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)
ISO MASTERCLASS IN SOFIA.
AFTER BECKETT, TOWARDS A GENETICS OF TRUTH
The stage is dark, silent, empty. An indistinguishable figure (Nadia Keranova) stands still against the background wall tinged with blue. One foot bare and the other wearing an oversize hiking shoe, she walks towards the center, under the amber backlight, then a sound explodes and she falls on the ground of the right corner. She takes a small mirror from her pocket, and, with incredibly slow movements, she slots the mirror in the shoelaces: what a surprise to see her own image…
In the context of the Small Season Festival 2016 at the Sfumato Theatre-Laboratory in Sofia, Bulgaria, Margarita Mladenova and Ivan Dobchev directed a four-day masterclass with eight members of the International Super Objective (ISO) Theatre, a group of young European actors from nine different countries developed in the context of the 2012 UTE Decentralized Academy.
In the view of Mladenova and Dobchev, who during the masterclass were helped by a brilliant Bulgarian to English interpreter, Sava Dragunchev, “the idea is through the garment to resurrect the human, his unique personal being and so to form his monologue.” Petya Alabozova, Sophie Lewisch, Aglaia Katsiki, Benjamin-Lew Klon, Luís Puto, Angélique Zaini, Bilyana Georgieva and Boris Krastev joined Ivan Barnev, Hristo Petkov, Boyko Krastanov, Catalin Stareishinska and Nadia Keranova (all from Bulgaria) working each one on an excerpt of the 1972 Samuel Beckett short play Not I.
The author’s indications fix a single spotlight on an actress’s mouth, “about eight feet above the stage,” and a second silent character named Auditor, who performs movements “of helpless compassion”. In the two directors’ idea, the role of Mouth is played by the actors in thirteen five-minute long solo scenes that follow the same structure. A blue light on the back wall, a central spotlight: when the actors reach the centre, a breaking sound smashes them down in the dark. A ringing recovers them and obliges them to speak the text, somehow against their own will. Thus, Mouth is not an actual character, rather an outside presence, “a small girl who is speaking from an outer world”, as it is whispering the lines in the actors’ ears.
The speech is fragmented and mechanical, the pauses and the punctuation almost nonsensical. The pause, the intermission between one thought and the other, in the hiatus there’s the very essence of Beckett’s writing. “You talk but you don’t know how, it’s not a physical process.”, says Dobchev, who is smoking a cigarette sitting in the dark of the first row. “You feel exhausted, as if something mysterious happened to you and crushed you down. And now you are slowly waking up.”
Under the title of Second Hand, the masterclass accompanied the group through an initial session of improvisation work, to be later used to shape the sense (or the nonsense) of the text. In the first two days, the actors were also invited to choose their “second hand” costumes and props, previously used in other productions of the Sfumato.
When mingled with the Irish author’s writing, ragged coats, misshapen trousers, beggar-style hats, broken umbrellas and walking canes look so “Beckettian”, in the way they suggest a post-human imagery. And yet, the route of this work heads towards a “pre-human” condition, a sort of biblical archeology that tries to investigate the original sin from a Sartre-like perspective: everyone was condemned to be born, and living is just a way to endure that heavy duty.
Dobchev talks about the word of God and its “inexplicable miracle, pure, from the very beginning”, about “the need for love”, but also about Prometheus and his attempt to replicate the sacred fire, to give birth to life, to imitate the Gods.
Benjamin walks and dances on high heels, falls on the floor spreading legs in front of the audience: he delivers his lines assuming the position of a woman who’s delivering a baby. “Every word must be a surprise for you,” Dobchev and Mladenova insist. In fact, the vocal cords of the actors are transformed into a mere tool at the mercy of someone (or something?) else’s will.
The actor’s key to such a primordial speech is in keeping totally detached from the idea of impersonating a character, by using body and voice as instruments that let such speech be louder in the spectator’s ears.
Without necessarily being a theatre or literature expert, reading Samuel Beckett means engaging a never-ending conflict, standing in front of a castle made of doubts with no entry doors: “This female voice that you hear in your minds”, says Mladenova, “may be your own attempt to decipher a code and find your own place. It’s the experience of every single man that tries to find his place.”
Imprisoned as they are in their small space centre stage, the actors found a way to be powerful, leaning on a very accurate and original physical work that marks the peculiarities of a rich bunch of styles and training backgrounds.
