Tag: Vienna

The Generation of Joyful Knowledge

The Generation of Joyful Knowledge

With the Silver Surfer world premiere at Volx/Margareten, the studio of the Volkstheater Wien has brought out an innovative theatrical experiment, in which the bracket between millenials and silver surfers finds its expression in all their contradictory and appropriate facets, without abandoning the critical attitude towards smart technology.

Barbara Pálffy / Volkstheater

Ganaele Langlois is Professor in Communication Studies at the York University. Her book Meaning in the Age of Social Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) studies how the very concept of meaning is being reshaped in the light of human-computer interaction. Following Langlois, in the process of creation of meaning online, the human user is only «a component, but not the driving force of these systems». A social networking site (such as Facebook or Instagram) is based on a very complex software architecture, only partly activated by us and made by a sum of technical objects that possess their own agency and are able to influence, reshape, and bend to their will the human actors.

Digital Natives is a cooperation project by the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe (UTE) with the support of Creative Europe, that involves the Volkstheater Wien, Schauspiel Köln, the Hugarian Theatre of Cluj, the Comédie de Reims and the National Theatre of Northern Greece. At the end of March 2019, Vienna was animated by a two day-long series of conferences, talks and performances, all dedicated to exploring how twenty years of interactive Web technologies were able to determine a new way of looking at reality and living interconnected lives. Digital interaction can indeed be interpreted as an opportunity in digging new paths to creativity: but, if relationships seem to no longer have limits, how can we trace boundaries between a fake reality and a real fakeness?

Since the advent of anthropology, human sciences have come to terms with the importance of a specific context, a system of social conventions and common rituals that really defines the roots and the logic of a local community. The very concepts of “openness” and “closure” can be fully understood only by measuring how such conventions and rituals invite or refuse a negotiation with others coming from different cultures.

If, back in the days, the Internet was created as a powerful vehicle to exchange data and information, Web 2.0 – those platforms characterized by highly interactive functionalities – deeply changed the modes used by different communities to establish a dialogue. We are not only talking about a new order and pace in mingling social traditions, but also new languages and velocities able to reshape the basic forms of intergenerational communications.

This is the thematic core of Silver Surfer, a project by Volkstheater’s Youth Programme, directed by Constance Cauers and Malte Andritter, that had its world premiere Saturday 30 March at the Volx/Margareten in Vienna.

Five adults and six teenagers meet on the same theatrical stage to discuss their everyday life, building, layer by layer, a dense collective discourse around the “digital diet” of the present society.

The wide blank stage is surrounded by translucent curtains, a sort of open limbo between two generations. A sparse vegetation of black lecterns grows on the empty white space; each stand has a LED light that illuminates the faces when the actors in front talk. Between rapid accounts of conversations with mom and dad and quick dialogues through which the digital natives walk the first steps into a romantic affair, every line of this very rhythmic and sparkling text is addressed to the audience. This shows how disconnected we really are when engaged in virtual communication. “Online relationship”, “Digital daily routine”, “Digital assault” are some of the titles that break the text in several scenes; but there are also such terms as “Nude pictures”, “Porn”, “Darknet”, all related to “the dark side of the Internet”. The virtual world is always a mirror of the actual one, where an inattentive traveler can easily get lost.

In establishing virtual contacts with the outer social circle, a turning point may then be a solid education, a kind of knowledge that makes us cautious and curious towards how we can actually appear to the eyes of the others and how we can understand and gain control over new systems of power. In his model of “discourse analysis”, Michel Foucault used to look at language and practices as battlefield where one has to oppose resistance to a number of power structures. In Langlois’ opinion such war is nowadays fought through the creation and the negotiation of meaning: «Media transform the conditions within which we humans come to interpret, produce, and share meanings. At the same time, media can be harnessed by specific social forces to establish power formations». Social media are fundamentally based on the idea that an individual view of the world can recognize itself through the act of circulating information and thoughts, in a way which is no longer able to distinguish private from public content.

