Table of Contents | Table des matières

Is it fair to say that many of the world’s leading artists -- from ancient times to our own – have been provocateurs of one sort or another? Some have sought to provoke politically. Some stylistically. Some were fighting for new ideas. Some for new ways of seeing or being or becoming. And from time immemorial, many of these cutting edge artists have either felt the need themselves to break free of their own familiars or, in many cases, have been forced out of home and country by those they have differed with or offended. Whether by need or choice then artists and exile (whatever form it may have taken) have long gone hand-in-hand.

The examples are many. In our own time we have seen the Nobel Prize winning dramatist Wole Soyinka forced into exile from Nigeria through death threats from a mad military regime. Kenyan playwright Ngugi wa Thiong’o spent some two decades abroad for challenging his government and what he saw as its colonial-minded policies. Athol Fugard in South Africa challenged his country’s policy of apartheid for decades and the South African government couldn’t wait to get rid of him only to find that he declined their kind offers and chose to live for much of his embattled artistic life within the country in a kind of internal exile.

During the Cold War and going back almost to the Russian Revolution of 1917, artists not willing to toe the official Communist Party line often opted out of their homelands for safety as well as for intellectual and artistic freedom. The names are too many to list them all here but among the most well-known of these political exiles one must certainly recall the experiences of the German Bertolt Brecht, the Russian Yuri Lyubimov and the Romanian Andrei Serban. Theatre of the Oppressed founder Augusto Boal was forced out of his native Brazil early on in his career by rightwing police facing threats of death if he returned.

But the exilic is not only about being forced abroad. Many choose to work away from their own homelands because it is also a way of seeing the world with fresh eyes. Would Ibsen have written his great plays if he had not left Norway for Germany and Italy? Would the Italian Eugenio Barba have learned to barter and anthropologize aspects of world theatre if he had not moved to Denmark and created his unique Odin Theatre? Would Peter Brook have created his Mahabharata or his Iks if he hadn’t chosen to leave the security of a commercial career in Britain’s West End for his ramshackle experimental theatre in Paris. The exilic – including the difficult but sometimes necessary choice to live abroad as an expatriate -- is something that happens frequently in the contemporary world. And once such a choice is made, the challenges of living that new life, living in a new society as a minority, often working in a new language, makes one seem to be different, makes one what we now call the “other.”

This issue of Critical Stages takes as its theme the whole notion of exile and the exilic, expatriatism and otherness and seeks to understand what it is and what it does to the artist both positively and negatively. The section begins with a fascinating theorization of the exilic state by Russian-born and now Canadian-based scholar Yana Meerzon. In an excerpt from her soon to be published study Theatre in Exile as Performing Odyssey (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Prof. Meerzon defines the field as both imposition and choice connecting her major study to contemporary definitions of self. Her work starts at the Odin.

Two historical pieces look at exile in historical contexts. Critic and scholar Savas Patsalidis from Aristotle University in Thessaloniki examines the huge significance of exile in early Greek drama. His study of Aeschylus’ play The Suppliants (and American dramatist Charles Mee’s adaptation, Big Love) explores the loss of friends and family along with the protection of one’s government and sees it as a fate worse than death. Expatriate Italian scholar Lamberto Tassinari, on the other hand, starts with a remark made by T.S. Eliot to the effect that Shakespeare saw the emerging English world with such fresh eyes that he must have been an exile. Utilizing textual and biographical evidence, Tassinari adds to the recent debate about the Shakespearean authorship question (the Japanese-backed, English-set film Anonymous -- directed by a German -- has brought the whole issue, for better or worse, into classrooms around the world). Tassinari suggests that a good case could be made these days that the real Shakespeare was actually Italian poet and lexicographer John Florio. Exile and otherness, he argues, are clear themes in so many of the plays.

The section concludes with examination of two lives directly connected to the issue of exile. In the first, Finnish scholar Liisa Byckling – an expert in Finnish-Russian cultural contacts – looks closely at the life and career of one of Stanislavski’s star students, the Moscow Art Theatre actor and acting teacher while in exile Michael Chekhov. Chekhov, a relative of the dramatist Anton, struggled to create a Russian-style acting school and company during his years in the UK and later the US after leaving the new Soviet Union where his alternative approaches were not always appreciated. His experiences in exile as an acting teacher were also not always appreciated or understood in his new homelands.

The final piece in the section is an interview with one of Asia’s leading theatrical provocateurs, director-playwright Chong Wishing, sometimes known as Jung Euishin. Chong is a clear example of the exilic as Other. The son of a Korean immigrant to Japan, Chong has lived his whole life in that country, was educated in Japan, does not really speak Korean and yet has spent his entire career feeling and being seen as different, as an outsider, as a minority. In this specially-commissioned interview with Chong, Japanese critic Manabu Noda explores Chong’s long and important career and the role that alterity has played in it.

To speak personally for a moment, it has been an honour to edit this exciting theme section for CS. In preparing it, I have spoken to innumerable people with innumerable views on all sides of the issue. Some were themselves exiles, others (like me) expatriates, and still others minorities within their societies. The section has clearly only been able to scratch the surface of this issue, an issue that in a world of growing trans-nationalism and inter-culturalism promises only to become more important in the decades to come. Many thanks to everyone who has spoken with me about what should be included and especially to those who have taken the time to actually write for CS here. Your time and thought and work are deeply appreciated.

[1] Don Rubin is founding Editor of the quarterly journal Canadian Theatre Review and Editor of Routledge’s six-volume World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre. He teaches at Toronto’s York University.

Theatre in Exile: Defining the Field as Performing Odyssey

(Editor) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 06:25:00 +0900

Theatre in Exile:
Defining the Field as Performing Odyssey

Yana Meerzon [1]

Exile as pain. Exile as difference. Exile as performative adventure. In the following article, excerpted from her upcoming book, Performing Exile -- Performing Self: Drama, Theatre, Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Russian-born and now Canadian-based theatre scholar Yana Meerzon examines a wide range of contemporary and traditional exilic conditions in an effort to define a field that is both ancient and agonizing, theatrical and political, complicated and challenging in the context of contemporary definitions of self. In the process, she redefines ideas of home and homeland and the kinds of journeys of recognition and change they can represent and have represented for theatre artists.

In the summer of 2008 I traveled to Holstebro, Denmark, the hometown of Eugenio Barba’s company, Odin Teatret. I joined the Odin’s actors and the Jasonite Family, an international group of 30 theatre youngsters, at the Holstebro Festuge (Festive Week), a celebration of the people and the city of Holstebro.

The 2008 Festuge opened with a meeting for the participants and the guests, who were asked to introduce themselves to the “family.” In my short speech, I said that I study the lives and the art of those theatre makers who left their countries to find a new home in a different land. I explained that I was in Holstebro to visit Barba and the Odin Teatret, an example of a theatre company working in exile.

A young man approached me after the meeting. “I’m in exile!” he exclaimed. “Your project is about me. I’m from Greece and I left home when I was 18. I first moved to Paris, and then to London, now I’m here and hope to go to New York next fall. I’m an artist in exile, a theatre maker who left his country to find a new home in a different land!” This young man was clearly excited – we had found something in common. I smiled too and then said to him: “No, I think you’re your own project, the theatre of nomads…”

I begin my study of theater and exile with this anecdote to illustrate that in today’s globalized consciousness one’s attitude towards exile as banishment or as a necessity to leave one’s home, to seek refuge elsewhere, has changed. Today, the very word exile often sounds like an invitation for a personal adventure. Taken as one’s personal quest and cultural expedition, such a view of exile refers to something that Julia Kristeva calls “the height of the foreigner’s autonomy” (Strangers to Ourselves, 7) or what I call nomadic consciousness, and thus makes the contemporary paradigm of exile quite different from that of the past.

