Europe Theatre Prize – A Jungle of Languages

Europe Theatre Prize –
A Jungle of Languages

ETP – Special Prize to Silviu Purcărete (Romania). Click on the image to see the video (external link) — ETP – Special Prize to Silviu Purcărete (Romania). Click on the image to watch the video (external link)

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Established in 1986, after nine editions in Italy (in Taormina and Turin), the Europe Theatre Prize hit the international road and reached Thessaloniki, Wroclaw and St. Petersburg, involving a number of major institutions. The fifteenth edition was held in Craiova, Romania, between April 23rd and 26th, in connection with the tenth International Shakespeare Festival.
According to the press release, the Swedish choreographer and director Mats Ek was awarded with the XVI ETP for his ability “to mix dance and theatre in his own personal and very original expression”.
Since its third edition, alongside the main award, the Europe Theatre Prize Theatrical Realities “is aimed at encouraging trends and initiatives in European drama, considered in all its different forms,
articulations and expressions.” Winners of the XIII editions are Viktor Bodó (Hungary), Andreas Kriegenburg (Germany), Juan Mayorga (Spain), National Theatre of Scotland (Scotland/United Kingdom) and Joël Pommerat (France). A Special Prize was awarded to the Romanian master of stage directing, Silviu Purcărete, author of some astonishing rewritings of evergreen classics from Shakespeare to the Greek tragics.
The programme was opened by two performances of former winners, Thomas Ostermeier and Romeo Castellucci: Richard III and Julius Ceasar. Spare parts, as a liaison with the Shakespeare Festival. Then the National Theatre Marin Sorescu in Craiova hosted an intensive schedule of performances, round-tables, conferences and open discussions, a fruitful tool to get deeper into the artists’ world and, on the other hand, a precious platform for international networking.

A comment

The value of a prize can very much depend on the country where it is awarded. In those places where the arts struggle to get attention, facing a deep competition with other forms of expression and communication, a prize can function as a form of recognition, something that is able to create an outburst of emancipation and to strengthen the peculiarities of a language. Very often this function cannot manage to cross the borders of a very specific audience, which remains the same at the end of the day.
Nonetheless, the experience in Craiova showed that the value of the ETP lies in its inclusive nature: it’s a safeguarded environment in which artists and spectators have the chance to meet, discuss, and open their eyes and minds. The most important aspect of this three-day marathon was the opportunity of diving into so many different languages. The handcrafted dream-like work of Joël Pommerat, for example, proves to be attached to two strings: on the one hand, the quest for powerful and thought-provoking words , and on the other hand, the visual imagery of primordial cinematography. His company, Louis-Brouillard, funded in 1990, was able to draw a picture of contemporary society with all its contradictions through a form of theatre that, in his words, is “a possible place to interrogate the human experience.” Actors, music, and sounds are kept together by a subtle work on light designing, creating a continuous tension in the spectator’s attention.

Although similar in its urgencies (again dealing with contemporary issues), the Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga fills his plays with a stream of words that govern the frenzied relationships between characters of the everyday life. In Reikiavik—presented in Craiova—through a text that’s perhaps too long and wordy, Mayorga imagines the epic duel between two famous chess players (that reveals to be nothing more than a Pirandello-like “game of parts”) as a metaphor for a lifetime battle in which everyone struggles with a destiny that appears to be already written in a book.

Viktor Bodó‘s collective actions (his Sputnyik Shipping Company toure d Europe extensively) represent a very complex, articulated and multi-layered scenic text in which contrasting styles coexist in the same time/space span. Absurd theatre, pantomime, and visual theatre meet with biting irony.

Throughout his intensive work on major German stages and international collaborations, Andreas Kriegenburg has established a signature tone. The most evident characteristic is an amazing visual impact and insight into some cornerstones of Occidental theatrical literature. The German director’s three-hour staging of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise has been quite an experience for the foreign audience, challenged in following the surtitles, and at the same time amazed by such strong mastery of acting and stage movement.

The National Theatre of Scotland, a rather young institution, has proved to be open to tough challenges in producing new plays and pursuing high quality standards. And it’s laudable that an international prize was able to widen its perspective beyond the career of a single artist and towards the definition of a line of work. Last Dream (on Earth) (created and directed by Kai Fischer, presented in Craiova) is a storytelling piece that intertwines the desperate journey of an African refugee to Spain with Gagarin’s attempt to the Moon landing. It’s a sort of radio drama listened through earphones, and nonetheless completed by the sight of the actors/musicians on stage, immobile on their stools, yet kept alive by a very thin path of small movements and gestures.

If, at first sight, the choice to replace a live guest performance with a video projection appears disappointing, the audience was eventually rewarded by being given the opportunity of entering Silviu Purcărete’s mind through the documentary Within A Tempest. The Island (by Laurenţiu Damian). Watching the great Romanian artist directing his actors through Shakespeare’s final play gave back the essence of creative work, with whirling ideas flowing in and out the stage, building up and crumbling down whole portions of intuitions.

Curated by the Swedish critic Margareta Sörenson, the meeting with Mats Ek (more than any other) helped the audience to embark on a trip to this master’s imagery, featuring comments and notes by a group of scholars and critics. Ek’s attention to female characters was only one of the focuses that put this choreographer in the centre of a committed research on the essence of the human being: as Ada D’Adamo stated, “even when detached by a narrative dimension, dance always leans on expression, because it is driven by a human body. It never limits itself to being a frozen hieroglyphic, it’s pure passion in flesh and bones.” Ek rewrote some classic 19^th century ballets, marking a new path which is nonetheless in debt to some other artists’ lesson, and yet incredibly personal. Pieces, such as Giselle (1982), The Swan Lake (1987), Carmen (1992) and Sleeping Beauty (1996) are characterized by a sharp care for costumes and gestures, and very simple in the visual approach, often featuring only small objects or pieces of furniture. “I’m in love with bodies”, Mats Ek said at the meeting, “with real bodies, sometimes ungraceful, sometimes unpleasant; but a movement must be authentic, and therefore beautiful.”
The piece Axe, choreographed by Ek, featuring Ana Laguna and Yvan Auzely, was a very gentle and elegant grand finale of the awards ceremony: the simple action of woodcutting (with real wood and a real hatchet) grows more and more rhythmical; Laguna is like a ghost of late past crossing the space and passing through Auzely’s memory, resolving in a heart-breaking last dance.

That’s how a thick dramaturgical texture and a perfect technique establish a strong connection between those real bodies and their complex psychological and emotional substratum: in Ek’s words, “It’s impossible to separate body and head. The point is not how the bodies look, but the interaction between body and actions.” Due to austerity measures, this year the Prize (originally 60.000 Euro and 30.000 for the ETP Theatrical Realities) was drastically reduced; to the point where we might question the sense of such an operation, when more money might be better invested in finding new opportunities for promotion and touring.