The moment when the world was divided into online and offline is buried in the past: the Italian media theorist Giovanni Boccia Artieri (University of Urbino) argues that «we are facing an accumulation of occasions in which individuals “play” with self-representation forms, thanks to the diffusion of reproduction and production technologies in daily life, from digital photo cameras to editing software». The resulting media forms are very close to the ones promoted by the mainstream media and such scenario is reinforced by a growing “disintermediation” (the removal of intermediaries in a supply chain), encountered both in the market and in the individual construct of reality.

In his speech at “Digital Hermits”, the first Digitization Conference in Cluj (read the report here), a very young Hungarian YouTuber, Tamás Trunk, was explaining how quickly a teenager can launch his/her own online career as an influencer, only by endorsing the right product at the right time. Because virtual communities are already prompt in getting engaged in a communal attitude to marketing and in sharing ideas.

And yet, Silver Surfer focuses on the controversial duplicity between virtual and actual presence, observing how certain natural dynamics of interaction are today encapsulated in a form of “digital milieu”, where everyone has to prove his or her level of connection, to be a witness of a shifting era.

The performance is a generous mix of vivacity and humor, the group of teenagers is very efficient in presenting different approaches to storytelling. Singing songs live, the actors display a polished body language and an accurate work on facial expressions that become extremely important in the way they convey and share with the spectator what such a fluvial text couldn’t, especially when the choir speaks in unison, winking at a Brecht’s “didactic drama” and, at the same time, portraying the effects of fixed thought.

One-to-one relations (between natives or with the «instaGrans») can in fact serve as a good model for political involvement, which is another big “black hole” of the proliferating digital culture(s): the absence of a real political attitude, the end of what Jürgen Habermas called “communicative action”. This has historically founded on language and the possibility of formulating an argumentation, as deliberate as possible but able to be contested and discredited.

To gain back what Habermas had envisioned, the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han proposes a quest for an alternative, a “digital rationality” that comes from a crucial understanding: the “digital swarm” is not a mass, rather an aggregate of individual egos not organized in a political construct.

As inhabitants of different areas of the same gigantic virtual community, our very imagery is being replaced with a wall full of slogans and tags, a semantic formula that gives the users the impression of being part of the same family of friends and followers, consuming and sharing the very same symbolic forms, productive «networked publics» (Diana Boyd) who recognize themselves in the same hidden processes.

While the social media establish themselves as the most advanced meaning machines, where a users’ response can discipline, at the same time, the accurateness of advertising and the relevance of the news, we are all “texting”, “snapchatting”, “skypeing”, “instagramming”, “posting”, “twitting”. All terms that had no sense less than a couple of decades ago and that now are included in every dictionary, at least in our glittering Western world. What is interesting about Silver Surfer is the way its energy sets the stage for a new kind of critique, because a clear division between “apocalyptic” and “integrated” (as Umberto Eco had defined two attitudes towards new technologies) is no longer there.

Thus, the idea of inviting members from Veterans and Generation Z to handle the same vocabulary and together funding a common language is an intelligent getaway to gain knowledge by living a real-time experience.

«What’s missing again at the moment that is has to be now?» is the last sentence of a long “teen choir”. Facebook suggests us to re-post a “memory” of a time when we were still married or still pregnant with our first daughter, and suddenly the past becomes a revenant; the future appears under the mask of “events” to be interested in. Between

posts, video-chats, virtual encounters and Instagram stories that 24 hours later are gone, this is the scenario: a condition where present is the only tense. At the end of the day, theatre is one of the last occasions to gather in the same room, among unknown people, and together occupy a time and a space which are owned and negotiated by an actual community. The same that, in the bar of the Volx/Margareten, has shared a drink and toasted to the wonderful effort of this bunch of members from a generation of joyful knowledge.

