography is very 70s Germany, the interaction with the world is very 21st century no-man’s-land, as if you could make reality, even at its harshest versions, go back and forth the way things go back and forth on an iPhone touchscreen.  The five characters in 5 Morgen may well point to an indefinite time, but whether it comes from the past, the future or the present— this is an impossible place to live in: the place of paranoia, the place of apocalypse, the place of disease, the place of an unstoppable contamination chain (in short: the world as an ultimately viral phenomenon).

Manja Kuhl, Holger Stockhaus
Manja Kuhl and Holger Stockhaus in ‘5 morgen’ by Fritz Kater © Bettina Stöß

A parade of zombies, a parade of survivors, Fritz Kater’s play was the final act of a festival built around an idea that is impossible to live with: the idea of terrorism as a perfectly established, and no longer exceptional, way of getting things done. But it was also the first of these five productions especially commissioned by the TERRORisms project to find its way to the stage — back in October 2013, as the opening performance of Armin Petras’ first season as the Schauspiel Stuttgart’s newly appointed director. In a way, it contaminated the theme festival that Armin Petras hosted in Stuttgart more than a year later — not without some public commotion —, finally getting his and the four associated productions together for a last brainstorm (Nationaltheatret Oslo’s We chew on the bones of time; Jugoslovenko dramsko pozoriste’s The Dragonslayers; Habima National Theater’s God Waits at the Station; and Comédie de Reims’ La Baraque, by order of appearance).

But how do you tell a city, how do you tell an audience, that of all the themes in the world this is the one you’ve decided to talk about? Plus, how do you tell this to a city that had been bruised by a terrorist experience itself, the Baader-Meinhof one?  “Well, that’s why they brought me all the way from Berlin [before heading the Schauspiel Stuttgart, he was the director of the Maxim-Gorki Theater there]: to shake things up around here”, Armin Petras explains a couple of minutes after 5 Morgen’s last performance. “Let’s say it was not a problem. Although the reaction of the political authorities at our announcement was not exactly ‘wow, cool, let’s go’.” The artistic team was guaranteed full freedom in its tackling of the issue — aside from some special procedures, Petras says, “We had to get in touch with the city’s police department; they gave us a phone number and told us which groups were likely to show up and what to do in case they did. They did not.” Even gags, such as the installation of a fake metal detector in the main entrance, or the appearance of a fake policewoman at the bar were allowed: “Our stage designer came up with that idea. We agreed that it was interesting to explore the different ways of dealing with the subject of terrorism, today, as artists.”

It was a learning opportunity for Armin Petras himself: “Staging the terrorist attacks makes it easier for us to live with them: suddenly we’re not alone with those problems and fears anymore, there are 500 other people in the room. For me this was the most important lesson.” The festival’s director singles out God Waits at the Station — the anatomy of a suicide bomber who blows herself up in Israel — as a demonstration that it is definitely possible to go way beyond paranoia in a theater room. “I could understand the social, economic, political and religious circumstances behind the Palestinian suicide bombers’ phenomenon. Now I can deal with it in better ways.” Maybe there’s not much more we can do, as suggested by the performance staged by the Nationaltheatret Oslo for this TERRORisms cycle while recovering from the founding trauma of the Utoya massacre, in which 69 people lost their lives at the hands of a seemingly normal Norwegian citizen, Anders Breivik. That’s the lesson to be learnt, Armin Petras insists: “Terrorrism lives with us.”

Inês Nadais interviewing Armin Petras during the TERRORisms Festival in Stuttgart
Inês Nadais interviewing Armin Petras during the TERRORisms festival in Stuttgart. © Jennifer Ressel/UTE

In Stuttgart, no matter how many years have gone by since the neighbouring Stammheim Trials — Stammheim being the prison where several members of the Baader-Meinhof group were found dead between 1972 and 1977 —, that statement is particularly true. The name is deeply inscribed in the city’s collective memory, and in its public space, too. But is it still alive? “Not too much”, says the director at the Schauspiel Stuttgart, who came to town more than 30 years after the Stammheim events. “Older people know about the history, but I don’t believe the younger ones do. Other issues have become more urgent: the NSA violations, salafi terrorism… That’s why I wanted this festival to be called TERRORisms, in the plural form. But of course it is peculiar to organize such a festival in a city where there’s a metro line going to Stammheim. I knew the word from the movies Fassbinder had made in the 70s, but I only realized how close it is to Stuttgart when I first came here.”