The ceremony itself, broadcasted by the national TV station, and attended by a considerable number of young and non-habitué spectators, was somehow too formal, and at risk to crystallize the image of the current theatrical vitality. On the other hand, the glimpse we get into such a high number of different theatrical languages allows us to compile an executive summary of the artistic reflection on contemporary issues. The conferences, open discussions, and even the informal moments of small talk in the beautiful hall of the Theatre Marin Sorescu might be the highest achievement in drawing a picture of the actual urgency of contemporary European theatre: to get together, to talk, to discuss, to fight.

Rather than recognition, assertion, and agreement, we might need doubt, dissent, and productive disagreement to prove that the cultural level of the multi-national discourse is the foundation on which any other form of “community” should be built.
As in any well-written play, a strong dialogue is made through contrasts. Treasuring these opportunities of encounter, the cultural community might use arts as an ethical barometer; fostering the ability to show the differences, and sometimes to preserve them, might be the way to pose a question: to which point can and must we consider ourselves to be similar in order to be part of a group of free minds?
On this premise, a common dock for mooring ships carrying loads of doubts is the most precious prize we can award each other.

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

Facing the strange in Craiova

Sunday, 24th April 2016. A wind coming from Europe blows over the city of Craiova, Romania. In the streets, in the restaurants and in the wide hall of the National Theatre Marin Sorescu, one can hear the music of a joyful compilation of foreign languages. Unknown accents and unpronounceable sounds: English, Hungarian, German, Spanish, French, words from dozens of countries sounding as the same language.

At the National Theatre Marin Sorescu, the International Shakespeare Festival presented two performances by Romeo Castellucci and Thomas Ostermeier as a curtain call. The Europe Theatre Prize comes next with a three-day program of performances, conferences and international meetings. Launched in 1986, the ETP was initiated by the European Commission to distinguish the artists whose works “promote understanding and the exchange of knowledge between peoples.” This year it was awarded to Mats Ek (Sweden), Viktor Bodó (Hungary), Andreas Kriegenburg (Germany), Juan Mayorga (Spain), the National Theatre of Scotland (Scotland/United Kingdom) et Joël Pommerat (France).

Sharing with the ETP a long-standing history of collaboration, the Union of Theatres of Europe participates in the event. On 24th April 2016, the UTE presented a public discussion, whose title “Turn and Face the Strange” is borrowed from the David Bowie’s song “Changes.” The “strange” refers to the multiple, fleeting, inconstant world on which theatre attempts to cast a light. It is within such “fundamental relationship to the present” that theatre indeed shares a responsibility over the flow of events that strikes and disrupts our societies. To explore these questions, twelve among theatre makers and administrators from Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy and Portugal were gathered together and invited to join a discussion, moderated by Italian journalist Sergio Lo Gatto. What emerged is a bunch of visions and experiences of theatre, an idea that each one of them believes as essential, because firmly linked to our present time.

Diverse and multicoloured are the answers to Sergio Lo Gatto’s questions. To someone, theatre is a getaway through a suspended otherworldliness, a “mindful pause” within the crazy chronology of our present existence. Others consider theatre as a living manifestation of the “Here and Now”, an imperious reply to the urge to tell about the world and to make a difference. We often put two kinds of theatre in opposition: on the one hand, a “fiction theatre” that’s able to pull us out of our everyday life and let us be free, and on the other hand a type of theatre that aims at having an effect on the world by confronting us to it, harshly sometimes. Nevertheless, rather than one out of these two, thousands kinds of theatre exist: they discuss, they confront, but none of them will ever exhaust the infinity of resources that artists convey to makes us stronger, greater, freer and alive.

This article is an account of what has been said among the most remarkable during this discussion.

A watchful theatre that sounds the alarm

Slovak choreographer and artistic director of Farm in the Cave company, Viliam Dočolomanský, develops a work that stems from anthropological research. His last project “Disconnected” deals with “Hikikomori”. The term, which means “disconnected” in Japanese, refers to men and women who withdraw from social life because they feel unable to cope with the pressure of a society characterized by a strong competition. As Viliam Dočolomanský remarks, Hikikomoris are the “tax that our societies must pay for living the way they do”. By broaching the subject, the Slovak artist wants to alert the general public on the reality of a phenomenon unknown in Europe. In his sense, his duty as an artist is to be “the canary in the mine”, the one who— anticipating the dangers that people might be facing—sounds the alarm. But in order to be able to influence the course of events, “theatre must tackle the real problems”, Viliam Dočolomanský adds. This capacity to attract spectators is the only condition that can enable theatre to act as a real whistle blower and fulfil its duty that is to generate change.

A living theatre to “change life”

According to Pippo Delbono, the problem is not a matter of content, but a matter of form. What the Italian artist wants to do throughout his performances is to inject life in a moribund theatre. Quoting Bergman, according to whom “theatre is a meeting with human beings”, and pointing out his affiliation to Jerzy Grotowski’s “poor theatre”, Pippo Delbono expects theatre to “change our life and points of view over things.” It is something that fiction theatre cannot do, because “actors are phantoms”, he believes. Pippo Delbono’s actors, on the contrary, are “real people”: disabled, homeless or refugees, these men and women who often live on the fringes of society find on stage a dignity to which they cannot have access elsewhere. This dignity lies in their technique. With his theatre, Pippo Delbono creates a space where the beautiful, the poetic and the extraordinary are not the monopoly of the artists, a space where the outcasts talk and the privileged few listen. In the concrete experience of such a reversed structures of domination, in the awareness that it might raise, in the change of perspective that it might arouse, lies the hope of a possible transformation of life.

A free theatre to “stop life”

Founder in 1988 of the Compagnia della Fortezza, Armando Punzo also works with non professional actors. In fact, the Italian stage director develops his works with the convicts of the prison of Volterra. Denying any ambition to do social theatre, Armando Punzo insists on the artistic dimension of his approach: “The prison—he says— is the model of the society, the prisoners are the model of the human being.” He chose these place and people to be the material of his theatre, because they express something fundamental about our contemporary world. But this theatre that tells spectators about the world also owes its strength to its capacity to “create a suspension in life,” “to stop life.” Inside the prison of Volterra, Armando Punzo created a space to read, discuss and perform, that nobody is ever forced to enter. This “out of time space,” far from the confinement and isolation of everyday life, offers a place to search and experiment liberty. Since the creation of the theatre company, “the prison became one of the most open in Italy.”