 

Published on 2 May 2019

Mixing the languages: personal encounters within a digital framework

Mixing the languages: personal encounters within a digital framework

UTE’s Sofia correspondent, Ina Doublekova, gives a vivid picture of what happened  in Vienna’s Volkstheater during a warm pre-spring weekend in March through the workshop and premiere’s experience of 25 young Europeans from five different places and cultural and migrational backgrounds made possible by the educational theatre project Digital Natives.

DIGITAL NATIVES is a cooperation project between five of the UTE’s member theatres: Volkstheater Wien, Comédie de Reims, Hungarian Theatre of Cluj, Schauspiel Köln and National Theatre of Northern Greece. The starting point of their collaboration is the play Concord Floral by Jordan Tannahill, a play about teenage identity and interactions, the power of perception and technology. The five theatres will take the text and work on it, either staging a production or using its themes as the basis for workshops with amateur teenage actors. The theatres, together with their amateur actors, will simultaneously develop a digital experiment during the rehearsal period.” – explains the text on UTE’s website, presenting this year-long, transnational educational initiative. However, what is not mentioned in this paragraph and naturally does not fit into this kind of project descriptions is that the teenagers involved are 90 in total – 15 in Cologne, 40 in Thessaloniki, 10 in Cluj and 10 in Reims, 5 stage directors are working with them on a weekly basis during the rehearsal period. Now just imagine how these five different groups meet in these theaters in each city almost every weekend. How they work with and on Concord Floral play (or do not work on it all but still spend time together), probably often simultaneously. So close and so far away at once – in the same theatrical dimension and at different geographical locations. Put in the same project and virtual framework but apart, at least in the first step of the project.

And yet, one weekend they all came together for a very first time in Vienna. This meeting was not in the initial schedule of the project but instead an almost spontaneous change in plans, which the Volkstheater agreed to host. In the morning the teenagers participated in their first ever workshop together and in the evening they attended the premiere of Silver Surfers – a performance created by the Volkstheater with seniors and millenials, again in the frame of #digitalnatives19, that you can read more about in Sergio Lo Gatto’s text.

Witnessing their first live encounter, after three premieres of Concord Floral already done in Vienna, Cologne and Reims and more importantly after all the participants having been in touch with one another via Skype for more than a half year now, was thrilling and though-provoking experience. Having to describe it – meaning to “zip” it into words for people who were not there – for an online journal makes it even more so.

The teenagers met in one of the rehearsal rooms of Volkstheater on a Saturday morning. The idea was for them to get acquainted with one another and also get a grasp on how the workshops happen in each city, what their counterparts have been doing,. For this purpose each of their trainers – Simon Windisch (Vienna), Bassam Ghazi (Cologne), Naïma Perlot-Lhuillier (Reims) – worked with the whole group for about an hour each, involving them into activities and trainings that they normally practice at home. Needless to say, at the beginning the atmosphere was awkward. Most of the kids were shy. One of the first rules established was that languages needed to be mixed. The first meeting ground for that, as it was noted, was the English language, which was not native for anyone but was the one which everyone spoke. Then came the body language. Everyone was encouraged get louder and louder, to stretch beyond the timidity, to open up to the others. To look them in the eyes. To team up with someone and to learn to follow their gaze, to recognize their laughter or cry from a distance. Some of the teenagers started acting out. One could tell that they got into it and got intrigued. Links were built; question of power (and superpower) was also raised. Through exercises and games synergy came into being. The languages were mixed up indeed. The atmosphere was now joyful and exalted. The magic of a dense personal encounter had worked out.

And here aroused a major question: how much this result was favored by the online encounters the teenagers had before their live meeting? And how their interaction online will be changed from now on that they know each other in person? What is the recipe for mixing up the language of the digital communication with the one of the personal interaction in the right proportions to make it taste good and right?

On the next day the conference, Digitality and Democracy, took place, focusing on Big Data, power and access to knowledge, possible ways to achieve digital maturity. It was moderated by Corinna Milborn, co-author of Change the Game. Wie wir uns das Netz von Facebook und Google zurückerobern (Christian Brandstätter Verlag, 2018) The other speakers were Dr. Sarah Spiekermann-Hoff (Professor at Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, author and researcher), Angelika Adensamer (Lawyer and criminologist, Policy Advisor at epicenter.works) and Stefanie Wuschitz (Artist, researcher and hacktivist).

