Tag: Masterclass

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

Finding solutions with Ludovic Lagarde

Finding solutions
with Ludovic Lagarde

A master class of the UTE Decentralised Academy

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With its origin in the project of the Union of Theatres of Europe, the Decentralised Academy offers a series of international master classes to young theatre professionals (actors, directors, playwrights or stage designers) who work in the context of theatres which are members of the UTE.

Matthias Langhoff in Athens, Lev Dodin in St. Petersburg, Hans-Werner Kroesinger in Graz, Georges Lavaudant in Palermo, Viktor Bodo in Porto, Eric de Vroedt in Bochum, and Csaba Antal in Moscow…all of them have already conducted a workshop with the Decentralised Academy and have contributed to this enormous work field initiated by the UTE: the training of a generation of artists who are completely European, “united within the difference” to use a phrase coined by Michel de Certeau. Because it is exactly this eternal dialectic of the common and the difference that this programme attempts to resolve — by allowing young people with an artistic outlook and different cultural backgrounds to meet, exchange their points of view, share their methods, while being trained together by an important figure of European theatre.

After Bochum and Moscow, it is to Reims that the season 2015/16 brings the Decentralised Academy. Ludovic Lagarde, director and artistic director of the Comédie de Reims, conducts a masterclass there, dedicated to the text Small Town Boy by Falk Richter. The participants are actors between the ages of 24 and 32, originating from Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary and Italy, and all have made an appearance in one of the theatres part of the UTE, where they were chosen to participate in the event. Their names are Kata Bach (Vígszínház, Budapest), Maria Teresa Campus (Teatro di Roma), Ruggero Franceschini (Piccolo Teatro, Milan), Delyan Plamenov Iliev (Sfumato, Sofia), and Chryssa Toumanidou (National Theatre of Northern Greece, Thessaloniki).

I encounter them at lunch, it is their last day of work. The mood is relaxed, a great sense of complicity seems to have grown already between the participants and Ludovic Lagarde. It does not feel like they have only known each other for three days. “But three days is long,” explains Delyan Plamenov Iliev, “we worked 24 hours every day, not only the hours of the master class.” Brought together for a very short period of time, it is more in the deepening of an ongoing dialogue, where they find the key to enable the joint work. “We discussed a great deal,” recounts Maria Teresa Campus, “the text itself gave us the opportunity to talk about Europe, because the situations which Falk Richter describes in his text have reminded us often of experiences we made in our respective countries.” And Chryssa Toumanidou adds how enriching it was for her to discover how her comrades imagined her country, Greece. “I have also enjoyed confronting myself with other ways of thinking about and making theatre,” she tells me when we are alone, “in Greece for the grand majority of theatre production the text is very important, here, with my Bulgarian and Italian colleagues I have discovered a more physical approach to theatre.”

While the participants describe how much they gained from such an intersection of cultures, Ludovic Lagarde ascribes his reflections to his artistic practice. For him, working with actors who have different cultural and artistic backgrounds does not have a fundamental impact on his method of directing. Taking into account the singularity of each of the actors on the stage, he explains, is a part of his work as a director. The fact that they have or not the same nationality, language or culture, does not change anything in this situation. Rather he emphasises that, if he was able to note many differences among the participants of the master class, then they were without a doubt just as much the differences of culture and training as of personality.

The choice of working on Small Town Boy by Falk Richter was not an obvious one for him. This text material, forged in the post-dramatic tradition of a more performative theatre style, belongs to a dramaturgical universe that is quite far from that of Ludovic Lagarde. It is mostly for its political dimension that the director has proposed the text to his participants. At once expression and symptom of the evil of our times, Small Town Boy sketches a world of “interactive solitudes”, where the characters, inhabited by contradictory desires, redouble the vacuum of their existence through the verbose expression of a deep-seated contemporary discomfort. An exemplarily attempt at political theatre, the text — when devoid of all the stage directions — also offers interesting challenges to the director.

“Finding solutions”, that is how Ludovic Lagarde modestly summarises the research work which he has led for three days with the participants of his master class. Sometimes it is the physical stage action that he has to work on, sometimes it is the text that is problematic, when for example in one scene a character references an anecdote that is so specific to the German context that it escapes the notion of a foreign audience. This is the eternal question of cultural transposition: treason or solution? Finally, whether it is about questioning the text or about experimenting with the scenic tools, having actors from different worlds was a chance, emphasises Ludovic Lagarde.

In the grand hall of the Comédie de Reims, now unusually empty, I have the chance of watching their last afternoon of work. On stage they speak four monologues, which are very different from each other: irony, revolt, melancholy, stupidity, all manifest themselves on stage, where a space is created over the course of the monologues which is fragmented by the impossibility of communication between human beings. The beautiful work proves the abilities of the young actors in the room as well as the abilities of Ludovic Lagarde, who has managed to create the ideal conditions for an exciting working experience comprising trust and a good spirit.

A master class directed by Ludovic Lagarde With Kata Bach (Vígszínház, Budapest), Maria Teresa Campus (Teatro di Roma), Ruggero Franceschini (Piccolo Teatro, Milan), Delyan Plamenov Iliev (Sfumato, Sofia) and Chryssa Toumanidou (National Theatre of Northern Greece, Thessaloniki) Assisted by Sophie Engel From 2 to 6 June 2016 At the Comédie de Reims, France An event in the content of the UTE Decentralised Academy With the support of Creative Europe programme of the European Union

Published on 11 June 2017 (Article originally written in French)