A theatre of distortion

While Armando Punzo diverts the penitentiary space from its primary logic of confinement, Icelandic director, author and actor Gíssli Örn Garđasson, member of the Vesturport Theatre, insists on the need in Iceland to circumvent the commercial logic of theatre institutions. Allegedly more profitable, stagings of classical texts represent the major part of the artistic programs of Icelandic theatre institutions. While it is almost impossible for artists to produce something else, this constrictive situation obliges artists to develop strategies of circumvention, explains Gardasson. In the hands of the Vesturport artists, classics thus become the Trojan horse thanks to which they can invade the Icelandic and international theatres and make their works known from a greater audience. As Viliam Dočolomanský underlined it earlier, the question of the audience is crucial, since a confined and isolated theatre cannot influence society. This is why Vesturport artists use all their means to give their works a wider audience, especially mass media such as television or cinema.

A theatre of resistance

Responding to this tricky approach of a theatre struggling to exist in a world rules by profit, Bulgarian playwright and associated author of the Sfumato Theatre in Sofia, Stefan Ivanov, defends a theatre of resistance. Mentioning Gilles Deleuze’s remarks on the links between art and resistance act, Stefan Ivanov describes theatre as a besieged entity, struggling against the forces that threaten our imagination, empathy and courage. This theatre of resistance always faces dangers: on the one hand, the danger of institutionalization that neutralizes all forms of subversion, on the other hand, the danger of the absorption by the market that turns theatre into nothing more than a mere product.

A theatre of distance and emotion

Italian playwright and associated author of the Teatro di Roma Roberto Scarpetti believes that these traps can only be avoided if the author keeps a certain distance from reality. Although his theatre obviously tackles the problems of our time, it also has to do with a certain strangeness. Underlining a fundamental difference of nature between theatre and television, Roberto Scarpetti describes the unique power of theatre as the result of a paradoxical movement: on the one hand the author creates distance from reality, on the other hand he aspires to move the spectator in the innermost parts of his soul and body. “I try to keep my distance from reality. But in order to understand a reality which is far from us, we need emotion.”

A theatre of cry

But what happens when reality is so imposing and painful that it is impossible to keep away from it? What do playwrights express when the only words they have are cries? This is the question raised by Greek playwright Angeliki Darlasi. Mentioning the crisis in Greece, she explains the difficulty for authors to put words on the experience, now and here, of an unbearable suffering. “When I try to write about this situation, I cry, I get too emotional about it.” If many Greek artists prefer not to broach a subject which they can only talk about with emotions, Angeliki Darlasi believes that “something interesting may come out from this theatre of cry.” This “something” is the hope for theatre to continue to live and tell the world, no matter what.

The hunting dog

As Francisca Carneiro Fernandes (President of the board of directors of the National Theatre São João Porto) rightly remarks, there is not one way of making theatre. When theatre, through its power of fiction, tears us away from “the fear and guilt of daily life”, it proves itself to be vital in order for us to continue to live. Yet, the many forms of theatre are what enable it to embrace the perpetual movement of history. The duty of the artists, as Michal Dočekal (artistic director of the National Theatre Prague and UTE President) sums it, is to make sure that theatre never become “a hunting dog running after changes but never managing to catch it.”

An imperative to which Sergio Lo Gatto responds by quoting the words of Jacques Copeau on the occasion of the opening of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in 1913: “We don’t believe it is enough today to create great works; where will they find acceptance, where will they meet both their public and their interpreters, in an atmosphere favourable to their development? Thus, inevitably, like a “postulation perpetuelle” this great problem confronts us: to build a new theatre on absolutely solid foundations. Let it be the rallying point of all those, authors, actors, spectators, who sense the need to restore beauty to the stage. Perhaps one day will see this miracle realized. Then the future will open up before us. […] Let us try, at least, to form this little nucleus from which life will radiate, around which the future will make its great contributions”.

TURN AND FACE THE STRANGE
 A discussion moderated by Sergio Lo Gatto (Italy)
 With UTE members Francisca Carneiro-Fernandes (TNSJ Porto, Portugal), Michal Dočekal (National Theatre Prague, Czech Republic), Jan Hein (Schauspiel Stuttgart, Germany) and Veronika Maurer (Volkstheater Wien, Austria)
 The young playwrights of the “Harbour40” project Angeliki Darlasi (Greece), Stefan Ivanov (Bulgaria) and Roberto Scarpetti (Italy),
 And Pippo Delbono (Italy), Armando Punzo (Italy), Gíssli Örn Garđasson (Iceland) and Viliam Dočolomanský (Czech Republic)


Published on 11 May 2016 (Article originally written in French)

The Own & The Foreign

The Own & the Foreign

"Die Schutzbefohlenen / Appendix / Coda / Epilog am Boden" at the Schauspielhaus Bochum, directed by Hermann Schmidt-Rahmer. Photo © Birgit Hupfeld — “Die Schutzbefohlenen / Appendix / Coda / Epilog auf dem Boden” at the Schauspielhaus Bochum, directed by Hermann Schmidt-Rahmer. Photo © Birgit Hupfeld

In the context of the three-year project CONFLICT ZONES | ZONES DE CONFLIT a UTE General Assembly was hosted by the city of Bochum, where the Schauspielhaus organized a programme of artistic activities and meetings on the subject of xenophobia — “Das Eigene & das Fremde (The Own & the Foreign)”. At the present time the refugee flow is one of the most pressing issues in Europe; nevertheless it is running the risk of political, especially right-wing populist, exploitation. In this two-article report we try to review the general situation by presenting an account of three performances and related public discussions that invigorated the Schauspielhaus Bochum during the UTE visit.

Hiob. Longing and belonging. Read the first article here
The Pursuit of an Alternative. Read the second article here

Published on 12 April 2016 (Article originally written in Italian)

Gaudeamus igitur … or The Soul after Victory

Gaudeamus igitur…
or The Soul after Victory

Gaudeamus, directed by Lev Dodin. Maly Drama Theatre, Saint-Petersburg. Photo © ViktorVassiliev

Standing ovations after the opening night of the newly rehearsed award-winning Glasnost classic Gaudeamus on 27 January 2016 at the Piccolo Teatro – Teatro d’Europa in Milan. Based on the story The Construction Battalion by Sergei Kaledin, the world premiere — that successfully prevailed against the military censorship on 11 July 1990 at the Leningrad Maly Drama Theatre (MDT) — courageously tackled the inhuman treatment of young people liable to military service in the Soviet army, which the young actors back then had experienced themselves first hand. 25 years after the end of the Stalinist Papal State, the Saint Petersburg founding member of the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe (UTE) — since 1998 the Maly Drama Theatre – Théâtre de l’Europe — guests with a post-Soviet generation in the parts of their older fellow ensemble members. The Russian director of the play and UTE President of Honour, Lev Dodin, brilliantly masters the transmission of a cultural heritage whose roots are tightly linked to the history of Europe. The idealization of the past — sadly having become so characteristic of our restoration period today — yields the performance of the young graduates who once again bring to life a fruitful memorial site of timeless relevance.