This rendering of exile as a new economic and political condition of today’s cosmopolitan world requires a proper description and examination of what the exilic state in its historical and modern interpretations entails, and a reminder that even the very globalized exile “cannot be treated as a mere metaphor,” a “somewhat facile argument that every intellectual is always already in a ‘spiritual exile’.” (Boym, ‘Estrangement as a Lifestyle’, 243)

Hence I propose to look at the condition of exile as a wide spectrum of possible scenarios: from exile as banishment to exile as nomadism; from the impossibility of return to a desire for constant voyage resulting in a transient state of transnational experience and transcultural art. Thus I engage with the concept of exilic theatre as the artist’s manifestation of his/her exilic condition found in the themes, forms, and means of the artist-immigrants’ literary, theatrical and cinematic performances. I envision the practice of the exilic performative as stemming from the intersection of an exilic artist’s original cultural knowledge (both personal and communal) as well as his/her professional knowledge, which this artist intends to preserve and advance in his/her newly adopted country; and the demands, tastes, and expectations of his/her adopted target audience.

Finally, I intend to celebrate the hardships and the victories of the individual in today’s cosmopolitan world in which exile is claimed to become the new norm of social being. This norm I argue is still an illusion. No subject of global cosmopolitanism or of symbolic citizenship (Margalit, The Decent Society, 158-160) can escape the mechanisms of the state’s manipulation and its scrutiny of the individual. Global cosmopolitanism cannot provide one with a shield to defend from the linguistic and cultural shocks that one experiences in a new land, whether as tourist, economic migrant, political exile, or war refugee. Symbolic citizenship cannot guarantee a traveler his/her personal presumption of innocence. Hence, symbolic citizenship cannot help with one’s personal journey into acceptance, integration and “arrival” into the adopted land regardless of whether one is an artist. This personal journey of redefining what one calls home and where one finds one’s homeland, a journey of recognition and change, is the subject of my inquiry.

I define the exilic performative as manifested in the artist’s everyday life and described in Erving Goffman’s famous “dramatic realization” of self (The Presentation of Self, 30), as well as those theatrical appearances that the exilic artist makes professionally, whether on stage, in images and sounds, or in language. I consider each manifestation of the exilic performative as an example of the exilic artist’s call for remaking one’s identity and thus performing the act of self-fashioning. I believe that the poetics of exile, the quotidian and professional art of self-fashioning and survival, is always grounded within the artist’s social, economic and personal exilic conditions, it is the process of constant negotiation and translation.

As such, I envision exilic theatre in a close proximity to poetic theatre, theatre of auto-portrait, testimony theatre and theatre of memory, among others. I also recognize in the aesthetics of exilic theatre the prevalence of a poetic utterance: an utterance that embraces theatre performances based on plays written in verse and in prose; performances based on non-verbal expression, movement and image; reciting poetry as professional and personal performance; and creating the meta-performative constructs. Following the dominant genealogy of Western understanding of exile found in Greek democracy—exile as both punishment and existential voyage – I theorize exilic experience as a dramatic and performative odyssey.

I adapt the temporal vision of exile as a circular journey which consists of three essential steps — leaving home, living in a new country, and homecoming; and I argue that although not every exilic experience follows this tripartite schema, and not every exile returns to his/her native country, the children of exile eventually seek this passage “home.” In the following, I wish to demonstrate that the exilic voyage involves the processes of the artist’s self-estrangement. It becomes an opportunity for creative self-liberation, an enhancement of the artist’s chosen mode of creative self-expression.

Theatre and exile: some general statements

The experience of exile, as it was practiced in the period of the Greek Democracy, took the forms of torture, both physical and emotional, and death from hunger and thirst in the desert. The democratic state used exile as a form of punishment and as a mechanism of self-defense. At the time, the act of political exile secured the expulsion of “the tyrant from the community” (Forsdyke, Exile, Ostracism, 6).

The political exile remains even today the most powerful paradigm of physical, spatial and temporal separation from one’s native land. Accordingly, the word exile evokes such meanings as trauma, muteness, impossibility of reconciliation, and the deficiency of any personal or collective closure. It also signifies a displacement and a falling out of time phenomenon.

Following this tradition, Edward Said defines exile as a metaphor of death and suggests a view of the exilic journey as a crossing of the River Styx from the world of the living (the homeland) to the world of the dead (the new land) (Said, Reflections of Exile, 174). In his definition, Said therefore reinforces a long-standing tradition of seeing exile as regret, doubt, sorrow, and nostalgia. Echoing Said, Bharati Mukherjee views exile as “the comparative luxury of self–removal [that] is replaced by harsh compulsion” (‘Imagining Homelands', 73). This view of exile, in other words, suggests that the exilic state may be understood as an experience of suffering and agony offering no possibility for self-realization.

In an age of global migration, however, it becomes difficult to accept readily this longstanding view of exile as territorial, historical, and personal loss. In a time of cultural shifts, one needs to recognize that the exilic journey can rest on changing premises which are much broader, more complicated and unpredictable than just expulsion from one’s native land. These premises endorse and attest to the condition of the modern exile as a manifestation of intellectual and cultural discomfort.

Today, the condition we call exile – derived via the Middle English exil from the Latin exilium – encompasses both one’s enforced removal from home as well as one’s self-imposed absence from a native country. This condition manifests itself either as an internal exile (a voluntarily choice to resist and confront the state’s politics from within) or as an external exile (a life away from one’s land). As an act of banishment and expulsion, exile results in a state of displacement, loss, sorrow, and personal marginality. It nevertheless becomes a solution to a perceived threat, be it confinement, civil war, poverty, ethnic discrimination, or physical or psychological persecution.

Paradoxically, exile can also provoke a state of happiness and pleasure, as well as a bittersweet taste of nostalgia for one’s home, one’s childhood, and one’s history. Exilic life can provide a sense of continuity and personal satisfaction. It can trigger artistic discoveries and lead to economic fulfillment or benefits. Finally, the condition we call “exile” also serves as an invitation to grow up, to recognize and welcome one’s capacity for creativity, for innovation and reinvention of self.

Today's exiles, both voluntary and involuntary, risk being misunderstood because of language barriers. They face the potential humiliation of having to exist outside of their social class and familiar discourse and thus need to fight for various forms of economic recognition and means of self-expression. They also face the processes of cultural loss, breaking with their past collective mythology, and the necessity of coming to terms with the values of an adoptive nation. Nevertheless, these obstacles do not deter today’s émigrés from mastering a new language or updating their professional vocabulary. On the contrary, such experiences can stimulate the exiles’ personal creativity and encourage them to seek intellectual and economic well-being.

Accordingly, the exilic state today can be experienced as an exercise in alterity, in which social, psychological and artistic challenges dictate “an immense force for liberation, for extra distance, for developing new structures in one’s head, not just syntactic and lexical but social and psychological” (Brooke-Rose, ‘Exsul’,40).

Today’s exile can be experienced in many complex forms, but it will always be marked by the conditions of translation, adaptation and integration shaped by the cultural and linguistic challenges one meets in a new country. Nowadays, exile can be experienced as banishment, and it can be used as the means for saving one’s life. At the same time, the experience of exile can be triggered by one’s longing for adventure and seeking “the meeting with the unknown”. It can also manifest itself as a condition of birth, the divided self.