During the discussion, many crucial issues were touched upon: the personal data collection and the fact that all our activity online is tracked, which violates the fundamental right of doing things without being under surveillance, thus this gathered information is used as an instrument of control and manipulation. What is more, algorithms are not transparent and tend to strengthen inequality. One possible solution mentioned is for these processes to be led bottom-up, which is not the case at the moment, since the major players on the field like Facebook, Amazon and Google are privately owned corporations. Furthermore, the situation of internet security in Europe was discussed, comparing it to countries like Russia and China, which are developing their own internet, while most of the servers where the European information is stored are still in the USA.

Without undermining at all the importance of those significant concerns, it seems that there are several outstanding tendencies when we talk about the digital world that we inhabit in general. First of all, we talk about it a lot and discussions about the near and distant future are quite common these days, which, is already a symptom.  Second of all, those debates often seem to be only two-sided (which was not the case for this conference) – there is one side claiming that the advance of digital world and the artificial intelligence is good and there is another side explaining why it is bad. Third of all, the digital is presented as a separate entity, a world of its own, not connected to the analog world outside the screens of the mobile devices.

Having attended both events in the course of 24-hours, it seems that probably we should start thinking of it as a mixture, as the right balance and between the two, as the golden middle. The digital is here to stay. And it is part of the analog daily life. And vice-versa. Nowadays they complement each other and how this relationship works needs to be examined deeper and deeper.

 

Ina Doublekova, Sofia, April 2019

 

S.O.S. Encapsulation… or the Soul after Victory III

S.O.S. Encapsulation… or the Soul after Victory III

© Herwig Lewy

The riddle of the International Theatre Festival is its name: Interferences. This year’s sixth edition of the biennial tournament for collective representations in Cluj-Napoca, which has been held every two years since 2008, deals with the theme of war. From the 22nd to the 30th November 2018, 16 ensembles from 13 countries met in Transylvania, a cultural interface below the Carpathian Arc since antiquity.

The cultural diversity and multilingualism can be felt at every corner of the city. It is home to various spaces of experience of distant pasts, which in their linguistic expression meets daily today in Hungarian, Romanian and sometimes also in German. The memorial culture of the city with the name triangle amazes and wonders visitors at the everyday overlays, because besides Cluj-Napoca there are also the names Kolozsvár and Klausenburg. Thus, the two city centres, a Hungarian and a Romanian one, are connected with each other by a street on which the sculpture of a myth was placed. It is the myth of the founding history of Rome – a she-wolf feeding Romulus and Remus on a marble-covered pedestal with a portrait of Trajan, including the inscription: Alla Citta di Cluj – Roma Madre – MCMXXI. The visitor is confronted with the question: Is this still young memorial a reminiscence of 1921, staging Rome as a matrilineal origin for the city of Cluj-Napoca?

Time is Convention

Anyone looking at the sculpture from outside looks for words to understand what kind of représentation finds expression here. Judging by everyday political standards, it may well have been the intention to create sense to meet the challenges after the turn of 1989/1992. However, a link to the founding myths of the nation-building process after Romania’s founding one hundred years ago as a result of the Versailles peace negotiations has attracted too much social attention. Festival director Gábor Tompa, at the opening of the festival in the Hungarian theatre of Cluj-Napoca, gives a hint, both in his address in the festival catalogue and in his personal address: the theme of the festival is war. One hundred years has passed since the end of the First World War, whose peace negotiations dramatically and tragically rearranged the map of Europe. At the same time, however, they also prolonged warlike conflicts indefinitely until today. – In his speech, he directly asks the audience the question: “How can we remember war in ways other than that losers remember losers? – Because in a war there are no winners,” says Tompa.