Perspectives

Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, a terrorist attack in the Tunisian resort of Sousse — 38 victims, mostly Europeans — interrupted the festival from a distance. “That’s how it has been since the beginning of this process: while we were writing these plays, while we were rehearsing them, hundreds, thousands of people died in terrorist attacks. There’s a growing number of such attacks, so, unfortunately, the occurrence of the Sousse events right in the middle of the festival was not a big surprise”, says Armin Petras. But was that the reason why spectators didn’t want to come and face — inside a theatre room — the same lousy show they’re confronted with day after day in every newscast?  “Different reasons explain why the festival was not that crowded: it’s summer, the topic is difficult and tough, and, generally speaking, Southern Germans prefer to have fun when they have some free time. But I’m not bitter or angry about that. We proposed a very intense schedule, and the city’s just not that big.”

As far as 5 Morgen is concerned, the city was big enough. “The reviews weren’t too good, but still we showed the performance 27 times in four different countries, and it became a success. A lot of the shows were sold out, despite the fact that we chose a secondary stage far from the city center in a not so lively neighbourhood.” Armin Petras witnessed as the performance grew and changed in the course of these past two years: “In Oslo, people laughed up until ten minutes before the end; in Sibiu, it was the opposite. In Stuttgart, it was a mixture of both. And I heard people say, ‘They’re so good with their bodies’. Because here nobody works with the body, people work only with their laptop and their mouse.”

It’s a matter of perspective. So were the five plays that the festival assembled: “Both the Norwegian show and the German show illustrate how our lack of faith in God and ourselves constitutes a problem for the western society. The Serbian show illustrates how terrorism is a 500-year-old battle. The Israeli show illustrates that there are places in the world where people are so close to one another but at the same time have so many conflicting purposes that terrorism must occur. These kids who volunteer for the terrorist attacks have no work, no home, no water. In the North of Africa, 45% of the male population aged between 18 and 28 years old is unemployed. A social worker from Essen stated that 95% of the volunteers leaving Germany to join the ISIS grew up without a father. For them, terrorism comes as a life project.”

It’s a terrible conclusion to come to, after five days of reflection on the topic. A conclusion, Armin Petras says, he will be considering for projects in the near future. “Theatrically, this idea of a terrorist organization becoming the father you never had is very strong. I guess I will be working on this story in one of my next shows.”

And so the contamination continues.

 

 

Published on 13 November 2015 (Article originally written in Portuguese)

 

If terrorism is an act, we are all spectators

If terrorism is an act,
we are all spectators

Suddenly, three almost simultaneously occurring terrorist attacks trigger a theatre festival fully dedicated to questions regarding terrorism: What do we do when fiction becomes reality?

God waits at the Station © Elohim Mehake Ba Tahana
© Elohim Mehake Ba Tahana

Even if this scenario didn’t actually happen, it most certainly could have: Stuttgart airport, June 23rd, a border control officer asks an Israeli actor what brings him to Germany. In response, the actor waves his invitation to an international theatre festival — and here he pauses to decide how, in a post-9/11 world, he could, without taking the risk of staying under interrogation, diplomatically formulate this — called TERRORisms. The same festival that, three days later, observes what was supposed to be fiction becoming a reality in Tunisia, Kuwait, and also, so close to us, in France; and with many — too many to be ignored — European victims (judging by the international community’s paralysis regarding Syria, other victims have been ignored more easily).