The artist of the divided self repeatedly seeks a mode of communication that can reach a wide variety of globalized and cosmopolitan audiences. This artist seeks the aesthetics of transnational, the ultimate expression of the exilic condition and the exilic chronotope. Lastly, exile can be experienced as a post-exilic anxiety for roots by the post-exilic subject, someone who never experienced personally the perils of a flight but would dedicate his life to the search for reconciliation with his ancestry.

For that reason, by redefining the exilic paradigm as a creative opportunity for the liberation of self and as an occasion to celebrate the existential condition of being “other,” we must aim not only to shift the perception of exile away from the archetype of suffering, disorientation and displacement, but also to explore the spiritual quest of the exilic artists who long to re-establish their creative environment and build an aesthetic shelter in a new land. We need to investigate the change of social and narrative paradigms of exile that have been taking place in the period starting after the Second World War, and adapt Homi Bhabha’s definition of global migration as global cosmopolitanism to the concept of personal exile, seen s as the condition of personal mobility.

These exilic artists’ flights and longing for return are exemplified in the processes of coming to terms with one’s artistic identity. This identity originates within the exilic artist’s gradual move from seeing oneself as an ethno-cultural and thus national subject in the past, at home; to recognizing oneself as a representative of a certain profession – a poet, a theatre director, a writer, a dancer, or a filmmaker – someone whose life abroad, in the artist’s present, must be defined by what this person does, and not by what place, language or cultural heritage this artist belongs to.

The exilic identity rests with the sentiment and the practices of the exilic voyage, which often includes the major transformation of the exilic subjects themselves. Either in the space of one’s own lifetime or within the temporal span of the life of the exilic subjects’ children, the exilic artist undergoes a transformation from the clash of cultures to hybridity, a condition that becomes a cultural antonym to the state that originated it. The elements of the individual discourse mixed with the narrative of the dominant or adopted culture form the basis of this exilic identity. The exilic transformation leads to a series of progressions: the exilic subject’s linguistic, cultural and ideological challenges eventually lead to the forms of one’s personal and professional integration, adaptation and change.

Both the act of creation (the process of writing plays, staging theatre and dance productions, and making films) and the products of exilic creativity (the plays, the productions, and the films themselves) serve as examples of exilic transcendence. The act of the exilic performative leads to the artists’ problematizing and foregrounding the chosen media of their creative expression: be it the media of poetry, drama, theatre performance, dance or film. Very often the exilic artists find themselves having to re-evaluate the effectiveness of a habitual artistic routine, i.e., one brought from home and often popular “back there”. The artists find it necessary to adapt their original poetic, dramatic or performative language of expression to the needs and the tastes of their new audiences. The condition of exile makes these artists re-evaluate the opportunities one’s creative medium offers in the new cultural environment. In exile, the artists find themselves forced to generate instances of meta-discourse as one begins to rely on the devices of meta-dramatic, meta-theatrical, meta-cinematic, and meta-narrative communication.

Hence, I recognize an artist in exile as someone who, whatever the reasons for his/her flight, chooses to continue his/her creative quest in one’s adopted language and not necessarily directed at the community of his/her former compatriots. An exilic artist is someone who is aware of and embraces the linguistic, cultural and economic challenges of the new land not as obstacles but as stimuli for both one’s creativity and one’s personal growth. The works of the exilic artists build upon the forms of existential and professional continuity which define the exilic condition.

The exilic artists choose to speak to three audiences: 1) the larger audiences of their adopted country, thus aiming their works at international and domestic readership; 2) the diasporic audiences of their home-country’s community abroad; and 3) their former home-country’s audience.

These artists consciously resist complete integration either into their newly found society or into the community of their former compatriots. They reject the opportunity to become the chroniclers of their displaced community, subscribing instead to the creative opportunities of expatriation. These artists take exile as an act of “sustained self–removal from one’s native culture, balanced by a conscious resistance to total inclusion in the new host society. The motives for expatriation are as numerous as the expatriates themselves: aesthetic and intellectual affinity, a better job, a more interesting or less hassled life, greater freedom or simple tax relief, just as the motives for non-integration may range from principle, to nostalgia, to laziness or fear” (Mukherjee, ‘Imagining Homelands’, 71-72).

These exilic artists, therefore, are characterized by their “cool detachment” from the everyday hardships of exilic being. They lack the immigrant’s troubled engagement with one’s present social condition. They are to remain the freely floating islands, difficult to confine or define within the normative bureaucratic language of the state’s administration. Ultimately, expatriation in the forms of both forced or self-imposed exile serves these artists as “the escape from small–mindedness, from niggling irritations” (‘Imagining Homelands’ , 71-72) of their home culture or the culture of their adopted homeland.

Accordingly, I see the exilic artists along Said’s definition of intellectuals in exile:those artists who strive well beyond the artistic norms, criteria and demands of their new homeland. These artists find themselves in a constant state of negotiation, seeking continuity between their past and present experience, between their professional skills and the expectations of the new audiences, and between their habitual artistic langue and a new creative parole. To work in one’s second language and to search for other (possibly non-verbal) means of creative communication, to address not only the audiences of one’s ethnic community but the large groups of international readership or spectatorship are the artistic and existential goals an artist in exile faces.

This search for an expressive language of the exilic experience is particularly pertinent to “an intellectual as an outsider” (Said, ‘Intellectual in Exile’, 39), someone who is dependent on his/her linguistic forms of expression not only in everyday life but also and more importantly in his/her professional domains. Said describes this challenge as a condition of marginality and solitude, but also of pleasure and privilege (‘Intellectual in Exile’, 39).

In other words, an artist in exile is someone who consciously chooses not to belong to “any place, any time, any love” (Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 7) and who rarely defines oneself in spatial terms but sees exile as an existential voyage unfolding in temporal dimensions. As Kristeva states, “the space of the foreigner is a moving train, a plane in flight, the very transition that precludes stopping. As to landmarks, there are none” (Strangers to Ourselves, 8) and thus the temporal dimensions of exilic experience dominate its spatial coordinates.

Exile as Banishment

Exile as banishment and displacement not only changes one’s social and political status but also challenges an émigré’s perception of self. The need to communicate in a second language (even if one has mastered it at home) increases an exile’s insecurity not only in his/her own eyes but quite often in the eyes of the residents of a newly adopted home country. Fortunately, the “instinct of theatricality” (Evreinov, Teatr kak takovoi) serves an exile both as a protective shield and as a means of reconnecting with his/her sense of self, when one’s essential tools of everyday communication undergo the processes of theatricalization. As a result, the quotidian practice of the exilic experience turns into a performative site of negotiation between the émigré’s self-perception and his/her newly adopted culture’s perception of this exilic subject.

A comprehensive grid for the exilic performative as the site of the émigré’s everyday and artistic negotiation must consist of the description and analysis of the new tendencies in cognition instigated by the exilic being that inspire exilic artists in their everyday and in their professional performative practices. The definition of the exilic performative requires rendering the concepts of performance and performative beyond the scope of theatre studies and welcomes an expansion of the term performativity to describe and analyze various artistic representations of the exilic self, namely in language, drama, theatrical production, dance, and film.