From the spectator’s point of view, his suggestion makes the facets of the festival programme comprehensible much more quickly. The chosen season in the festival calendar is the time of mental heaviness in Europe. Autumn passes into winter and the days become shorter. And outside only fog circulates. Theatre as a festival needs such a stable sacred anchor, which is realized anew in a periodic sequence depending on the season. The word “sacred” floats in my mind as I listen attentively to Tompa’s words in the auditorium as I leaf through the catalogue, creating a certain sense of time and space. I’m thinking of Henri Hubert’s essay on La représentation du temps dans la religion et la magie from 1904, read recently on my tablet. Those who get involved with the festival events leave the normal space-time feeling of everyday life. The sacred space-time order captures a feeling of infinity and immutability. Such a joint search for sense in theatre competes with the fixed memorial culture, which wants to present stability as an unchangeable factor for everyday life as obligatory; a demand that is strived for in everyday life, but rarely fulfilled.

The theatre, which has its origins in magic, has its own unfixed foundation of meaning. It is an open project, a search for sense. If one accepts the festival from the spectator’s point of view, one agrees with sacred space-time. Tompa’s choice of pieces is based on this common search for meaning under the sign of a shared time and a shared space when he writes in his address in the festival catalogue: With the various types of war, it is important to speak of a theatre of fright. The terrible trauma caused by violence would call for an individual and collective “exorcism”. The fixed point of the search for meaning lies in the similarity between war and theatre, for they are the reciprocal actions of two opposing forces.

Scrape That Fiddle More Darkly

The selection of the various directorial manuscripts from different theatre families in Europe stands for the side of change, self-assessment and collective responsibility. Absorbing a few festival days demands a higher level of attention from visitors from outside and the admission that they can’t see everything. The simultaneous presence of English, French, Romanian and Hungarian, the languages of the guest performances, such as German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian and Serbian, will also be added. There is a closely timed main programme in the main hall and in the studio. There is a supporting programme in the Tiff House, in the Tranzit House, in the Paintbrush Factory and in the Quadro Gallery. There are exhibitions and concerts. And for the first time there was a technical interference called Digital Hermits. This conference at the Tranzit House tried to explore the use of digital technologies and their impact on the coexistence of people in our world. A contribution on war that takes into account the consequences of the Cold War, when the Internet was born, to ensure communication between entities after a nuclear fallout. The focus was on user interfaces – also known as new media – and their own spaces of experience in and with time and space. It was seen as problematic that the dialogue between the generations leads to a dichotomy between the group of people who live completely without digital technologies and the group who no longer want to shape life without them. The connection of passions to the filter bubbles and echo chambers of the digital world unfortunately failed to materialize.

One question that has always been virulent for the two-thousand-year history of theatre is: How do people behave in war? – In a collapse crisis, laughter and crying not only alternate, they can also occur simultaneously. One person’s suffering is the other’s only short joy until the perspectives change and the persecutor becomes the persecuted. Milo Raus shows with his work Compassion. The history of the machine gun an impressice teichoscopy, to which the dramatic elements of the Greek tragedy are reduced. In it, this change of perspective is performed in a loop. The actress Ursina Lardi from the ensemble of the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin plays herself as a young development aid worker in Rwanda, where she witnessed the Hutu genocide of the Tutsi. Later she finds out that the person she helped became the perpetrator. The Belgian actress Consolate Sipérus also plays herself. As a baby, she was adopted by a Belgian couple. More than the country of origin, Rwanda, and the catalogue with the baby faces that can be chosen for adoption are not known to her. From the viewer’s point of view, this enormous amount of social facts is hardly bearable. And Lardi tells of the theatres of war with impressive power of speech and physical presence, as if she has just observed this quantity of irrational actions.