“We don’t have a memory from our birth because our eyes couldn’t see”, suggest the directors. This idea, mixed with the extraordinary capacity of Beckett’s words to gain a second, a third, and an umpteenth meaning, guarantees a variety of images and attitudes, from rage to sensuality, from childish muttering to clumsy dance, from lyrical tones to beastly growls. In such a jungle of languages, Dobchev and Mladenova invite the actor to flee any psychological research, rather pointing out as many metaphors and external references as possible, provoking new approaches by associating each sentence to a physical experience, like: “You are getting closer to this truth, but this truth is very hot, like a stove; when you reach it, it will burn your fingers.”
Thus, according to Dobchev, “speech means truth; when you are speaking, you are trying to make things real, you speak just in order to verbalize. The truth is for salvation, not for consolation, because Beckett is not a moralist, he pities the humanity. With this sort of speaking corpse we want to reach the truth, this is the adventure. To reach ‘the country from which no visitor returns’, as Hamlet says.”
By watching them work, loneliness is the most evident feeling. Nevertheless, Not I also poses a second character next to Mouth: the Auditor. In the view of the two Bulgarian directors, the Auditor must be seen as a symbol for the spectators. Barefoot under a long black mantle, Boris Krastev marks a constant silent presence on stage, listening and provoking the speech at the same time. Judging with his blind look (he wears eyeglasses with red lenses), the Auditor is the personification of the audience, he “stands for the multiplied listener.”
A listener to which question? The main question of Beckett, but also of any other form of theatre: who are we? Under the pressure of the lights, the ringing, the short time and the Auditor, the token performer seems to try out a personal way to address that very question, confronting a sense of panic, or the threat of an unknown punishment, or an inner sorrow, in a paradoxical situation in which not pain nor happiness can be felt because they were deprived of their meaning in the very first place. It’s not a journey to the knowledge of a character, but to the opportunity for the actor to arrange an individual position toward the voice that hits the senses of a mysterious character (Mouth), who inhabits a slightly distant dimension.
It’s hard to find an answer when the questions don’t come out. “Let yourselves be explorers”, the directors suggest, “be scientists. Let yourselves cast a glance into a microscope and accept to see a mysterious creature as it dies.” In such a detachment lies the basic nature of acting; to experiment the feeling of being someone else, of living someone else’s life. “It’s about getting closer and closer to a scream that is not going to come out. Because you need to be alive in order to scream. And you’re not.”
Thus, the only possible way to make any sense, is by getting deeper and deeper into the very essence of each word, to unveil the most intimate layer, the one that resonates in everybody’s most inner and common impulse. It’s a quest for humanity, that basic plateau on which every soul slips, on the journey to knowledge.
Published on 3 July 2016 (Article originally written in Italian)
ISO Theatre – Porto 2016:
Krausian Satire as well as a Cabaret Slapstick
Between 22 and 31 May, 2016, one of the ISO Theatre (International Super Objective Theatre – the group name is an allusion to Stanislavsky’s notion of super-objective) meetings took place, this time in collaboration with the Portuguese National Theatre São João in Porto (Teatro Nacional São João do Porto).
The ISO Theatre Group was established in 2012 under the auspices of the UTE (Union of European Theatres/Union des Théâtres de l’Europe) as a spontaneous response to the masterclasses, organized by the UTE Decentralized Academy. One of the first masterclasses was held in November 2012 in the Little Drama Theater in St. Petersburg (Малый драматический театр / the Maly Drama Theatre) under the guidance of Russian director Lev Dodin.
The idea of both interconnected projects – the ISO Theatre and the UTE Decentralized Academy – is based on the principle of creative exchange and sharing of experiences in the context of the tradition of European theater aesthetics and anthropologically oriented theatre discourse of contemporary Europe. The collaboration of both platforms is carried out within the network-programme of the UTE called Conflict Zones, which is supported by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union).
The 2012 emergence of the ISO Theatre was articulated in A European Youth The ISO Manifesto, in which the artists formulated their pan-European ideological and artistic vision. At the birth of the ISO Theatre stood several young theatre practitioners from six European countries and Israel. Over the past four years, the group has undergone slight changes, and the solid core of the company was formed. Currently, the group consists of eight member countries (Bulgaria, France, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Greece and Israel/Palestine).