A performative scene of the exilic wandering embodies the dramaturgy of social and existential dialogue leading to forms of cultural performativity based on the dynamic of people’s interaction framed within its socio-political and linguistic context. It becomes the tool for re-establishing self-identity as the framework for one’s self-imposed (and therefore self-accepted) norms and potentials of societal being. Exiles and other marginalized people or groups can be considered exclusions instigated by the established societal norms and expectations. Therefore, the processes of re-signification of self and of personalization of the forms of societal performativity can be manifested in economic, political, artistic, and social discursive self-expression.

According to Evreinov, our self-performativity is based on the instinct of theatricality and improvisation, the pre-aesthetic and pre-religious need for human cognition, which emerges from our collective unconscious and constitutes our desire to play, to imitate, and to enact. The instinct of theatricality is equal to biological law and it is the uncovering of human nature that is exactly the goal of making theatre. In exile, the instinct of theatricality is defined anew. In the mind of the performer, an exile who is an initiator of communication, becomes estranged. The moment an immigrant starts to instigate a dialogue, his/her vocal and visual differences betray the speaker’s foreignness: the accent of one’s speech, the colour of one’s skin or the cut of one’s clothes makes the exile a marked being, someone who always circulates at the centre of the communicating model. The exile’s theatricalization of self, therefore, becomes estranged and the everyday improvisation loses its flow of transitions.

The theatricality of the exilic experience unfolds within the tension between the exilic individual and the exilic collective performative as a clash of theatrical representation and reception. This process, therefore, is also framed twice: first within the émigré’s own consciousness as a pariah and secondly within the consciousness of the inhabitants of the émigré’s newly adopted country.

In her famous description of how gender is performed and constructed in any given social milieu, Judith Butler writes: “gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts” (Gender Trouble, 179). Similarly and in an even more complex fashion, the exilic self originates in a variety of quotidian, performative acts that an exile constantly produces: “the way we hold ourselves, the way we speak, the spaces we occupy and how we occupy them, all in fact serve to create or bring about the multi-levelled self that these acts are so often taken merely to create or represent” (Loxley, Performativity, 119).

As Butler notes, gender is produced by “the stylization of the body” (Gender Trouble, 179) from without, by the exterior gazes directed towards an individual. Analogously, the exilic self and the exilic body are constructed, performed, and sorted out in the public space. The exilic self, very much as the gendered self, is conditioned by the “conventional gestures, movements and styles [we] produce,” as well as “the colours of the clothes we wear as babies, […] the toys we play with as toddlers, […] or the sports we are made to play at school, to the ways we learn to talk about ourselves” (Loxley, Performativity,119). All these unmarked differences become marked and visible when one crosses a border and emerges as an actor, director, playwright, dancer, or film maker. The culturally unmarked conventions of our psychological and physical being become marked (visible and audible) when we move across the borders; they emerge through the exile’s (foreigner’s) accented voice and body.

An exile often experiences an imbalance between his/her audio and visual comprehensive abilities in which the former are suppressed and dominated by the latter. One’s visual, vestibular (balance) and spatial sense of self and body increase. The weak mastery of a new language leaves one’s ear less active, and as the brain performs the act of substitutions or transfers, it gives controlling powers to one’s visual sensors. This imbalance of the perceptive mechanisms makes an émigré-theatre maker far more sensitive to the visual and kinetic world around, which this artist can then translate into the artistic language of his/her theatrical presentations. This explains why exilic theatre often privileges either the practices of purely movement-based performance, or creates opportunities in text-based theatre for the exilic actor to express oneself through the increased physicality of his/her stage presence.

In addition, life in a new land influences one’s physical expression. Often, an exilic person finds him/herself displaced not only within the new exterior landscapes but also within the bodily topography and kinetic organization that comprises his/her interior landscape (Berthoz, The Brain’s Sense, 5-6). Strangely enough, in exile not only does one’s sense of topographical assurance fade but one’s movements and gestures may become imprecise as well. These processes are familiar to anyone traveling abroad who experiences a kind of culture shock when forced to function in a second language. A similar process occurs upon coming home after a prolonged absence, when it can take hours or even days for the traveler to re-adjust back to his/her familiar geography, sounds, idiomatic expressions, smells and so on.

Exiles with no return ticket in their pockets realize the urge and the inevitability of making their surroundings familiar, of forcefully mastering the techniques of un-defamiliarizarion. To paraphrase Viktor Shklovsky’s classic formula of estrangement, in exile one is forced to learn the skills of making unfamiliar things familiar. These skills include the exile’s excessive self-performativity both in everyday life and on stage, and the reshaping of his/her culturally loaded professional devices. Both the everyday performative skills and the exilic artist’s professional expertise constitute the basis for the aesthetics of the performative in the theatre of exile.

In exile, therefore, the instinct of theatricality appears at the intersection of the existential and theatrical mechanisms that every émigré practices in a new land. The anxiety of exilic experience functions as a reaction to this theatricalization of self as well as a response to the exilic encounters of linguistic duality and cultural hybridity. The challenge of bridging the exile’s original worldviews with the idiom and the cultural traditions of a new country constitutes, in other words, the phenomenon of one’s exilic performative. This exilic performative creates a framework for seeing exilic theatre not only as a state of permanent translation but also as an artistic struggle between traditions. It highlights the practice of the exilic artist to consciously seek a position as an outsider, stressing his “necessity to remain foreign, to be a floating island that does not put down roots in a particular culture” (Turner, Eugenio Barba, 23).

The widespread variety of intercultural, postcultural, transcultural, intracultural, and multicultural theatre makes the boundaries between the cultures involved in the artistic exchange indistinct. This variety produces a generic fusion of previously established theatrical utterances, which reflects Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic model and sanctions the appearance of situational art, produced in response to certain social, economic, or political situations in which an artist might find him/herself; and narcissistic art (to paraphrase Linda Hutcheon’s term), which features as its subject matter the artist him/herself and thus uses a range of self-reflective, (auto)biographic and (self-)estrangement techniques. However, the work of the exilic artist, discontented with the unwanted role of community preacher and looking for collaborative opportunities within the host country, does not fit these practices.

Cultural explosion serves as the first step in the processes of exilic adaptation; it presents the exilic artist with a moment of unpredictability (Lotman, Kul’tura i vzryv, 191) as a possibility for a meeting with the unknown. This possibility acts for an exilic artist as a source of self-estrangement, artistic encouragement and aesthetic pleasure. An artist in exile simultaneously “accentuates the potency of what is given, of the forces that have shaped us before we could shape ourselves” (Hoffman, ‘The New Nomad’, 60); and also makes use of his/her newly acquired position as an outsider. A moment of cultural explosion, the state in between, becomes in Joseph Brodsky’s words the condition of a freed individual, someone who has sought and finally acquired “a posture of somebody isolated, operating in his own idiosyncratic way, somebody on the outside instead of in the thick of things” (in Hadley, ‘Conversation with Joseph Brodsky’).

Accordingly, the cultural explosion triggers processes of improvisation and theatricalization of self when an exile is forced to experiment and improvise with his/her experience in a new country, i.e., to (re)construct order in the disorder that surrounds him/her. Cultural explosion resolves itself in the further condition of hybridity, creolization and glocalization that presents the idea of a fusion of global and local tendencies in the exile-expatriate’s life and art through which one balances the position of in-between and above. It postulates and conditions the state of the exilic performative as the émigré’s site for negotiation of self.