Civilised and natively dressed, they enter, dispersed and to the sound of military marches from all cardinal directions: Kostya (Evgini Sannikov), Bogdan (Aleksei Morozov), Babai (Philip Moglinitsky), Vlad (Leonid Lutchenko), Itskovitch (Aleksandr Bykosvki), Sharaev (Artur Kozin), Bourmistrov (Beka Tculukidze), Milman (Evgeni Serzin) and Popov-Bielotchiski (Stanislav Tkachenko). One after the other they enter the platform that slantingly faces the audience on the stage of the Piccolo Teatro Strehler; it is approximately fifteen metres long and approximately five metres deep (stage design by Alexei Porai-Koshits). A plethora of shredded white plastic strips cover its surface. Bright light aflame, the draftees waddle on the tips of their toes, fumbling forward through the snowy landscape until they — and Bob’s your uncle — go down in a hole in the ground as if they were drowning. Drafted. Descent is the name of the first scene.

On the creation of heroes and swaggering

We find ourselves in the time between the 60s and 80s somewhere in the Soviet Union. Beyond the civilised world there’s a world of the military. It nourishes distinct expectations on the malleable material, the young, manly body with its most intimate desires and thoughts. Dressed in Red Army uniform the young men climb through the hatches back into the snow. Now it’s really getting started. Together with the recruits, we’re riding at a gallop through the basic military training: “Company, attention!”, “Stand at ease”, “Eyes steady” — they exercise everything, also how to ‘make’ a report. The instructors’ unintelligible barking orders on the barrack yards are alike everywhere around the world. The same goes for the harassment performed on rounds. The major (Pavel Gryaznov) cunningly wags a white handkerchief in front the eyes of the recruits. He has found a dust grain on the doorframe above the entrance. There will be repercussions.

The scene Physical Exercise leads to scandal. A flatulence interrupts the athletic showdown from a press-up contest to lifting weights. A brawl starts between the swaggers. In the end, Itskovitch, the contemplative nonathletic Jew, is threshed until he’s unconscious. And Lieutenant Shamtchiev (Stanislav Nikolskii) kicks everyone in the groin who can’t hold the declared position of attention: space between the forward section of the foot in an angle of 20˚, chest out, stomach in, arms bent, fingertips at the hip on the trouser seam, and the greeting altogether! Greeting, walking, standing, sitting, sleeping… natural movements are socially rearranged and normed according to military procedure. Human material is made fit, fit to the service regulation that even Lieutenant Shamtchiev has to check every now and again, much to the laughter of the audience.

Material deficiency or adaptive difficulties?

The first attempt of a Moscow company failed to already stage the six-part story of The Construction Battalion by Sergei Kaledin in 1989 in the theatre of the Soviet Army in Moscow. Throughout the union, officers conferred and decided that The Construction Battalion is backstabbing the Red Army. A public power struggle between the military censorship and the cultural sector preceded the publication. The story was planned for the October edition of the Moscow literature magazine Novy Mir in 1988. The General Directorate of the protection of State Secrets in the Press (Glavlit) did not want to give their assent for printing without the approval of the military censorship. The chief editor, who had previously already enforced manuscripts such as The Foundation Pit by the Andrei Platonov, who had been prohibited for almost 60 years, received a rejection on the grounds of Kaledin’s story demonstrating an extraordinarily low political and moral standard of the relatives of a unit of troops of the Soviet Army. Kaledin is taking the risk himself and begins defending the text across the censorship authorities until its publication in April 1989. Prior to this, reviews are published in the Komsomolka, “there’s nothing worse than barrack yard collectivism of lawless people”, and in the Moskovski novosti “Glasnost isn’t enough — we also need a sense of hearing.” Julian Panitsh read Kaledin’s text on the Radio Svoboda; the latter was surprised that no one came to get him.

Times had changed. Lev Dodin and his troupe had nothing to do with the Moscow controversy, and rehearsed, undisturbed by censoring, for a year until the opening night on 11 July 1990. A class of his acting and directing students at the Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) University of Theatre, that Dodin has been teaching at since 1967 and where he now chairs the department of stage direction , used Kaledin’s story as a starting point, but mostly used their own experiences as a basis for their performance which they solidified in 19 improvisations, putting the issue on the map. Taking it as a leitmotif, the hole in the ground serves as a latrine that the gypsy Vlad and the Jew Itskovitch shovel faeces in, while the ‘hero’, Kostya, transports the faeces away in a wheelbarrow. On stage Vlad and Itskovitch wear their caps like a food bowl underneath their lower jaw. Matchboxes containing faecal specimen of the recruits fly from these pitfalls in the scene War is War. The filthy curses and the soldiers’ speak of Kaledin’s story influence the dialogues. Everything is relentlessly brought up, from alcohol abuse to deaths in military manoeuvres to the movement of discharge contenders that distinguishes recruits according to term of service into ‘dashers’, ‘badgers’ and ‘grandpas’, and includes the personality-despising duty of ‘dashers’ and ‘grandpas’.

Happy Fracking

In a conversation with the Italian theatre critic Luca Doninelli about Theatre and Freedom Lev Dodin, when asked about the human soul, responded, “The human memory tends to erase tragic memories. Our human memory does away with uncomfortable memories and uncomfortable thoughts and tries to eradicate the pain. And one of the most important qualities of theatre is to identify this pain, to interpret it, and to talk about it.” — The son of a geologist, born in 1944 in Siberia, has proven this three-part working method in numerous productions at the Maly Theatre in Saint Petersburg, amongst which The House and Brothers and Sisters based on Fyodor Abramov, Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Chevengur by Andrei Platonov, Stars in the Morning Sky by Alexander Galin or Life and Fate by Wassily Grossman. The basic conflicts of the Papal State are envisioned in these plays by Stalinism force collectivising the dream of the new human or the Soviet Civilisation (Andrei Sinyavsky) starting in the mid-20s.

This construction is cheered. This construction is cursed. The cheering is faced towards victory. The paid price is cursed. Dodin’s interpretation of the pain of young people in Gaudeamus resembles fracking, through which gases in low-lying rock layers are released. These gases are the dreams, the yearnings, the wishes and hopes of young bodies. This Let’s be happy! gives a premonition of unused sources of youthful zest for action: the civil side is the convincing performance by full-of-life acting graduates. The military side is the ironically funny exaggeration of the going-to-waste soul in every day life of young recruits in basic military training. Both sides of the same coin clank together with a cheer when Dodin gives this Stalinist construction a surreal chemical cocktail that comes up with a visual and acoustic colourfulness of poetry, opening up rooms for association across the memory of the ‘Russian Soul’ and literature.