In Porto, the ISO Theatre group worked under the leadership of Nuno Carinhas, the artistic director of the National Theatre São João, Porto, and the Lisbon-based director Nuno M. Cardoso. The basis of the week-long workshop was the dramatic opus magnum written by the Austrian satirist, essayist, journalist, performer and, above all, visionary Karl Kraus (April 28, 1874, Jičín, now Czech Republic – June 12, 1936, Vienna): The Last Days of Mankind (first published as a series in K. Kraus’s journal Die Fackel – The Torch between 1918–1919)
Kraus’s Destruction of the World in the Black Magic of Wikisources and Postmodern Totality of Global Phrases
Karl Kraus wrote his Last Days of Mankind, a dramatic oeuvre in five acts with prologue and epilogue, between 1915–1918/19, i.e. in a close connection with the war events, which Kraus reflected in the work with his symptomatic, docudramatic satire.
Documentary character of this text lies in two aspects: (1) the text material is imbued with concrete, “annexed” reality of wartime events; (2) Kraus’s then heretically original artistic practice based on the dramatic montage of anonymous quotes from newspapers, war reports, proclamations of political and army officials or individuals representing cultural and artistic elites, as well as the speech patterns and phrases appropriated from the everyday, mostly Viennese, street life. The linguistic material, which drew on a wide array of contemporary public life and especially from its media discourse, provided Kraus a pre-text which he quite loosely assembled into a distinctive collage. However, the quoted anonymous excerpts remained literally faithful to the original. Needless to say that the statements of an endless line of characters, i.e. “mankind,” are either verbatim or loose quotes expropriated from the speeches of concrete individuals who are subjected to Kraus’s satirical subversions.
Noteworthy is also the structure of Last Days of Mankind, which converges the aesthetic convention of traditional dramatic form (five acts with prologue and epilogue) with the characteristic modernist practices (montage or juxtaposition of separated elements). In this context, Kraus with his original creative approaches (in the Last Days of Mankind e.g. a method of documentary citation) can be considered a direct predecessor of theatre of absurd or postmodern, documentary and post-dramatic theater.
Symptomatic of all of Kraus’s work, including the Last Days of Mankind, is its affinity with the philosophy of language, namely Ludwig Wittgenstein (see e.g. JUST, Vladimír. Valpružiny noci Karla Krause. Divadelní revue 25, 2014, č. 2, s. 104–130). One of the dominant features of the Last Days of Mankind is Kraus’s essential belief that the acts of concrete violence, the structure of power mechanisms and principles of totalitarian manipulation grow from automatisms of linguistic clichés or the anonymous “tyranny of public phrases” (ČAPEK, Karel. Spisy. Od člověka k člověku III. Praha: Čs. Spisovatel. 1991, s. 173). In the context of philosophy of language, Kraus’s documentary-citation method, which is the cornerstone of the Last Days of Mankind, seems to be a logical outcome of the artist’s ethical and philosophical convictions. Characteristic of Kraus is his particularly sharp criticism of not only public populism, superficial journalism, nationalism in all its forms, but, above all, media strategies per se.
In one of his texts, entitled The End of the World Through Black Magic (1922), Kraus did not hesitate to call journalists “modern-day vampires who feed on ink instead of blood ” (qtd. in JUST, V. Ibid., p. 112) [The title of this subchapter is an allusion to Kraus’s text]: “Newspapers exterminate all imagination: explicitly in the way they offer reality with fantasy, while protecting the receiver from his activity; indirectly by anaesthetizing his ability to perceive art […] The poet will no longer exist, substituted by the reporter; and the state lacks the imagination to introduce the very last tax which would be a kind of starting point and a kind of honest attempt at pounding the capital out of spiritual misery: phrase tax.” (Kraus, K. Soudím živé i mrtvé. Praha: Odeon, 1974, s. 219–220) In this sense, Karl Kraus anticipated the subsequent development of critical thought about the media discourse. It is hard to say how would Kraus reflect the current mediatized world, dominated by global, television, and internet strategies.
In the Last Days of Mankind, Karl Kraus expressed his anxiety about political events and their mediatized image which is in our tradition “inscribed” in history: “In this time you should not expect a single word from me. Besides: The only protection from the misinterpretation is silence. […] Those who have nothing to say, keep talking. Let him who has something to say come forward and be silent.” (KRAUS, Karl. Aforismy. Přel. Aloys Skoumal. Divadlo 15, prosinec 1964[a], č. 10, s. 28.).