A product of cultural explosion, the exilic theatre originates in the collision of the culturally differentiated contexts of the exilic artist and his/her adopted culture. This collision maintains a moment of unpredictability as “a set of options” of possible structural and cultural positions making all participating elements equal. As a result, exilic theatre replicates the new tendencies in cognition to which every exile is subjected in a new land, and echoes them thematically in text-based performance and through changes in the actors’ vocal and physical work in devised performance. Exilic theatre advances the principles of scenic glocalization as a state of permanent translation and struggle between traditions. It refuses territorial definitions and prefers to function within temporal or existential dimensions of being.

Exilic theatre privileges the position of the outsider. It cherishes the state of liminality and thus it neither seeks any influential role within the culture of the dominant, nor identifies itself with the culture of that linguistic and cultural community to which an exilic artist belongs. In other words, exilic theatre sees itself growing in parallel to the adopted culture and of its diaspora. It tends to engage with the culture of the dominant and to develop itself both within and separately from the administrative frames of the adopted state. Exilic theatre privileges the sporadic, mobile, and flexible life style of the artistic communitas. It tends to live on the outskirts of the society; it reserves the right to float freely between languages, traditions and cultural referents, and thus it presents an administrative challenge to cultural and institutional bodies. Exilic theatre acts as the expression of borderlessness, flexibility, and free movement between separate cultural, ethnic and communal entities. In this sense, exilic theatre can be rendered cosmopolitan, built by the artists who are both the citizens of the world and the detached observers of it.

The move to a new land forces one to relive an earlier stage of his/her cognitive development. The need to learn a new language, to find some new means to communicate with the world takes a grown up person back to one’s childhood. Unable to adequately express oneself in a new language, an exilic adult is forced to face one’s own existence as a particular psycho-physical, intellectually driven and mortal being a new. Unable to properly communicate with the new world, an exile repeatedly asks him/herself the essentialist questions, such as: Who am I? Where am I coming from? What is the purpose of my existence? What am I doing in this world? and Why am I doing what I’ve chosen or was pushed do to?

This search for the “essentials” often makes an exilic artist “a modernist by default”; someone who in today’s age of postmodernist reproduction and simulacra resists cultural entropy. In one’s artistic utterances, an exile is bound to simultaneously become autobiographical and to search for wider audiences. An exilic artist, therefore, seeks out a multilayered discourse that remains deeply personal to the artist but also allows others to see experiences that may be analogical or differential to their own lives. This quest, nevertheless, remains utopian. It suggests the model of multiple or personal modernities for which the exilic artists opt.

As Naficy claims, the authority of exilic artists derives from their position as “subjects inhabiting interstitial places and sites of struggle” (An Accented Cinema, 12). The creativity is necessarily colored by the exilic artists’ goal to remember, reconstruct and re-evoke the homeland left behind. As Naficy writes, exilic artists/filmmakers “memorialize the homeland by fetishizing it in the form of cathected sounds, images, and chronotopes that are circulated intertextually in exilic popular culture, including in films and music videos. The exiles’ primary relationship, in short, is with their countries and cultures of origin and with the sight, sound, taste, and feel of an originary experience of an elsewhere at other times”. (An Accented Cinema, 12) Still Naficy’s view of exilic art provides a limited frame of the Lot’s wife gaze or (self)-reflective nostalgia in Svetlana Boym’s terms (Future of Nostalgia, 41), the gaze tuned into the “prohibited direction” of once lost past.

I propose the concept of the performative nostalgia based on the Phoenix phenomenon, which postulates a view of exilic art originating in the trajectory of the émigré’s gaze slowly turning from the direction of “over-there” to “here-and-now,” focusing either inwardly on the exile’s very concrete Self or on the circumstances of the exilic dasein. The gaze, however, is never fixed; the view is never complete. The ambiguity and flexibility of the exilic position is always bound to oscillate between there and here, between past and present, between lost and newly acquired homes. Hence, this work renders exilic art and thus exilic theatre as rooted not only in territory but also in time, when a historical epoch and a particular exilic flight together create an exilic experience and condition.

I see exile as a personal voyage and an everlasting lesson about one’s self, time and space. Based on the constant re-mapping and re-fashioning of Self in a new country, new language and new culture, the condition of exile facilitates one’s effort for performance. It suggests that exilic art oscillates between the highly idiosyncratic experience of the exilic artist and his/her search for a new means of expression, marked by this artist’s need to function in a new language and in the immediate proximity of his/her newly acquired audiences.

Exilic art often builds on the autobiographical experience of the author, who strives to transgress the universality of pain and hope. Exilic theater, therefore, although informed by the highly traumatic circumstances of its production, is capable of addressing the most profound questions of human existence as well as acting as a therapeutic tool of hope for those who are struggling to succeed in a new land and those who have already achieved something.

Moreover, exilic theatre challenges the binary oppositions proposed by intercultural performance practices and their theories. If the practice of intercultural performance is characterized by the dialogic exchange between the elements of Context A and the elements of Context B, which creates an intertextual activity within a performance text (Fischer-Lichte, The Show and the Gaze, 285), the exilic theatre is not dialectical, binary or linear. It consists of the artists who carry within themselves the complex, multilayered and multivocal performative texts that are always adapted and changed by the surrounding context of a theatrical event that they become a part of.

Exilic theatre, based on the principles of amalgamation and continuity, adapts to the new structures. The exiles maintain their new identity and stay true to the techniques brought from home. They make the theatrical stage a manifestation of their professional and cultural self, an assertion of the emigré’s dignity and pride. In other words, exilic theatre revolts against the processes of decontextualization and desemantization of intercultural performance, in which the elements of one theatrical tradition placed within a production originating in another theatrical tradition become only the counterpoints or riffs on the background of the major text of a performance.

Exilic theatre is the result of the amalgamation of one’s inherited cultural traditions and those of a new world. It often stages and maintains the tension between continuity and difference, and so for an exilic artist it becomes a search for a professional homeland which “transcends cultural specificity and encourages the development of an identity that is formed from living in the theatre rather than a society” (Turner, Eugenio Barba, 23).

[1] Yana Meerzon, born in the former USSR, is director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Theatre at the University of Ottawa in Canada. She is author of a major study on Michael Chekhov entitled The Path of a Character (Peter Lang,2005) and was co-editor of the volume Performance, Exile and America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). She has published in numerous journals including Modern Drama, the New England Theatre Journal, Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. This essay was published with the agreement of Palgrave Macmillan.

Looking Back to Greece: Exiles in the Ancient World

(Editor) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 06:20:00 +0900

Looking Back to Greece: Exiles in the Ancient World

Savas Patsalidis [1]

To be forced to leave the city-state (the home) and be exposed without the protection of government (laws), friends and family, was seen in ancient Greece as a fate worse than death. In the following essay, Greek theatre scholar Savas Patsaladis explores the notion of enforced exile in Aeschylus’ play The Suppliants, the oldest extant text in dramatic history connecting it to American playwright Charles Mee’s 2000 take on Greek drama, Big Love.

Wikipedia gives us this definition of exile: to be away from one's home (i.e. city, state or country), while either being explicitly refused permission to return and/or being threatened with imprisonment or death upon return. Although most commonly used to describe an individual situation, the term is also used for groups (especially ethnic or national groups), or for an entire government. Terms such as diaspora and refugee describe group exile, both voluntary and forced, and government in exile describes a government of a country that has been forced to relocate and argue its legitimacy from outside that country. Exile can also be a self-imposed departure from one's homeland. Self-exile is often depicted as a form of protest by the person that claims it to avoid persecution or legal matters (such as tax or criminal allegations), an act of shame or repentance, or isolating oneself to be able to devote time to a particular objective.