There’s the big hang-out-the-laundry babushka (Mariya Nikiforova), who becomes the sexual adventure for the recruit Babai. At the same time, she’s also the lieutenant’s wife and represents Mother Russia. Whoever gets involved with her will be loved to death and left on the ground like Babai. She’s the character of the reaper that force collectivises Wostchew in Platonov’s The Construction Pit who commands death and donates food. She’s an invisible power that unexpectedly dives into fellow human beings. This power lets Itskovitch cover Kostya’s mouth when the latter drunkenly brags about going to America and screams, “America, I love you!” — this Kostya, who’s only dressed in briefs, whose athletic body makes him look remarkably like a Soviet hero’s memorial, when with a craving chest voice full of yearning he’s dictating his love letter to Tatiana (Danna Abyzova) — who’s looking for pleasure in the casern to the Beatles’ song Girl — to Vlad who’s standing in the cesspit up to his belly button.

First Love wasn’t missing either. There’s a girl (Daria Rumiantseva) standing at a lake, washing her hair. The man who sees her doesn’t stay alone for long. The other recruits immediately accompany his imagined wedding night with her with a dance. In another scene there’s a piano swinging in the heights of the stage area on which the couple Bogdan and Ludmila (Ekaterina Kleopina) play the beginning bars of Mozart’s symphony in G minor as a sign of love with their toes. It’s this far-away certainty that these projections would express this unrequited desire that let us enjoy folk song qualities with the grossed adaptation of the US song One way ticket to the blues (Neil Sedaka) in a de-jazzed Russian version Blue Song („Синий-синий иней лёг на провода…“), and lets our heart wallow in nostalgic but also blurred memories.

The source of the “Russian Soul” with Dodin is a peculiar symbiosis of nature experience, fertility mysticism and keen judgement. In search of the truth, he invites the audience as well as the actors to follow the simultaneous processing of different rationalities. The thus parallel existing competition of sacralities creates consistently new breaks that make you laugh or give you food for thought; when Ludmila, Tatiana, the girl at the lake, or the lady (Arina von Ribben) dance ballet on the tips of their toes in their nightgown around the latrines, but then sit on the ground in their cotton jackets, smoking, singing about the beauty of the body, using words from the church Slavic with which they direct their voices from a perspective of creation to us. Maybe this is the divine moment of the evening.

Theatre — a memorial site

An essential element of Dodin’s rehearsal process is the physical visit to the original locations. After the table reading of Grossman’s novel Life and Fate, the troupe travelled to a Stalinist GULAG and Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they stayed for a few nights. Rehearsals for the Abramov-Trilogy lead the troupe into the village Pekashino. This was repeated with younger ensemble members so that the thread between the generations wouldn’t rip. In the conversation with Doninelli, Dodin points out that theatre expresses the real meaning of life. No human existence can exist without the exchange of emotions. Interpersonal relationship only makes sense when seen in relation to our behaviour. Artists can share the search for truth here much better than can politicians or historians.

When everyone joins into the eponymic students’ song Gaudeamus igitiur… in the last scene, Academy, the tie between the first acting generation and the post-Soviet graduation class is ritually renewed 25 years after the world premiere. In this renewed production, which had its opening night at the Maly Theatre on 16 September 2014, only Mariya Nikiforova is still on board. Next to acting techniques that Dodin imparts in the tradition of the artist theatre based on Stanislavski’s and Meyerhold’s methods, the young actors penetrate the world of the basic military training in the Stalinist construction that brought pain to their predecessors. Now, it is them who keep Dodin’s interpretation alive and who talk about this pain. It is them who, 25 years after Glasnost and Perestroika, still transmit that the pantheon of the hero’s memorial doesn’t fit into the pre-cut stencils of the service regulations and doesn’t at all go with the well of adolescent curiosity, and that no nostalgia can cover up the true adaptive difficulties, even if the intonated music — civil or military — devoid of any kind of ideas contains a cheering promise, and throws the body into clanking excitement, which is more topical than ever, not just in Russia.

This is what distinguishes recollection and memory. Dodin’s theatre, which has its home in the Small Drama Theatre (MDT) in Saint Petersburg founded in 1944, has cultural techniques ready that can always revive earlier experiences and once acquired knowledge. This makes the works of the repertoire of this theatre ambassadors of those cultures whose peoples have suffered true hardship. Lev Dodin also imparts these cultural techniques in his masterclass that founded the ISO theatre of the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe (UTE), whose President of Honour is Dodin and whose founding member is the Maly Theatre. Lev Dodin is the patron of the Decentralized Academy. He was awarded numerous prizes, amongst which the Golden Mask, the Lawrence Olivier Award, the Russian Presidential Award and the European Theatre Prize for his lifetime achievement.

Published on 24 February 2016 (Article originally written in German)

You can’t suffer from acute pain forever

You can’t suffer
from acute pain forever

A reflection on Terrorism(s)

Scene from 'God waits at the Station" directed by Shay Pitowsky at the Habima National Theatre of Israel, Tel Aviv. © Mehake Ba Tahana — Scene from ‘God waits at the Station’ directed by Shay Pitowsky at the Habima National Theatre of Israel, Tel Aviv. © Mehake Ba Tahana

The TERRORisms festival has gathered everyone who finds it hard to talk about ‘terrorisms’ both literally and figuratively. “Terrorisms” are themes one is afraid to touch even among their closest friends, “terrorisms” are all about controversy on the state level where the truth and lies are so elaborately minced and mixed that you can’t tell one from the other. “Terrorisms” are about getting off at the wrong stop just because you didn’t like the look someone gave you.

You can’t suffer from acute pain forever. Over time, pain is reduced to mere figures and dry facts. TERRORisms pumps fresh blood into the questions tattered from too much repetition. The most agonizing questions are always driven out into the realm of the subconscious. This process may occur within an individual as well as within a whole state. Memories lose their verbal shape since words lie too often. Maybe for this very reason, in the majority of festival performances text plays a secondary part. Similar to a dream, art brings back powerful imagery with renewed energy and unprecedented coolness of judgment. Five stage productions presented at the festival slap the audience in the face, tickle their ribs, shove a fist into their chests.