Kraus’s words resonate with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s letter to Ludwig Ficker: “My work consists of two parts, the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important point. […] In short, I believe that where many others today are just gassing, I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it.” (Wittgenstein qtd. in Janik, see link)
The afore-mentioned quotes capture the intellectual and aesthetic essence of Kraus’s Last Days of Mankind more eloquently than any detailed description of this vast, almost 800 pages long work that stages an apocalyptic and deliberately de-individualized vision of destruction and decay of European civilization against the backdrop of the First World War.
Besides his literary-satirical, essayistic and journalistic activities, Kraus organized his own public lectures within which he also performed (Kraus was also an actor and cabaret artist in his early youth). The format of lectures was rather syncretic, fusing authorial readings with stand-up and performance art. However, the topicality of Kraus’s theatrical and dramatic legacy, which inspired e.g. Austrian actor Helmut Qualtinger, in the context of contemporary European dramaturgy remains virtually undervalued. It is only in the German-speaking countries where, every now and then, an adaptation of the Last Days of Mankind occurs.
In this context, Robert Wilson’s controversial Prague production of 1914 should be mentioned. The script of 1914, which premiered in April 2014 at the Prague National Theatre under the auspices of the CONFLICT ZONES network-programme of the UTE, is based on Marta Ljubková and Robert Wilson’s adaptation of Kraus’s Last Days of Mankind and the satirical novel The Good Soldier Švejk (1921–1923) written by the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek. 1914 was the second attempt at the stage adaptation of Kraus’s play in the Czech Republic.
Historically the first (and essentially the only) Czech production of Kraus’ work, presented as Last Moments of Mankind, was mounted by the Prague Chamber Theatre at the Theatre Comedy, Prague (prem. 2011).
(Last Moments of Mankind. Kraus, Karl – Schmitt, Katharina – Zielinski, Thomas – Riemenschneider, Alexander – Bárta, Vojtěch – Knotková, Viktorie. Director: Schmitt, Katharina – Zielinski, Thomas – Riemenschneider, Alexander, prem. April 22, 2011, Theatre Comedy.)
ISO Theatre Inquiry into the Fourth Act of Kraus’s Apocalyptic Vision
The artistic residency of the ISO Theatre in Porto united seven members of the group: Bilyana Georgieva (Bulgaria), Khwala Ibraheem (Israel/Palestine; participated in the final stages of the residency), Boris Krastev (Bulgaria), Vincent Menjou-Cortès (France), Luís Puto (Portugal), Kim Willems (Germany) and Angélique Zaini (France). Rehearsals/masterclasses were conducted under the leadership of Nuno Carinhas and Nuno M. Cardoso and took place on the premises of the former Benedictine monastery Mosteiro Sāo Bento da Vitória, whose significant part has been utilized by the National Theatre São João, Porto Teatro Nacional São João do Porto, TSNJ) for alternative and chamber-like events for which this space offers appropriate conditions that can’t be provided by the traditional proscenium arch stage of the historical building of the TSNJ.
For the purposes of the masterclass, directors Carinhas and Nuno M. Cardoso selected the fourth act of Kraus’s Last Days of Mankind. In the first stage of the masterclass (May 23 – May 27) the performers worked on collective improvisations which were based on the fragments from the fourth act. The final outcome of the workshop was presented as a “work-in-progress” in front of an audience, consisting of an internal member circuit of the TSNJ and invited trainees of the CONFLICT ZONES network-programme of the UTE, namely Elena Galanopoulou (cultural journalist, Greece), Julie Kočí (historian of ballet and dance theater, Czech Republic) and Sergio Lo Gatto (theater critic and cultural journalist, Italy).
The final presentation, which was conceived as an informal, open and uninterrupted rehearsal, included nine improvised scenes from the fourth act of the Last Days of Mankind (scene 11, 12, 13, 14, 22, 32, 34, 38 and 39). The actors performed on a bare stage, coated with the vinyl dance floor material, the backstage was separated by a black curtain. In the front left side of the stage there was an ordinary worn-out wooden table and chairs. In several improvisations both pieces of furniture were employed in a variety of ways. Among other items that have appeared on the stage were e. g. camera, pen and paper, paper bag (designed for pastry) or a plastic box filled with a leftover from lunch, or fork. All props, as well as “costumes” were fully authentic objects of everyday use. The ordinary-like authenticity of improvised fragment was disrupted by the articulated aesthetic interpretation only once and for a few moments: at the end of scene 13, which is in Kraus’s play a grotesque demonstration of anonymous brutality, embodied in the violent act of a male nurse assaulting a wounded, groaning soldier; in the spirit of Kraus’s bitter poetics the scene leads into the saucy pub ditty that drowns the moans of the dying soldier. In the presentation, the pub ditty was substituted with Ravel’s Bolero.