Human history is full of exiles and so is theatre. Hamlet and Lear in Shakespeare, Karl Moor in Schiller’s Robbers, Grusha in Brecht’s the Caucasian Chalk Circle, the Armenian immigrant family in Kalinoski’s Beast on the Moon, the old lady in Durrenmatt’s Visit, not to mention the numerous examples we get from the classics (Medea, Oedipus, Iphighenia, among others). To understand the popularity of this idea in ancient Greek drama, one has to understand the importance of belonging, of having a place to call your own.[2] As Boedeker & Raaflaub tell us, some of the mythical material used, “focusing on Athenians’ selfless dedication to helping the oppressed and saving their fellow Hellenes from barbarian onslaught or tyrannical injustice … formed an essential component of Athens; self-presentation and imperial ideology. Further, these same themes … also served as serious arguments in foreign policy debates and diplomatic exchanges” (2005: 114).

Myth was a recognizable medium that helped Athenians shape their identity and strengthen their sense of space. To be forced to leave the city-state (the home) and be exposed without the protection of government (laws), friends and family, was seen as a fate worse than death; an idea beautifully dramatized by Aeschylus in The Suppliants, the oldest extant text in drama history (possibly 463 B.C), the first part of an incomplete trilogy (the other two parts being Aegyptii and Danaides), and the first play ever written that deals with the issue of international justice, an issue inspired by the great social changes taking place in Athens, where political powers shifted from the traditional Areopagus Council to the Council of 500, the assembly and the law courts, “that is, to bodies that represented the demos as a whole. Subsequent reforms further facilitated popular participation in politics, and simultaneously made citizenship more exclusive” (Boedeker & Raaflaub 2005: 115).

The play tells us the story of the fifty virginal Danaids who, to avoid marrying against their wishes, flee Egypt and seek refuge in Argos, the homeland of their ancestress Io, where they ask for king Pelasgus' protection.[3] Confronted by the unexpected geographical (re)location of the daughters of Danaus ―who will later on succeed him as king of Argos― the king hesitates, for he knows that if Argos gives them sanctuary, the sons of Aegyptus and all their followers will attack the city and then his fellow citizens will tell him that he "destroyed Argos for the sake of foreigners" (l. 402). Thus, a seemingly simple refugee case, turns out to be a very complicated ethical, political and military matter. Aeschylus is obviously concerned about the exercise of power: Where does it reside? In law, in the people, in mutual accord, in sweet persuasion [petho], in domination, brutal violence, in marriage (Vernant 1981: 15)? To what extent are the people's comments true when they tell their King (their anax) that he is "the State," the "unquestioned ruler" that fears "no vote" (l. 72-4)? What is the role of reason in decision-taking and in ruling?

Issues of nationality, religion, body politics, love and sexuality, society and individual decision are all inextricably interwoven. For example, the women's decision to run away may be an affair of the family, but, as it turns out, the state also becomes involved. By offering them sanctuary, Pelasgus brings them inside the polis, just as marriage brings them inside their husband's house. As the husbands take on the role of guardians, the King and his citizens are expected to guarantee the Danaids' protection (Zeitlin 1996: 136-42), which is more easily said than done. The Danaids, on their part, know very well their rights and the strength of their position. They claim four things to convince the king to grant them political asylum. a) The aspiring grooms are crude and voluptuous (they characterize their behavior as “hubris,” l. 30, 89, 104), b) they do not want to get married against their will (they wish to maintain their freedom, l. 227-8), c) being descendants of the Argive Io, gives them the right to ask for protection and d) being under the protection of Zeus Hikesios, they are entitled to an asylum.

The Danaids are so obsessed by their struggle that they appear to have “no clear idea of political responsibility,” as Burian soundly observes (2007: 206). What makes things more complicated is that their views about political power are radically different from those they encounter in Argos. They think that Pelasgus’ power is lacking only compared to Zeus. Line 425 makes it very clear: “O you who hold all the power in this land”. With this in mind, it is only natural that they expect him to behave autocratically, like any eastern monarch. “You are the state, you are the people” (l. 170), they tell him, also reminding him that he can rule “by the sole vote of his will” (l. 327). His hesitation is beyond their comprehension. “…I am at a loss, and fear seizes my heart” (l. 329), the King confesses, thus revealing a mentality totally different to that of the suppliants. As a statesman he has to examine all possibilities and then try and reconcile two seemingly irreconcilable claims. The first is the demand of the suppliants and the other the safety of the citizens. The wrong decision could turn people against him, accusing him of destroying the city to honor some foreigners. "What can I do?," he wonders, "I fear either to act, or not to act" (l. 379). He understands the gravity of the situation. He does not know whether to honor the right of sanctuary even at the cost of war, or to reject his suppliants and see the altars of his gods polluted with their blood. In other words, the dramatic weight here does not fall on the achievement of protection, as Burian rightly argues, but rather on the way in which the tragic choice is made (2007: 206). To this end the King has to clarify a number of pressing political and diplomatic issues (Bakonicola 1994,2004).

a) Are these women really relatives of the people of Argos? And if yes, can they prove it? For if they prove it the rejection of their plea becomes all the more difficult. The Argives wouldn’t refuse to protect their kins who are on the run. That would be twice as immoral (refusing asylum to a suppliant who also happens to be a relative).

b) Is the aversion they feel for this marriage in accordance with human nature? That is, do they object to the sons of Aegyptus in particular or do they reject sexuality and marriage altogether (an unnatural objection to men and marriage)?

c) Is their flight from Egypt connected to any unlawful act? Did they do something wrong from which they are running away? For if yes, granting asylum would be a wrong decision.

d) According to Egyptian laws, do the Aegyptiates, as their closest kins, have these women under their legal custody? In such a case, no city can provide them shelter.

e) If granting an asylum is against inter-state relations (Egypt/Greece), shouldn’t the king take into consideration the unwelcome consequences of such a decision? Who can say that the Egyptians will not take their revenge? In brief, does the protection of these women carry too much price for the Argives (war with immense casualties)?

The pressure they put on him turns an otherwise “proud autocrat to a constitutional monarch” (Burian 2007: 204). From “assertions of almost unlimited power there is a progression “to a recognition of the limitations on its exercise,” Burian states (2007: 203). As a king he may have the power, yet he is unwilling to exercise it without popular consent. It is the first time ever that there is any reference to a "popular government," to people as the rulers of the polis. The principle behind it is that those affected by the decision should also decide on what is to be done:[4] “If the city as a whole is defiled, let the people work out a cure together” (l. 365-66). And the community gets involved and unanimously decides in favour of the suppliants (l. 605-24). The asylum establishes holy bonds between the benefactor and the suppliant. It binds both sides for generations to come.

It is apparent that nothing in the way Aeschylus treated the myth is morally or ethically one-sided, even within the limits of a play. His concern touches upon issues of cultural, religious and ethical values, of gender roles, sexual instincts, natural laws. He talks about principles of justice, practices, rights and obligations of the suppliants, respect of human life. The issue of cultural kinship is developed in the play according to codes shared by all sides (Bakonicola 1994: 36) and not only just by those who are in power. Anyone affected by his decision has a say in the procedure (l. 336-67, 483-85).