As Hans-Thies Lehmann wrote in his book “Postdramatisches Theater”, “It is not through the direct thematization of the political that theatre becomes political but through the implicit substance and critical value of its mode of representation.” The TERRORisms performances tap into terrorism both explicitly and implicitly

A hilarious show staged by Ludovic Lagarde’s French company (which, however, gives you goose bumps every now and then), and a philosophically witty production by the Danish/Norwegian director Jonas C. Petersen (who would have thought that English and Norwegian sense of humour à la “stiff upper lip” can be so close?!) are in contrast with the both romantic and realistic work by Iva Milošević from Serbia and Armin Petras’ interpretation of the world in the grip of nuclear apocalypse. In all these productions a person is crushed by circumstances and grinded by their time.

Shay Pitowsky’s production God Waits at the Station looks terrorism directly in the eye. The face of terrorism is distorted with grief. A gap in the two heroines’ cultural codes seems to be bridged on the level of interpersonal relations; however it doesn’t stand the test of loss. God Waits at the Station is about the burden being too hard to bear on the shoulders of a common person.

Techniques commonly deployed in documentary theatre give the show a specific pace. The bomb is already ticking and the memories gather before it goes off. God Waits at the Station makes the audience start their own internal investigation.

The productions at the TERRORisms festival break the lulling hum of TV-sets, of the whole media world modern society is used to live in, disrupting the common logic inherent in the audience’s minds. Creating a festival that has to deal with such complex issues one can easily try to hide behind a net of restrictions, to protect oneself against the consequences of straight-from-the-shoulder remarks and hardline views. Luckily, this is not the case. Theatre has found the only way out existing within it and beyond. It placed a person in the centre of each story, a person with their own passions and sorrows.

Law proclaims order, terrorism proclaims disorder and chaos; theatre goes beyond the limits of the ordinary not to instigate chaos but to reveal black-and-white shortsightedness of both law and terrorism. Interestingly, all three of them — theatre, law and chaos — claim power. They want to dominate our hearts, instincts and minds. However, if there should be one to rule, let it be theatre.

Published on 3 December 2015 (Article originally written in Russian)

Postcards from Vienna… in a Serbian November

Postcards from Vienna…
in a Serbian November

Walking the streets of Vienna in late November is like hanging out in a huge jewellery store. With help from the Christmas lights, every angle shines brightly, shaping the frame for a peculiar “urban-crossing” experience in which the smallest detail seems to be meticulously staged.

Scene from 'Katzelmacher'. Photo © Andrej Jovanović / Narodno pozorište Pirot — Scene from ‘Katzelmacher’. Photo © Andrej Jovanović / Narodno pozorište Pirot

Nevertheless, before becoming one of the most stimulating and vibrant European metropolises, Vienna used to be the centre of a wide empire, made unique by its stunning variety of cultures and ethnic melting pots. Though these very features played a role in the Empire’s fall, they indeed are the root of a surprising cultural heritage. Now, the Austrian capital dedicates a showcase to the Serbian part of such heritage that has remained active and relevant throughout the years in the Central European and, generally, in the Western culture.

The Serbian November was organized in the context of the Austrian-Serbian Culture Year, in synergy with the Volkstheater in Vienna that offers two venues, the main playhouse and the Volx/Margareten.

Branislav Nušić was the author of Pokojnik (The Deceased), a 1937 classic comedy staged by young director Igor Vuk Torbica, produced by Yugoslav Drama Theatre with members of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts of Belgrade, where Torbica graduated. Unexpectedly returning to life, the deceased mentioned in the title finds no celebrations but a feud between the members of the family that have portioned his heritage, stepping over every rule of respect. On the huge stage of Volkstheater, the visual and textual structure brings us back to a classical early nineteenth century imagery, though the events are set in the late 70s, casting a light on the communist approach to the creation of a selected ruling class during Tito’s dictatorship. A high pace and a very good synergy between the young actors bring the director to fill the texture of acting and stage movement with perhaps too many tricks that tickle the audience’s laughter, making the political subtext hard to follow, at least for the ones who must rely on the surtitles. The result is an entertaining piece of well-staged theatre that collects a warm round of applause, especially from the Serbian spectators. And yet, the tight bond between the translation and the non-Serbian speakers in order to understand the text prevented that part of the audience from fully comprehending the historical thread that is certainly crucial in such critical operations.

Another production of the Serbian November was able to complete three different, and equally important, tasks: To represent a credible excerpt of the current theatrical trends in Serbia; to give an example of the clash between former Yugoslav and Central European cultures; and to discuss the themes of immigration and integration, so pressing in international political discourse.

The new staging of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Katzelmacher (Žabar in Serbian) by Bojana Lazić flows like an impetuous river through such contemporary issues, lying on a simple yet ingenuous set design and a group of strong and wild performers. The small space, circumscribed by a perimeter of black curtains, is entirely filled with old-fashioned armchairs, lined up to stare back at the audience.

Marie, Helga, Rosy, Gunda, Paul and Eric are the quintessential of the exclusive gangs from the outskirts of a contemporary metropolis: dirty, lascivious, lazy and totally closed to any contact with the “others”. They work for a factory in rural Germany at the service of a scowling boss, Elizabeth, a gangly woman with electrified hair and puppet-like movements. Such a squalid routine, deeply rooted in a genetic xenophobia and apparently impossible to be shaken, will find its balance-breaking element in Yorgos, a new worker from Greece. Though ignorant, barely able to articulate a sentence and initially open to being manipulated by the group, Yorgos learns to take advantage of one peculiar feature: being well-hung.

As in many Fassbinder’s plays and films, the sexual tension is the catalyst of social representation, misrepresentation, and, eventually, achievement. The language of the play is fragmented, dry, raw, and ironically artificial; the lines are continuously interrupted by flashy movements and sexual poses that weave an intricate web of allusions. Lazić keeps the actors in perpetual motion through repetitive acts – they continuously switch seats, take turns grabbing beers from a fridge and playing songs on the radio — creating a representation of the depraved rituals of contemporary intolerance.

The audience peeks at the activities of this absurd anthill of degradation, switching from being a spectator to being an unconscious accomplice. And this proves to be a successful way of portraying the responsibility of society not only in discriminating strangers, but also in keeping themselves away from the construction of a democratic environment. In other words, violence breeds violence, and the orgiastic lynching that puts an end to this apologue is even more chilling as it’s not enough to stop our giggling.

Published on 2 December 2015 (Article originally written in Italian)

The social face of TERRORisms

The 70s of the past century in Germany will forever be marked with the names of Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, Brigitte Asdonk and many other leftist activists. Years later they would be called terrorists, known as the “Baader-Meinhof Gang”. Provoked by the growing American influence in Germany and the obvious inclination to imperialism by the newfound yuppie-society, the gang began defending social-democratic interests of the middle class. The scars of WW II had not yet healed, when some people were already turning towards the extreme right again.