By représentation, Hubert means exactly this sacred time level. Just as in the auditorium on my tablet I work on an over one-hundred-year-old text in order to pursue questions of understanding about what is happening on stage, Lardi and Sipérus create a public sphere. Not just a public speech act, that is, one that can be seen by everyone, is performed here, at the same time an understanding of the event opens up for other group members who are not directly involved in the actual action. Now and here we take an insight into the events that took place on another continent in 1994. This is the quality of the festival, with which the riddle of the name, Interferences, is solved: it is the coincidence of all time levels in the concept of humanity. The model upheld in Europe since the Renaissance breaks itself in the face of the horrors of precisely this persistent humanity, no matter what skin colour, language, culture or religion it claims to be right and good for itself. The Greek drama models serve this quality.

Anna Badora of the Volkstheater Wien (Vienna Volkstheater) has created a link between antique representational drama and post-dramatic attempts to cope with the European present in Renaissance style. She stages an Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides in the format of the Golden Ratio, in which Iphigenia is actually sacrificed at the end of the first part, with which the tragedy of Euripides, which for us has only been handed down as a fragment, ends. The war really begins with Badora. While the battle rages, we spectators go to the toilet or to the fresh air. From the two thousand years in the past we fall in the second part into the Syrian present. Here, Stefano Massini’s text Occident Express serves as the basis for a play for the same actors who are now making their way to Europe as civil society from the war zones in Iraq and Syria.

It is said that waves of crisis lead to a learning process. Gabor Tompa shows in his in-house production of William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice that limits are inherent in this learning process. The fact that both actors, Gábor Viola and Zsolt Bogdán, can play both the role of Antonio and that of Shylock as respective double casts bears witness to the deep empathy for the characters that is necessary to represent sacrificial rituals. Antonio, whose sadness at the beginning may not be revealed to the audience until the end of the piece – at the beginning it is not business or love that causes his suffering – it is the quotations of the milieus and their internal morals made by Tompa in his soundscape installation, who let Antonio be as obviously sad as the mirror-inverted despair of Shylock, whose sacrifice in the end – analogous to Iphigenia’s sacrifice – is needed to restore that very internal morality after the group has gone through a common crisis. Antonio, like his alter ego Agamemnon (father of Iphigenia and at the same time commander who sacrifices his daughter), represents in this sense the permanent depression of a human being who knows that it always seeks the good, but at the same time always creates the bad.

Fatherland

The “exorcism” of the festival, which was the goal, took on a physically concrete form collectively and practically with the staging Vaterland in the choreography of Csaba Horváth and the stage design of Csaba Antal. The Forte Company presents text elements from Thomas Bernhard’s The Italians in a rhythmic and sporty sequence of scenes that gesturally play the timbres of Bernhard’s model. Bernhard, who in his will still wanted to ensure that no text, neither novel nor stage text, narrative or poem, would ever appear in Austria, was at war with the eccentric way of his fellow countrymen dealing with National Socialist traditions. The staging succeeds in allowing Bernhard to be regarded as the master of plastic surgery of collective passions that are unquestioned in memorial culture or devotional objects. Whether a geographical space is assigned a patrilineal or matrilineal original character is actually uninteresting.

In this way, the festival creates a concrete link to the themes of past years. Whereas in 2014, for example, it was still necessary to report on the stories of the body, this year the theme of war captures the passions in a way that suggests new approaches to the content of security policy measures, which are often difficult to understand in everyday life. The experiment on the formal side, such as Milo Rau’s, of exclusively exhibiting teichoscopy, seems all too minimalistic. We do not know whether the actress Ursina Lardi was really in Rwanda and whether Consolate Sipérius was really adopted. Here documentary theatre finds its limits in fictionality and has to compete with the classics, the timelessly valid dramas since antiquity. Mere indignation could perhaps have been problematized in connection with the digital filter bubbles and their echo chambers. But then the acting characters, whose limitations and weaknesses in Euripides or Shakespeare were excellently designed and presented in their plot constraints and intentions, would also have had to have been worked out more precisely in Milo Rau’s work. There are no spaces free of experience, even if the widespread contemporary encapsulation à la New Media and the generation conflicts associated with it might suggest it.