This issue raised with such finesse by Aeschylus’ text, is one of the most serious statements about a common feeling of justice and also about humanism in the field of political ethos in ancient times. Pelasgus’ hesitation is not a sign of weakness but “rather of swift and lucid comprehension of the need to decide between dreadful evils” (Burian 2007: 205). His dilemma is the dilemma of a statesman. As Boedeker and Raaflaub observe, “in a time of rapid and fundamental social and economic change, when distinctions between citizens and non-citizens became blurred in many spheres, it seemed all the more important to emphasize the citizens’ share in political power, government, and responsibility” (2005: 116).

The poet in this way made the spectators conscious of their civic responsibility. He updated the myth in order to bring it closer to the people, to make it their own. An idea that still attracts many contemporary writers, who appropriate the myth in order to discuss one of the major issues of our times: immigration and uprootedness. Charles Mee is one of them. He wrote Big Love (2000) in order to dramatize the correlations between the Aeschylean plot and current social and poltical issues (Hopkins & Orr 2005: 16-7), that is to comment on what is happening today, 2500 years later, regarding the plight of international refugees, the problem of political asylum, the problem of violence, gender relations, selfhood and otherness and, of course, love. To do so, he explores and exploits the work's textuality, constructedness, and arbitrariness. Mee brings to us male and female selfhoods with their cultural, ethnic and gendered characteristics that predetermine their subject positions within discourse. Culture always turns out to be much bigger than them.

Big Love is a play written by a playwright who believes that, although we are made up of heterogeneous codes, we can still strive for an autonomy of a classically liberal kind that would help downplay the seemingly irreconcilable differences of identity between individuals (and nations) and help build a sense of (universal) community without exiles and locals.

Bibliography

Aeschylus. The Suppliants. Trans. Philip Vellacott. London: Penguin Books,1961.Bakonicola, Chara.

Stignes tes Ellinikis Tragodias. Vol. I. Athens: Kardamitsas, 1994.

Bakonicola, Chara. Stignes tes Ellinikis Tragodias. Vol. II. Athens: Kardamitsas, 2004.

Boedeker, Deborah and Kurt Raaflaub. “Tragedy and the City.” A Companion to

Tragedy. Eds. Rebecca Bushnell. London: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 109-127.

Burian, Peter. “Pelasgus and Politics in Aeschylus’ Danaid Trilogy.” Aeschylus. Ed.

Michael Lloyd. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005: 199-210.

Hopkins, D. J. & Shelley Orr. "It's a Nightmare Really: The Radical Appropriations of

Charles L. Mee." Theatreforum 18 (2001): 12-9.

Kitto, H. D. F. Greek Tragedy. New York: Doubleday, 1954.

Mee, Charles. Big Love. In: Humana Festival. Eds. Michael Bigelow Dixon and Amy

Wagener. New Hampshire: A Smith and Kraus Book, 2000. 219-90.

Vernant, J. P. and & P. Vidal-Naquet. Tragedy and Myth in Ancient Greece. Trans. J.

Lloyd. Atlantic Highlands, N.J. 1981.

Zeitlin, Froma. Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

[1] Savas Patsalidis is a Professor at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece and Editor of the journal Gramma.

[2] Patris , patriotis , gis , gaea, polis, and asty, are just some of the words that directly or indirectly refer to the idea of home soil, homeland, motherland etc. and its importance in these classical works..

[3] Given the fact that local people generally hesitated to welcome foreigners, the suppliants had to follow certain steps dictated by a ritualistic typology. For example, the first place they approached when entering a foreign city-state was the altar. They would sit on it or just stand by it or they would simply enter the temple for there they felt more secure, since they were placing themselves and their plea under the protection of the god (usually Zeus: Xenios, Savior etc) (Bakonicola 2004: 96-97). They were also carrying small tree branches as well as ribbons, to decorate the altar or sometimes crown the head of the local ruler whom they approached with great respect and humility. The custom was to touch his beard or, kneeling in front of him, gently touch his right hand and knee. Further, and according to inter-state custom, they had to have the sponsorship of a protector (proxenos), that is someone coming from the same city as they did but now living in the host city. If such a person was not available they had to have a messenger whose job would be to set forth their case to the ruler.

In the world of tragedy, every human appeal accompanied by invocations to the gods was seriously examined and never rejected in advance. Yet, seeking for shelter was not only a religious matter but also a moral one. The political refugee/exile had on his side Zeus Hikesios (“Lord of Suppliants”), a god interested in the people who were exiled or on the run. He was also protected by the institution of filoxenia (hospitality), which presupposed mutual respect between the host and the visitor. It operated as a kind of moral bond. However, the whole procedure was a very serious and complicated test that frequently involved issues of public international law, individual rights etc. The dilemma rulers faced was to rightly choose between their religious duty and their duty towards the city and its citizens. That is, they protected the foreigners but at the same time they had to protect the host city, which means that providing an asylum was not an unconditional act.

[4] We are not to suppose, of course, Kitto argues, "that any and every decision has to be ratified by the Argive assembly [....] This decision is so serious and so unusual that the people, traditionally quick to blame (l. 485), would have every reason to disobey. Pelasgus is the Homeric King who knows how far he should go. The reference to the people is a means of emphasizing the seriousness of the dilemma" (10-1).

John Florio: The Case for Shakespeare as Exile

(Editor) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 06:15:00 +0900

John Florio: The Case for Shakespeare as Exile

Lamberto Tassinari [1]

Two subjects come up over and over again in the works of Shakespeare: exile and Italy. Given all the recent debate about who actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays, Lamberto Tassinari’s recent book, John Florio: The Man Who Was Shakespeare, asks if Shakespeare could himself have been an exile and if Shakespeare could have been connected to Italy by family and language. His argument in favour of linguist and poet John Florio as the author of the body of work we call Shakespeare is based primarily on stylistic evidence and Florio’s own life as an exile from his familial homeland. Whatever one thinks of the authorship issue, the fact is exile as a concept looms exceedingly large in the works of the Bard as scholar Tassinari here argues.

The poet, dictionary-maker and writer John Florio was born in London in 1553 and passed almost his whole life there, except for a long interval spent on the continent as an adolescent and young man—fundamental years of education, travel, and formative experience. The Florio family – John and his father Michel Angelo Florio -- returned to England in around 1571, when his father was about fifty years old, and John eighteen.

The rapidity with which John found acceptance in aristocratic circles is the best proof of the fact that his father was with him; for it was the old friends and protectors of Michel Angelo whom we soon find supporting the career of John. Thus Florio was destined to become English while keeping a strong link with continental Europe and particularly with Italy, his fatherland, whose language and culture he taught and immortalized in ten “Italian” plays (and many others) written under the pseudonym Shakespeare.

Italy as it appears in Shakespeare’s theater is precisely matched by the lives and works of Florio and his father, where Italy appears for what it is: the land, the folk, and the language that have been lost. To evoke Italy, to make it live again, is a response to angst, emptiness, and loss. Italy is the site of memory of the many exiled characters that populate the works, “the dark backward and abyss of time,” as Prospero says in The Tempest. One looks for Italy in Shakespeare not in order to “prove” anything in the forensic sense, but rather in order to confirm the fact that the author was an Italian “outside Italy.”

I shall refrain from systematically reviewing the evidence gathered over more than a century by a raft of researchers to the effect that Shakespeare knew Italy. A book presented last year in a limited edition and published in 2011 for a wider distribution, The Shakespeare Guide to Italy: Retracing the Bard’s Unknown Travels by Richard Paul Roe, seems to bring the final evidence of Shakespeare’s Italian connection.