It is not a dark comedy, even if the peculiar, and rightfully celebrated, Jewish humour is on stage, therefore: applause. In the last two years, five members of the Union of Theatres of Europe (UTE) — Nationaltheatret Oslo (Norway), Jugoslovenko dramsko pozoriste (Serbia), the Habima – National Theater of Israel, Schauspiel Stuttgart (Germany), Comédie de Reims (France) — have been willing to show that the same word, terrorism, can lead to many different places, so much so that it no longer looks like one but several words, sometimes doomed to get lost in translation. In German, for example, terrorism means an alternative history of the seventies — or a rather murderous way of dealing with immigration. (The trial of the far-right group Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund that killed eight citizens of Turkish nationality between 2000 and 2006 is still going on. Meanwhile, the Austrian Elfriede Jelinek has written a play about this subject matter, Das Schweigende Mädchen, which was also shown at the TERRORisms festival). In Norwegian it is a synonym for Utoya, the place where a seemingly normal man, Anders Breivik, killed sixty-nine people in 2011. In Serbian it has another name, Gavrilo Princip, as well as another victim, Archduke Franz Ferdinand (and, with him, an idea that for many intellectuals seemed unusually promising — Mitteleuropa). In French, at least in the last few months, all terrorisms have been Charlie. And in Hebrew it is a word that swallows the entire nation, in addition to the official violence — from the years that preceded the foundation of the state of Israel up to the 21st century, when it became Paradise Now to a whole generation of suicide bombers.

We could go on and on, even without leaving Europe — Spain, Italy, Ireland, England, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, etc. But sometimes there’s a need to stop and bring order to the conversation. That’s what a festival in Stuttgart — dangerously close to Stammheim prison, where several members of the Rote Armee Fraktion, or Baader-Meinhof group, were found dead under highly disputable circumstances between 1972 and 1977 — did in the last few days, closing a project that had been launched in 2013 by the UTE to map the multiplicity of manifestations and reactions that the phenomenon of terrorism has taken on within the European space (or in one of the most irrepressible territories of its diaspora, Israel, where the UTE has one of its members outside the European Union). Two years have passed since the first drafting of the programme dedicated to this topic — an idea which occurred right in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Oslo and Utoya — and the final festival that should, at least in theory, put an end to this ultimately inexhaustible subject. These two years happened to be of particular relevance to the debate on terrorism, its media effects and artistic representation. No wonder other UTE members are considering further expanding this debate through additional productions.

The festival organized by the Schauspiel Stuttgart wanted to bring a system to precisely this debate. An overwhelming programme not only compiled the five plays specifically commissioned by the participating theatres for the TERRORisms project (and the publication of the respective texts) but also a series of debates, round-tables, installations, expositions, book launches, publications and simultaneous presentations that all sought to demonstrate to what extent terrorism, in its staging of violence and search for a general audience, is also a show. And, if so, to which extent we are all spectators, even if we don’t want to see the play.

Love and Hate

Is a festival enough to shorten the distance between fiction and reality? Hard to say considering that a triple terrorist attack unexpectedly stole the show after two days of theoretically discussing the very subject of terrorism in the Schauspiel Stuttgart. Some of the discussions were actually quite tangible — a guided tour through town, for example, debated the wounds that the Stammheim trials had opened in Stuttgart, and how easily some of the top Nazi figures found their important positions in supposedly regenerated post-war Germany. Or a play, Wir Sind Nicht das Ende, that highlighted the subliminal connection between Germany and the 9/11 events; the Lebanese Ziad Jarrah, one of the hijackers of Flight 93, had studied aeronautics in Hamburg, and his last girlfriend, who used to live in Stuttgart, is still in the country, under police protection.

But the terrorist attacks of the last week weren’t the first reality check for the five plays that came together in Stuttgart after the opening nights in their respective countries of origin. The rehearsals of La Baraque, the comedy of the Iranian Aiat Fayez, with which the Comédie de Reims entered the operation TERRORisms, were suddenly interrupted by the Charlie Hebdo attack, the director Ludovic Lagarde explained. Faced with real terror, the artistic crew had to stop and think whether the show about the unexpected wealth of two go-getting makers of homemade bombs could — or should — continue. “We did an open rehearsal a few days after the terrorist attack and the spectators, disturbed, asked us if we were really going to do the scene where the protagonists make a bomb in their house. We ended up keeping the scene, and that rehearsal turned out to be most valuable for us in terms of establishing the boundaries of the play: how far we could go, how much we could laugh…” Even with a bomb on stage — or because of a bomb on stage —, the opening of La Baraque, four weeks after the massacre, worked as “a strange experience of catharsis” in the end.