When a ship is rescued, the SOS emergency call is made beforehand and the bodies are rescued. The Interferences International Theatre Festival reminds us that the purpose of the SOS emergency call is to save souls. It demands their participation, a shared attention. An encapsulation in technical terms or as usual in analogue memorial culture, on the other hand, leads to isolation with fixed values of collective internal morals and their obligatory victims. By rejecting such tendencies of isolation, the theatre festival leads the search for meaning and sense in Cluj-Napoca.

Contrary to what the sculpture of the founding myth of the city of Rome and its staged history of origin suggests for Cluj-Napoca, the theatre has understood the origo principle. Florence Dupont can read about this punch line on the “monument” to Romulus and Remus: Rome – city without origin. The punchline is: there is no origin. There is only one diversity in mutual respect and recognition. This is what the origo principle stands for. Interferences is also the name for an unfinished search for sense. Theatre is and remains an open project, both in terms of content and form.

Published on 21 January 2019 (Article originally written in German)

Unsurtitled Theatricality

Unsurtitled Theatricality—Three plays at the Volkstheater

Watching performances in a congtext that is the opposite on an international festival situation is quite an interesting experience. A group of non-German speaking journalists affiliated with the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe had an opportunity to just do that in the autumn of 2017, as guests at the Volkstheater in Vienna. We saw three different plays on three consecutive evenings, all without surtitles. In this sense, the present article can be placed in a dialogue with Sergio lo Gatto’s article “Surtitled Theatricality: What language do artists export?” written in connection with an international festival, exploring how much the theatricality of a performance is based (only) on the text and what this means for a foreign audience.

“Wien ohne Wiener”, directed by Nikolaus Habjan at the Volkstheater Wien © Lupi Spuma

Perhaps there could not have been a better time to test Segio’s theory than this: we had an opportunity to watch productions that were not necessarily intended for festivals, in their local setting, without surtitles and with minimal German knowledge. This is by no means an unusual situation, although writing about it is. To be honest, the opportunity to let go of the text often fills me with relief. As it is difficult to resist surtitles, even when one fights to succumb to the temptation: at least I, myself, am so verbally inclined that a scene rarely glues my gaze to the stage, I keep looking up, meaning I definitely miss a great deal of what is happening.

There is another reason why I feel that the situation at hand is the polar opposite of international festivals: I almost feel like a voyeur, peeping at the Viennese in their home, as they watch theatre made just for them. Even from the three plays, even without understanding the text, one sees what there is a market for, and what the artistic director, Anna Badora and the creative circle are intrigued by. One thing is for sure, the Viennese enjoy explorations (seeped in historical identity) about what it means to be Viennese: two of the three performances, Wien ohne Wiener and Alles waltzer, alles brennt dealt with specifically this question. The third production was constructed from two consecutive performances of Iphigenia in Aulis and Stephano Massini’s Occident Express about the post-migration society. This indicates, what may be evident to us, but not to all segments of the theatrical structure: that the Volkstheater is strongly focused on the present. How profoundly and in what depth the issues presented in the play are dealt with is another question. In the absence of text, I can only guess at how thought-provoking, provocative, playful or even didactic these productions were.

However, I am able to give a much more definite opinion on which of the performances had the strongest impact in terms of theatrical language: Nikolaus Habjan’s Wien ohne Wiener, even though this play is the least bit international. The production is a kind of homage to the deceased Georg Keisler, the Austrian cabaret artist who strongly relied on Viennese (Jewish) culture in his songs. On the surface, the context is completely foreign, but it seems contextual knowledge is not necessary for one to feel that the performance is about them. In other words, one does not have to be Viennese to feel Viennese (as someone from Budapest).

