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 Stationlooks 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)
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.
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)
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).
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 TheDragonslayers; 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 5Morgen’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.”
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)
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?
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)
SWR2 Radio talk with Reinhold Görling on “Terror and Theatre”
at the TERRORisms Festival, Stuttgart
Der Medienwissenschaftler Reinhold Görling im Gespräch mit Marie-Dominique Wetzel/SWR2 zum Theaterfestival “TERRORisms” in Stuttgart“Terror und Theater”