In Tel Aviv, the phenomenon of suicide bombers appeared to be a subject of the past by the time the Habima started working on God Waits at the Station, where, as in Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, there is more than one truth about the fictitious Palestinian woman who blows herself up in a restaurant in Haifa. It became a subject of the present again (without suicide bombers but with missiles instead) the moment Israel launched the summer 2014 campaign against Gaza. By then, the show had already been in rehearsals. “When we started this project, neither the public nor the press cared that much. Israel was going through a peaceful period; there wasn’t much terrorist activity. Meanwhile, however, the Israeli army entered Gaza and the Hamas responded. We heard the sirens in the rehearsals rooms, the actors had to run to the shelters, no one was thinking about work because the priority was hearing from family and friends… At some point, several members of the team said that with the country at war they couldn’t identify with the story of a suicide bomber and that they wanted to take their names from the technical file”, the director of the Habima, and current president of the UTE, Ilan Ronen said. The opening night got postponed several times because, even after the cease-fire, the administration of the theatre still believed it wasn’t the right time. And, Ronen admitted, they would have continued believing so if a UTE general assembly in Tel Aviv in November hadn’t forced the Habima to show the play, “Only international pressure allowed us to open: the play was part of a UTE project and the administration realised they couldn’t keep hiding it.” Reactions? Love, hate, and very few other things in between. “In Israel it is always difficult to tackle ‘the situation’. Everyone is openly far-left or far-right, everyone has gone through military service…”, the stage director Shay Pitowsky responded.

Even if theatre is always politics, — all five directors of the theatres present at the round-table dedicated to the subject agreed on this — some places are more political than others: Israel, obviously, where the new Minister of Culture, appointed by the most right-wing government ever, has announced that artists may continue saying whatever they want to but that there won’t be any public funding to help those who “disparage the country or the army”. But also Serbia, where it’s not completely safe for a theatre to announce its participation in an international project about terrorism with a show like The Dragonslayers — a sort of alternative, and quite poetical, biography of Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serbian that murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand 101 years ago (the festival ended precisely on 28 June) and that, as the main actor Nikola Rakocevic pointed out, “isn’t referred to in history books.” In Stuttgart, it’s possible to say manifestly that “Gavrilo Princip is a hero” and watch half a room applaud enthusiastically; but in Graz, Austria, where the play was also staged, the audience saw a manifestation of Serbian nationalism in The Dragonslayers — the same view that the director of the Serbian theatre Gorcin Stojanovic wants to avoid in what is “basically the story of a boy who never kissed a girl” and found himself killing “the regrettable oppressor whose miserable fate was really naming a pop band.”

Yes, looking at it from Stuttgart there are several, and not always obvious, paths that lead to terrorism — one only has to take a look at the Norwegian UFO that opened the festival with We Chew on the Bones of Time, an ironic meditation about the meaning of life, from the big bang to the apocalypse, that left many spectators wondering if they were at the wrong festival. There isn’t exactly terrorism in the play but there is the existential anguish, paranoia and acute atheism that we picture exploding in the face of an apparently perfect democracy when, in the blink of an eye, a normal citizen shoots and kills dozens of people at a summer camp. About the topic, “We are not the theatre one would expect, we are the theatre one wouldn’t image a national theatre could be”, the director of the Nationaltheatret Oslo, Hanne Tomta, underlined in a different context.

So, what else can we say about the theatre that organized this festival — and of Armin Petras, the director who had the idea of creating it when witnessing a demonstration in Oslo against the presence of the Habima – National Theatre of Israel in a European network? “We talked with the government, of course, but not because we were making a festival about terrorism, we have these kinds of conversations all the time”, he assured. Besides, the Schauspiel Stuttgart is the theatre where a director — the historical Claus Peymann — was once forced to quit his position because of his fundraising for subsidising the dental treatment of Gundrun Ensslin, a Baader-Meinhof member serving time in Stammheim prison; and it’s also the theatre where a play was made about that very event, Offending Peymann – A Training, by Rimini Protokoll in 2007. Many years, almost forty, have passed since. Today, this is the theatre where the freedom to deal with terrorism goes so far as to have a fake policewoman, fully armed, speaking with the spectators at the bar. The same spectators who have to go through a fake metal detector to get in, the same spectators who see a crowd of firemen invading the room that a Norwegian company has just filled with smoke, not knowing if this has actually happened, or if it just could have.