Naturally, among other things, it is the puppets in Wien ohne Wiener that make the play seem new, fresh and full of life. With the absence of a lingua franca, the audience becomes immersed in the visual stimuli. Habjan’s puppets offer a real treat: With their bulging eyes and wrinkled faces these figures embody the ridiculousness and petty bourgeois of people who step on our toes on the tram (And those polyester blouses and knitted waistcoats!). And it is as if death had left its fingerprints on all of the faces… The way the puppets move on stage is also exciting. They are actually life-sized, but their limbs are replaced by the limbs of the puppeteers, who fill the empty shirts, blouses, that are the torsos of the puppets with their own hands and bodies. Interestingly, this makes the puppets seem alive; and they seem to be “acting” even when they lay lifeless on the edge of the stage. Adding further colour to the production is that the puppets do not only have separate puppeteers but also separate voices: as one actor moves the puppet the other “dubs” its words. The production exploits the playfulness of this method, each element i.e. the puppets, the puppeteers and voice-over actors, have their own lives and communicate with one another. Funny gags include the “voice” knocking the puppet over the head, the broad-hipped Alpine girl built out of two actresses, and Claudia Sabitzer dressed as a pigeon looking like a puppet herself. And we have not even mentioned the music of the play! It seems that Wien ohne Wiener has such a great impact because it creates its own, new world out of existing texts (none of which I had been familiar with). The whole thing is very grotesque, incredibly funny and deadly.

On the second night, we saw Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis and Stefano Massini’s Occident Express. Anna Badora placed the two plays side by side. It is an unusual, but not unique method, a bit like a curator organising an exhibition of two independent pieces, maybe even from different eras, in a way that the pieces start to interact with one another. Naturally it is the task of the audience to find the link, the reflections of each piece with the other. We have seen examples of this in Hungarian theatre: Gábor Máté used this method at the József Katona Theatre, when he placed a genre-painting like play about gypsies set in the first half of the last century in contrast with a contemporary play about a series of ethnically motivated murders set in the early 2000s in Hungary. This experiment was followed by Csaba Polgár at the Örkény Theatre. He embedded a series of scenes also about murder into the well-known story of seven samurais from Kurosawa’s film. The audience could actually vote to decide the fate of the samurais in the last third of the performance. I remember how my thoughts jumped from one story to the next, how one interpreted the other without the solution being completely obvious.

The memories of these two plays danced around in my head as I was watching Anna Badora’s production; the lack of surtitles actually created a larger space to make these sorts of associations. Nevertheless, my lack of familiarity with the second play made this process more difficult as I did not understand the language. In essence, this method relies on each actor playing multiple roles. As they reappear in the second part of the production, their roles reflect upon each other. As I only had a vague understanding of Massini’s play, I found following this aspect of the production difficult. Rather, I watched the plays as two separate entities (or at least two separate parts of the performance). As a result, and also due to the lack of surtitles, the quality of the acting stood out even more. The difference in the style of the two plays was acutely apparent: the acting in Occidental Express seemed much more natural, reflective and multi-layered. Of course, the premise was also different: the actors narrated some of the play themselves and kept a distance from the story. This was obvious to me even without familiarity with the text, primarily thanks to the quality of acting. The other signs, the recurring motifs, the spilling of the paint, the proliferation of victims worked nicely, but it is again difficult for me to decipher to what degree Massini’s text takes over the story of the refugees, or speaks for them—an angle mentioned at a conference the day before by an artist of Syrian descent.

The production I saw on my third night was Alles Waltzer, alles brennt, which was quite likable even with the language barrier. However, it was during this production that I missed surtitles the most. To be more precise, this performance peaked my interest in the text (while Massini’s play probably was more predictable), it awoke a thirst for knowledge in me (even in an educational sense), and I kept wondering which aspect of the happenings the play dealt with. Irony and humour were quite clearly present, gags thundered through the stage and the story with dizzying speed. And I would like to take this opportunity to say that the solo of singer Eva Jantschitsch was absolutely magnificent.

Well that’s the way it is: if something interesting happens on stage, we notice it even without surtitles.

 

Published on 20 December 2017 (Article originally written in Hungarian)

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)

From Serbia to Syria

From Serbia to Syria

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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.

Chantal Mouffe
Chantal Mouffe.

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.

 

Featured image of Chantal Mouffe © by Santiago Mazzarovich

 

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