La Baraque. © Pascal Gely — Scene from “La Baraque” directed by Ludovic Lagarde, Comédie de Reims. Photo © Pascal Gely

45 years after the emergence of the Red Army Faction, we see our coexistence with the phenomenon of terrorism like a neighbour in a big city: we are living next to it but we don’t really know it. The growing media interest in terrorist attacks results in the easy formation of opinions and models that society blindly believes. In a wider sense, this media influence has been built by the western culture overseas that has been ruling for the past few decades. Living in a Big Brother society or a life of constant video surveillance moves the focus from the heart of the problem to a spectacular form. The creation and imposition of images, without giving much meaning to the story behind them, often leads to mass misbelief and psychosis. Hyper information, aggressive advertisement and ‘show’ business are moving the human being away from comprehensive insight on surrounding situations. It’s getting harder and harder for us to concentrate on something specific while we have free access to everything. We don’t question the news, brought to us as facts, less and less.

37 years after Andreas Baader’s death —conveniently declared as a suicide — in Stammheim prison in Stuttgart, we’re looking at the phenomenon of terrorism again: same place, different building. The Schauspiel Stuttgart hosted the international theatre festival TERRORisms. Under the auspices of the UTE (Union des Théâtres de l’Europe), the festival invited five productions from five countries, especially produced for this occasion: 5 morgen, Schauspiel Stuttgart, Germany; We Chew on the Bones of Time, National Theater of Oslo, Norway; The Dragonslayers, Yugoslav Drama Theater, Belgrade, Serbia; God Waits at the Station, Habima – National Theater of Israel, Tel Aviv; La Baraque, La Comédie de Reims, France. The official programme was accompanied by discussion panels and additional performances. Considering the frequent acts of terrorism in different locations, with different presumptive assumptions, the title of the festival explores the meanings of the word ‘terrorism’ in the context of different social mechanisms and their related problems.

It has been 14 years since the phenomenon of terrorism has become an excuse for taking extreme measures when it comes to human rights and the protection of privacy. With no small help from the media this phenomenon, which seems to be very convenient for the US, has been popularized. Thanks to this, the US has had the opportunity to make all of its military actions legal. Unfortunately, ‘terrorism’ has not led to prevention measures but has become a convenient pretext for imposing more extreme restrictions on our free existence in public. Big Brother has found a way to be in almost every public place. Private space and private life are becoming more and more a concept we know from stories and books. Using its function as a social and cultural mirror to focus on the above-mentioned tendencies, theatre sheds a light on these newly created “isms”. With various aesthetic forms and means of expression it explores the psychology and impact of TERRORisms as newly created mechanisms of propagating hate and public political controversies. In this light, the way theatre presents this phenomenon as well as its emotional attitude displayed in this context, is of particular importance. There’s no need to intensify terrorism’s characteristic features, no need to instigate further interracial, religious and political conflicts, no need to blame. Speaking of terrorism through the language of theatre, we should go in the opposite direction and depersonalize it, release it from its artificially created entity, from the stereotypes, but outside the theatrical conventionality.

Six months after the attack on the French satirical magazine ‘Charlie Hebdo’, La Baraque directed by Ludovic Lagarde, was shown at the festival in Stuttgart. Two weeks before the premiere of the show, which took place at the Comedie de Reims, the director received a phone call about the events in Paris. The project was not terminated, the premiere was a fact, and the result was a cheering audience.

Today. La Baraque by Aiat Fayez is set in a small apartment in Paris. Two men and a middle-aged woman, living their relatively miserable life, smoking joints, fooling around— a push through the window, sets in order the downward spiral that transforms the three protagonists almost accidentally into executors of terrorist orders.
The terror in this case is only one part of the absurd daily life of a working class Parisian. With mouse ears and ridiculous movements, the main actors prepare explosives in the manner of children who don’t know what they’re doing. Naturally, they’re soon carried away by the money, and the game moves to another level. Ridiculous, funny, arousing pity and derision; the characters embody terrorism in the form of an unfortunate coincidence. The same pattern occurs with addiction to drugs, alcohol, prostitution and gambling. The lack of culture in a combination with the low quality of life is a strong premise for an easy degradation. Of course, the degree of damage is different. But the conclusion is similar. Deliberately created informational deformations, genocide of art and culture, media manipulation, spreading hatred, all of which inevitably lead to the negative reflection on society.

Six, eight or ten months ago… doesn’t matter. Terrorism has become a matter of statistics, daily news, and TERRORisms is something that should not just be examined through the methodologies of stage and screen art, ISMS’t it?

Published on 1 December 2015 (Article originally written in Bulgarian)

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 20^th 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/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)

Right-wing populism: A quest for an alternative

Right-wing populism:
A quest for an alternative

Interview with Chantal Mouffe

If one could define “populism” as a tendency to criticize existing democracies for not being sufficiently democratic and to ask for more power for the people, according to Ruth Wodak and Majid KhosraviNik (authors of the book Right-Wing Populism in Europe), “it has been argued that right-wing populism differs from other trends [i.e. the French National Front, the British National Party, the Austrian Freedom Party) as it does not convey a coherent ideology but rather proposes a mixed bag of beliefs, stereotypes, attitudes and related programmes which aim to address and mobilize a range of equally contradictory segments of the electorate.” Populism has always been in search of a new “defining other”, an entity (be it a social class or a specific area of the common thought) to be seen as the decisive opponent of the people.

Putting the concept in a slightly simplified way, Wodak and KhosraviNik argue that “depending on the definition of the people’s defining other, the different contemporary populist phenomena can be categorized in different ways. But any kind of populism directed against an ethnically and/or nationally and/or religiously defined ‘other’ can be seen as right-wing.”

Right-wing populism in its relationship with the refugee movement was the topic of the roundtable organized by the UTE in the context of the Conflict Zones network programme. The attempt was to focus on the reactions registered all around Europe in response to the recent massive migration of the refugees. This direction was forced to encounter a moral and civil urgency: the whole debate had to be contextualized in the light of the horrible attacks that had taken place in Paris just the night before.

The tone of the conversation was set on a highly (though solid) theoretical level, rather than on a practical line of work. I tried to further investigate some aspects interviewing Chantal Mouffe, Professor of Political Theory at the University of Westminster, London.

In her opening remarks, she mentioned the great responsibility held by the Western countries towards the current crisis that indeed is presented to people’s attention “like a natural catastrophe”. This is an example of misguiding information about the actual role of influence of the individual thinking in the common knowledge of and about a democratic country. And yet, right-wing populism is very strong nowadays. In Mouffe’s opinion, the reason of such success lies in the fact that a real alternative for the voters is missing. “Left-wing abandoned the popular layer dealing only with the middle class”, Mouffe says, the people fails to find a counter discourse in the left wing. On the other hand, by criticizing elites — whose positions are based on higher education and individual achievement — right-wing populism is often using rhetoric traditionally associated with left-wingers.