The open rehearsal revealed the precise work of both directors who prepared the workshop and presented fragment, powerful presence of some performers and diversity of acting and cultural traditions of ISO Theatre members.
Carinhas and Nuno M. Cardoso approached the ISO Theatre residency, whose contribution already lay in the dramaturgical selection of Kraus’s play, both pragmatically and highly empathically, respecting the linguistically and culturally disparate nature of all participants, as well as the complicated structure of Kraus’s text. Both directors were very well aware of the linguistic, aesthetic and philosophical complexity of Kraus’s vast work, and, hence, were very well aware of the complex difficulties related to the linguistic, as well as meta-linguistic translation of the text within the framework of a 4–5-day workshop.
Thus, the major objective of their concept of the ISO Theatre residency was not unifying an aesthetic idea of Last Days of Mankind or an abstract interpretation of the work, but the principle of a collective experience of the text which – under the satirical reflections of media discourses related to the recent war history of Europe – conceals a profound anthropological experience of European civilization.
ISO Theatre Dramaturgy: A Search for the European Theme in the Jumble of Judeo-Christian Tradition (Bible) – Anthropological Pretext of Ancient Tragedy (Oresteia) – and in the Chaos of Life-style Clichés or Guidebooks of Contemporary Global Discourse
The group dedicated the last three days of ISO Theatre residency in Porto to the debate on the possible dramaturgical and operative concept of the future project which could be implemented either on the principle of a collective-laboratory creation, or in collaboration with a director. An organic, at times dramatically tectonic, debate predominantly addressed the issue of dramaturgical choices. Unequivocal consensus prevailed regarding the conceptual vision of ISO Theatre dramaturgy, which should focus on pan-European themes presented in a perspective that would resonate with the dynamic nature of controversial notions (or clichés?), such as “Modern Europe” – “contemporary European” – “contemporary European society” and its culture…
The outlined dramaturgical-conceptual collective process crystalized in the discussion of three fundamental materials that reflect the shared cultural-anthropological legacy of the European tradition, as well as the complexity, brutality and volcanic controversy of historical continuity of European civilization. The group discussed the Bible and the Aeschylus’s Oresteia; another topic was the global media format of guidebooks, cookbooks or instruction manuals, approached with a sense of biting irony and grotesqueness.
The satirical inversion of current not only European but global media discourse that corresponds to the Last Days of Mankind seems to be an eloquent reminiscence of Kraus’s message for the contemporary globalized European civilization, under whose ruins the embers of myths of collective origin still smoulder and the stigmata of both ancient and recent conflicts keep bleeding.
At a time when spectres once again are haunting Europe, spectres which cast far-reaching shadows of past guilt – a warning memento for the future – we, Europeans, probably have no other alternative but to choose between a postmodern-discursive analysis of our cultural memory embedded in the post-dramatic, fragmentary forms, or remain silent in the Krausian–Wittgensteinian manner.
“Under the white walls a mud in pearl-sheen
and after the wind bells flew to Rome,
horizon blushes, my dad,
scarlet in shame
we’re here alone, no descent from the cross.
Languid battalions already burning hands of bearers,
perhaps under the helmet only eyes hope
[…]
Not a piece of cake to drink again a heaping glass of wine
And believe in prophets in the chorale of bungle,
Dark hundred years shine with the star of poison
On the coat of arms for slaves – our heirs.”
(Karel Kryl, a fragment from the song White Mountain/Last Moravian.)
The quoted lyrics of Czech poet and songwriter Karel Kryl (April 12, 1944, Kroměříř – March 3, 1994, Munich) — who in 1969 left communist Czechoslovakia for West Germany, where, among others, he co-operated with the exile Radio Free Europe — express better than any other word the bitterly painful experience of this post-war (East- and Central) European artist who, like a few generations before him the (Central-) European Kraus, did not and could not remain silent. Kryl’s song is an allegorical protest against the occupation of Czechoslovakia that followed the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968. The lyrics, however, strictly correspond with the historical facts related to the Battle of White Mountain, an early battle in the Thirty Years’ War fought on 8 November 1620, in which an army of 15,000 Bohemian estates and mercenaries were defeated by 27,000 men of the combined armies of Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor, and the German Catholic League. The battle marked the end of the Bohemian period of the Thirty Years’ War, and decisively influenced the fate of the Czech lands for the next 300 years.