This article was originally published in the Portuguese print and online journal PÚBLICO the 29th/30th June 2015

 

Published on 31 August 2015 (Article originally written in Portuguese)

2000 – 2014

2000 – 2014, a time capsule of Portuguese theatre

Photo by courtesy of João Tuna & Teatro Nacional São João Porto
Photo by courtesy of João Tuna & Teatro Nacional São João Porto

The transition from the year 1999 to the year 2000 represented the mythical turn of the century and millennium that for many generations seemed like the foreseeable end of life on Earth—with the corresponding bug, the now very distant and very vintage Y2K. However, in the case of Portugal, it also looked like the beginning of a new paradigm in the relationship between the state and the creation, production and circulation functions in the field of the performing arts in general, and theatre in particular.

Leaning, then and now, on a model that juxtaposed the public sector (embodied by the two national theatres—Teatro Nacional D. Maria II in Lisbon and Teatro Nacional São João in Porto, the only Portuguese member of the Union of Theatres of Europe—benefiting from a specific institutional and financial support) and a non-public sector (i.e. ‘independent’ yet state-subsidized), that relationship was substantially challenged with the coming into force of Legislative Order 23/200. Suddenly, the special treatment given to the selected so-called “appointed companies and structures” (operating on a regular and systematic basis for a minimum of 15 years) was extinct, and the call for proposals application procedure became the norm for the whole community of theatre agents as far as the access to long-term (either quadrennial, biannual or annual) and specific project-oriented grants was concerned.

Regardless of the several legislative and operational changes that continued redefining the regulations for the call for proposals, sometimes overtly against the theatre community’s sensibility, this paradigm has remained in force until today. This is why we believe it is adequate to consider the period between 2000 and 2014 as a time capsule of Portuguese theatre. Such a transformation was, in fact, the political translation of an empirical observation: 25 years having gone by after the revolution of 25 April 1974—and the absolutely unique yet collective adventures towards the creation of an intervention theatre, both popular and politically engaged—the landscape had changed. The new companies operating in the country diversified the possible paths within the Portuguese theatre world, forcing the system into a reconfiguration. These new companies outnumber their predecessors, and are far younger and far more heavily exposed both to the influence of the outside world and to the influence of an advanced art education (in Lisbon, at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema; in Oporto at the Escola Superior de Música e Artes do Espectáculo).

2000, the year that marks the start of this journey, is therefore a big bang, in a way: From then on, all the state-subsidized companies, even those who had so far been chosen and financed by appointment, had to start applying to the available funds in a call for proposals. By then, this had already been the only way for the majority of the subsidized companies, even if 40% of the available funds had until then directly been awarded either to those ‘selected’ long-standing companies or to specific one-off projects.

Ever since, the call for proposals application system has remained the rule—but everything else has fluctuated. Governing bodies, amounts, procedures, evaluation criteria, decision methods, jury composition, i.e. the overall framework has had its ups and downs in the course of these moderately turbulent past 15 years. Still, despite the chronic (and sometimes disastrous) delays in every call for proposals and final results announcement—and indeed in the actual material awarding of the grants to each of the approved applicants—the system has worked without major interruptions. That’s quite an achievement considering the fact that in 2011 the Ministry of Culture was downgraded to a Secretariat of State, and that the body in charge of managing the grants went through several metamorphosis: at first, the Instituto Português das Artes e do Espectáculo between 1998 and 2003, followed by the Instituto das Artes from 2003 up to 2007, and finally the Direcção-Geral das Artes ever since 2007.

So far, we’ve been looking at the bright side of things. But we can look at the dark side, too, if we contemplate the effects of time on the dimension of available funds for theatre support and the number of subsidized companies: slightly over 9 million euros for 117 structures in 2000, around 6.3 million euros for 92 structures in 2014. (By the way, the maximum amount awarded to a company decreased, too: from the 424,000 euros awarded to both the appointed Teatro da Cornucópia and Teatro Aberto in 2000, to the 400,000 euros awarded to the Companhia de Teatro de Almada in 2014). Within this period, 2004 stands out as the year that saw the largest number of companies being awarded a state grant (131), and 2009 stands out as the year that saw the most generous global amount available for theatre subsidizing (reaching nearly 12 million euros).