Thus, a great part with the social issues regarding the refugee movements comes from the fundamental lack of a correct and actual cultural discourse, able to inscribe the figure of people arriving from other (devastated) countries in a common imagery; to create a brand new narrative.

SLG – Ms. Mouffe, how can culture, with its means,
contribute to the creation of such narratives to let the alternative surface?

CM – I am very much influenced by the work of Antonio Gramsci on such
concepts as the “organic intellectual” and, above all, “common sense”.
He says that, at a given moment, there’s a dominant common sense,
a common sense that basically defines how things are. But this common
sense is not something which is natural, is always a product of a given hegemony.
So what the common sense is currently saying is that there is no alternative to globalization, to an indiscriminate free trade logic, and so on. I think it’s precisely because of that that right-wing populists are the only offered alternative. A lot of people, particularly those of the popular sector, were undeniably affected and at the same time attracted by globalization. What is important, in my opinion, is then to fight to transform this common sense. And, of course, common sense is something built in different ways: that’s why artistic and cultural practices are so important. This is in great part where common sense is constructed and established, so this is where I think the major effort should be drawn. The aim is to create a different view; this could be different in letting people produce a “passion of hope”. We are not talking about faith; it is something that comes as the result of a certain political project, which can become hegemonic, something that I call a counter-hegemonic structure. And this is where I think artistic and cultural practices are important.

SLG – You pointed out some relevant examples — out of cinema, theatre, literature — in which a precise narrative can be drawn to the audience in order to clarify the living conditions of a certain social group (migrants are only some among others). In my work as a cultural journalist I wonder if there’s a way for such practices to go beyond the a different point of view on these “others”, but also to portray the actual situation of the societies that those “others” are invited to become a part of; because sometimes you run the risk of creating a different form of populism through the creation of a new narrative, be its matrix marked by right-wing or left-wing features.

CM – Actually, the only way to fight against right-wing populism is to be aware of the opportunity of a left-wing populism. When you speak about that, you need to abandon the idea that populism is something purely related to manipulation. It’s not a question of manipulating people in a conservative or progressive way. In fact, I follow the theory that populism is not something that embodies a content in itself, it’s a way to draw a political frontier between the people from lower and upper classes. In fact, politics is necessarily partisan, it’s always about creating a frontier, but a frontier can be created in different ways. And the tradition of such a creation of frontiers has been very much defined in terms of left and right; and also in terms of given interests and relative social classes. But the reason as to why we need to abandon these narrow divisions is that they lead to what I call an “essentialist way of thinking”, where the political consciousness is linked to the place you occupy in the economy. And things are not like that; political identity is something that is constructed by political discourse. And today, precisely right-wing populists are very good at constructing this political discourse; left-wingers are not. This impedes the creation of a kind of transverse popular wing. I am very close to Podemos in Spain, they believe that many people would not feel part of the left because they are not part of the working class; they cannot cope with these contradictions.

SLG – So, it’s about climbing on a higher step of discourse.

CM – Exactly. Because they are affected by policies of austerity, they don’t have an identity that in fact should necessarily be represented in a government, and it’s not.

SLG – You are saying that, for instance, one should not necessarily be a homosexual to fight against homophobic expressions that are to be faced in terms of a subtraction of equal and shared freedom.

CM – Exactly. Then again, what’s missing is a process of construction of a political identity.

SLG – Do you think there’s a chance to change the sense of populism from inside?

CM – There is a necessary populist dimension in democracy because democracy has to deal with giving power to the people. This is why I am very much against the dismissal of populism. It’s becoming a form of manipulation, though, and the parties want to prevent this drifting of populism. So we really need to fight to recover, to transform, to redefine the term populism into something positive, but then of course this must have to do with giving back the people the right to decide. But, of course, that can be constructed either in a right or left way. And this, for me, is the main question today: since what we are seeing is the progress of right-wing populism, we need to construct a left-wing alternative to populism. There are two parties that are currently trying to pursue this: Tsipras’s Siriza and Podemos in Spain. And another element is also important: it needs to be something not purely created on the party line, but in a synergy between parties and a social movement. Populism is not just a certain rhetoric, but also a form of politics which brings together the social movements and the traditional parties: because you also need to transform the state.

Published on 25 November 2015 (Article originally written in Italian)

Contemporary Theatre(s) in Italy – Introduction

CONTEMPORARY THEATRE(S) IN ITALY

INTRODUCTION

Motus Caliban Cannibal. Photo by courtesy of Motus — Motus. From ‘Caliban Cannibal’. Photo by courtesy of Motus

The present section of the website aims at drawing an overview of the contemporary performing arts system in Italy. A short note is necessary to introduce the reader to the functioning of the section – which tries to exploit the web potentiality at its best – but, most of all, to explain how and why a hyper-textual structure is more than ever cut out for the Italian present environment. Even though the nature of this issue (to which an agile and highly readable language is requested) cannot confide in creating a thorough and executive summary of the whole spectrum, the author’s point of view is that a dynamic and compound collection of small focuses has the chance to mirror the Italian system more faithfully than a single long essay. Such belief stems from an eight-year journalistic/critical experience that revealed the Italian stage arts landscape as a very fragmented organism in which the territorial diversity, mostly characterized by sensible economical differences, creates a plurality of production/circulation opportunities that goes hand in hand with the local environment.

As can be seen in the map of the section, one focus is sometimes generated by another and the focus itself originates a further one in a complex net of relations and interdependence, a lively system that is currently facing an evident shift and, yes, shows a fundamental ability to preserve its creative attitude. Cultural Policy and Theatre Practice, for example, are tightly connected; one necessarily determines the other, and the latter gives birth to peculiar Aesthetics, with related trends and a specific appeal on the audience, which in fact can influence (or at least interacts with) the Cultural Policy.

A final point must be brought up. The situation described in the present section was written in February and March 2015. In those months the whole state support system was undergoing a deep change (a short account is offered in the Theatres Structure paragraph) which still needs to be tested and processed by the system actors. In other words, at the present time the global organization of public money for the Italian performing arts scene is reshaping in a new order which is going to affect the balance between the public and private structure in the most unpredictable way.

This is why we chose to add an “S” at the end of the word “Theatre”.

Continue with article #1 Cultural Policies
To overview of the hypertexts go to Map of the Section

Published on 10 June 2015 (Article originally written in Italian)