Kryl’s reference to the monstrous reality of the Thirty Years War and his immediate allegory of his own experience with the demonstration of Soviet totalitarian power, as well as of his own awakening to the reality of active collaboration of Czechoslovak political representation, which was accompanied with the passivity of a majority of Czechoslovak population, is a telling postscript to Kraus’s artistic reflection of European totalitarianisms through the poetics of phrases, shibboleths, and media clichés.
Published on 29 June 2016 (Article originally written in Czech)
Up and down, up and down, up and down. That’s how the streets of Porto take you around, from a small café full of students lost in their books to the sound of crackling vinyls, to the stream of tourists going down to the riverside. Strong wind, some rays of sun, a lot of rain. This is the weather that welcomes a one-week ISO residency at the National Theatre São João, a time warp dedicated to creation and brainstorming.
The International Super Objective Theatre (ISO) is a project developed in the context of the 2012 UTE Decentralized Academy. Initiated in the course of a masterclass directed by Russian stage director Lev Dodin in Saint Petersburg, the ISO is a collective of young theatre artists from all over Europe and beyond, with the aim to explore what being European means today through theatre practices.
The kind of work that Nuno Carinhas and Nuno M. Cardoso conducted with the group of actors resembled the one made in a science lab, playing with elements and doses, provoking reactions between the performers and the spectators. The choice to use the original text of Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind and mix it with its English, French and Bulgarian translations revealed so many contradictions. The contradictions of a continent that would like to act and reason with a collective mind and realizes that it sometimes is not even able to understand its own words.
In one scene, an officer dictates a letter to a secretary, who—not speaking the language—finds no other way to execute the task than to perform a frenzied pantomime that mimics voice tones and their supposed meaning.
The result is an ironically distorted mirror of what is happening nowadays not just with respect to Europe, but whenever we consider the nature of our current modes of communication, overwhelmed by a Babel of contradictory signs and tools that give the illusion of a closer distance.
We might join this group of people for a simple stroll through the park or for a cup of chà in a secret and fancy-furnished tearoom in Porto, and a passionate conversation on religion and faith would seamlessly intertwine with comments on the structures of national theatres, with no need for excuses. There is always something refreshing in getting deeper into an artist’s mind, where every single detail of perception transforms into one element of an organic process.
For the journalists invited to cover the story the open rehearsal—held in front of a small but very attentive audience in the rehearsal room of the Mosteiro São Bento da Vitória—was just the starting point, to dig a way down to an even more complex process.
The group first gathered four years ago; the workforce has been changing, including new nationalities that have joined and introduced new perspectives, pursuing a sort of balance which doesn’t accept to be frozen by any hierarchal system. Angelique, Balázs, Bilyana, Boris, Khwala, Kim, Luís, Petya and Vincent (part of a larger group) got to know each other better and better, and are now aware of their common past and in search of a common future.
Sitting at their table for seven meals, having a drink together, playing childish games in the park a few hours before leaving Porto was such a great learning experience. But what was even more compelling for a journalist was the need to learn a different state of beholding, to find a way to be present without interfering. Being there while the group was spreading and discussing and changing ideas clacking on the notebooks and scribbling on the notepads meant to testify how the creative process is something, again, contradictory by nature: it demands of you to be in control and, at the same time, to be willing to be obstructed and put in crisis. As Italo Calvino stated, “The perfect idea is the one that is open to be discarded to make room for a better one.”
Between doubts about which should be the textual base for a further research and very different views on aesthetics and poetics of the performing arts, the core of the attention was in fact a meeting point: an actor and an actress on stage can (and must) be the keynote speakers for a tough but necessary discourse on contemporary society; because every shared action is a political one. And political acts are at the heart of a collectivity and the key to its consciousness made alive. Here’s the ultimate, fruitful contradiction: the members of a collective win back an individual prominence. And that’s why the International Super Objective Theatre should not forget to stay subjective.
Published on 27 June 2016 (Article originally written in Italian)
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)
Lucie BerahaBorn 1988. Lives and works in Paris/France.