From 2011 on, though, the contraction of the state supporting action as far as the arts and theatre in particular are concerned has become harsher. That year, of course, Portugal had formally demanded international assistance to overcome the financial crisis, and subscribed to the Technical Memorandum of Understanding proposed by the ruling troika (European Commission, Central European Bank and International Monetary Fund). Whereas so far the overall amount awarded to the theatrical “independent” system had fluctuated between a minimum of 9.06 million euros (2000) and a maximum of 11.94 million euros (2009), it continuously went downhill almost all the way after that year, reaching figures never seen before in this century (and millennium): 6.8 million euros in 2012, 6.1 million euros in 2013, and 6.3 million in 2014. The following figures for 2015 are necessarily incomplete because some calls for proposals haven’t yet reached their final stage (namely for the awarding of the specific one-off projects and the Apoios Tripartidos, a new system created in 2007 that has been operating since 2013, and allows joint-venture applications through an agreement with local governments): So far, 53 theatre companies have been awarded state support, in a total amount of over 3.1 million euros. But even after all the grants will have been awarded there will be a decrease in the global public funds available to the Portuguese theatre community in 2015—a scenario the government has already admitted to.

It’s the theatre of a crisis-ridden economy, stupid—a theatre that the existing statistics partly confirm and partly deny. There were more theatregoers in 2013 than in 2000, both absolutely (1.5 million vs. 614,000) and relatively (148,500 per thousand inhabitants vs. 59,700 per thousand inhabitants). But the best year, 2008, is already very far away (1.8 million theatregoers in total; 175,300 theatregoers per thousand inhabitants). Ticket offices were also doing worse in 2000 (2.5 million euros) than in 2013 (8.6 million euros)—but they had also been doing far better before, for instance in 2005 (11.2 million euros). At this point today, a recovery to previous proud performances doesn’t look very likely.

Not even the two national theatres have been able to avoid the decrease in ticket office revenues: between 2010 and 2012, the Teatro Nacional São João’s dropped from 286,000 to 212,000 euros, in a context where its total budget also dropped from 4.9 million euros to 4.6 million euros (it’s important to emphasize that it had reached 7 million euros just before). And, last but not the least, the institution lost its sponsor. Indeed, national theatres have suffered a lot of institutional instability, too, with significant statutory changes and, among others, a very obvious consequence: the loss of financial independence.

Despite all this, the last 15 years have also witnessed a major reconfiguration of the theatre and cultural centers circuit—with the opening of a series of brand venues, most of them promoted by local governments. These have independent programming and considerable means to coproduce along with the independent companies and structures (a vital function that both national theatres in fact also more or less engagingly commit themselves to, together with the mandatory investment in their own productions). A map of the Portuguese theatre in the last decade and a half will have to include, besides D. Maria II and São João, such cultural centers (some of them privately owned) as Lisbon-based Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Centro Cultural de Belém, Culturgest and ZDB, Oporto-based Fundação de Serralves, and Guimarães-based Centro Cultural Vila Flor; and such ‘local’ venues as Teatro Municipal de Bragança (in Bragança), Teatro Académico de Gil Vicente (in Coimbra), Teatro Viriato (in Viseu), Teatro Municipal da Guarda, Teatro Municipal Rivoli and Teatro Municipal do Campo Alegre (both in Oporto), Teatro Maria Matos and São Luiz Teatro Municipal (both in Lisbon). And it will also feature at least the following festivals, with very dissimilar degrees of consolidation and internationalization: Festival de Almada, Alkantara Festival, FITEI–Festival Internacional de Teatro de Expressão Ibérica, Próximo Futuro, Festivais Gil Vicente and Citemor–Festival de Montemor-o-Velho.

It is symptomatic that the Citemor–Festival de Montemor-o-Velho has gone from the place where Portuguese audiences met stage directors such as Angelica Liddell or Rodrigo García—the most performed contemporary non-French playwright in France, and recipient of the Europe Theatre Prize in 2009—to the non-state-subsidized festival where artists present their works almost free of charge, when they don’t actually pay to be there. Then again, this is the surreal country that for the past 15 years has been daydreaming of the mythical future where the government will finally spend 1% of the national budget on culture—and it’s also the real and not at all mythical country where that amount doesn’t even reach 0.1%.

 

Sources: Direcção-Geral das Artes; PORDATA; Instituto Nacional de Estatística

 

Published on 20 May 2015 (Article originally written in Portuguese)