Roe, for lack, I would say, of more convincing candidates, decided in favor of Edward de Vere as the true author of the Shakespeare canon and in so doing, made the Oxfordian partisans exult.

While I respect his choice, the least I can say is that Florio’s Italian credentials are bolder and infinitely more convincing than Oxford’s ones. Ultimately I’m anticipating that his book will bring more water to Florio’s mill. Because Italy is everywhere in Shakespeare, at every level—stylistic, linguistic, historical, artistic, geographic, topographic, emotive. Because certain emotions can’t be feigned, learned from books or experienced by a tourist. In no other Elizabethan writer do Italy and Italian culture, which do have a recurring presence in that literature, play so large a part as they do in Shakespeare.

Harry Levin writes:

Yet in so far as Shakespeare’s creative world had a centre, Italy and the Italians were very near it.

The same cannot be said of any other Elizabethan or Jacobean author .

Indeed, any reader of the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare is compelled to wonder why the theme of exile is so prominent. Even at a quick glance, exile appears to be much more than a simple motif or literary topos for the author. As for me, the theme of exile is one of the main axes of my Shakespeare theorem—internal evidence of great weight and cogency for the claim that the author was not the man from Stratford but a foreigner, like the Italian John Florio.

Here I shall make no attempt to survey the theme of exile across the entire oeuvre of Shakespeare, because the quantity of relevant passages is so great as to demand a book in itself. It will be enough to show the importance of the exile theme by citing examples from some of the plays and the Sonnets.

In a recent book, the British scholar Jane Kingsley-Smith examines the theme of exile in Shakespeare, noting that 14 of the 38 plays “represent the banishment of one or more central characters. If we include minor characters and self-imposed exile, that number is considerably increased.” [2] The scarcity of scholarly analysis and interpretation of the exile theme in Shakespeare is a telling example of how Shakespeare studies are conducted, the unbelievable caution and hesitancy they display whenever they confront delicate and embarrassing aspects of the life and works of Shakespeare, ones that might compromise the ramshackle literary identity of the man from Stratford if they were inspected too closely.

Kingsley-Smith herself acknowledges this lacuna in scholarship, which over the last 35 years has dedicated barely two books not even to exile as such but to the figure of the foreigner and the solitary: The Stranger in Shakespeare by Leslie A. Fiedler in 1973 and Shakespeare and the Solitary Man by Janette Dillon in 1981. She for her part does try her hand at a specific study of the exile theme, sallying forth boldly on a research project that ought to have earned her a commendation for her courage. But it actually looks more like imprudence, since she writes from an adamantly orthodox point of view.

Yet when read aright her book succeeds in breaking open the Pandora’s box of the Stratfordian identity. Kingsley-Smith denies it of course, asserting that the official version,and the biography of the man from Stratford, emerge unscathed. But she skirts the ridiculous in doing so. In her introduction she quickly mentions the authors contemporary with Shakespeare who made most use of the theme of exile in their plays, and concedes:

Shakespeare was not alone in his penchant for banishment, as a later comparison with Marston will suggest. Yet there remains something rich and strange in his recurrence to exile. Again and again, he writes a scene of banishment, reworking the details of earlier plays, redirecting the emphasis from loss of language to loss of nation, from loss of the beloved to loss of self. The mystery need not be that Shakespeare had experience of banishment. (Kingsley-Smith, 2.)

Stratfordians are faith-based scholars, they eschew reason: possessing the truth in advance, they must perforce resolve all the incongruities and contradictions over which they stumble through rigid adherence to the myth. That “something rich and strange” is owing to the fact that John Florio and his father -- the authors of the plays credited to Stratford’s William Shakespeare --, really were in exile, “doubly” so: as descendants of diaspora Jews and as Italian Protestants forced to flee.

After staking out this initial position, Kingsley-Smith bends over backwards trying to show that the “potential of exile” was so great in the man from Stratford that it accounts for the quantity and quality of the exile narratives thronging the works of Shakespeare. One comes to see, reading her book, why Shakespeare criticism has refrained from analyzing this theme: it is the only way to avoid proffering absurdities or banalities like “the Stratford man exiled in London,” which is what Kingsley-Smith is reduced to.

The great innovators and creators of literary language, from Dante to Joyce, always stand somewhat apart from, or even in opposition to, their homelands, to the point of becoming exiles (almost always non-metaphorically). But the example of Dante leaves the Shakespearians unmoved, as though Dante had not existed for the Bard.

There is little to suggest any Dantean subtext in Romeo and Juliet. We find perhaps the glimpse of an allusion in Romeo’s insistence that the world “banishèd” is uttered by the “damned” . . . “Howling attends it” or in his reference to “purgatory” (3.3. 47-48,18). (Kingsley-Smith, 52-53)

So palpable is it to A. D. Wraight that the sonnets are impregnated with the theme of exile that he concludes that the author really must have been in exile, and imagines that it was Christopher Marlowe, who is supposed to have faked his own murder and then hied off to Italy where, tormented by longing for home, he wrote the sonnets. This alone would be enough to prove that the author of the works of Shakespeare was a foreigner. Wraight declares:

When we apply ourselves to a detailed and unprejudiced analysis of the major themes of the Sonnets, we are struck by the inescapable fact that by far the largest group of all deals with the theme of a journey that was undertaken in great heaviness of heart, and that represented a period of cruel separation from his former life and friends, a journey into what can only be likened to a state of exile. It is amazing, but there is no other way to describe this major event in the Poet’s life.[3]

This extraordinary acknowledgement of a (for that matter undeniable) fact becomes credible, and infinitely more convincing than the canvassing of the name of Marlowe, if we substitute the name of either or both of the Florios, the father and the son. How can someone speak about the “drama of exile,” as Kingsley-Smith does, having in mind the sedentary fellow from Stratford? Could Shakespeare really have created all those wrenching tales of separation from place of birth, from friends, from language, from identity, purely and simply by empathizing with the real feelings of some European expatriate he met, and reliving in an especially intense and personal manner the literary commonplace of nostalgia?

No, Shakespeare thematizes exile not just because it works well as a plot device for the plays, but because exile concerns him, because it is something he has experienced, because he has lived such a story himself. Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Tempest, both “Italian” stories, are perhaps the two most powerful dramas of exile composed by the Florios, Italian expatriates both. The situation of the Florios in the Elizabethan and Jacobean age was peculiar: for 75 years they were active presences in one way or another, yet always central in the development of the culture, the basic themes, the fashions, of the age.

But while their importance, especially that of John, was recognized by many contemporaries, from kings and queens to Ben Jonson, the Florios nevertheless remained oddly marginal. There is no real contradiction, for it was normal that in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England two émigrés, albeit Protestants with well-placed friends, should always be perceived as outsiders. In the last analysis, they were always liable to be targeted as foreigners, when jealousy and envy at their literary accomplishments or the social status they had attained required a pretext. Allusions to hostility of this kind, and to the more or less undisguised xenophobia of London society at the time, are numerous and eloquent in John Florio’s works.

The Florios loomed large in England on account of their origin (Renaissance Italy) and their personal gifts (their talents, their cultural sophistication, their polyglotism). And this accounts for their arrogant tone, the bombastic attitude of those certain that their own cultural level is superior to their surroundings—which is a perfect sketch of the character of Shakespeare as revealed in his works: noble (or as the expression was then, “gentle”), but not by birth, filled with an irrepressible feeling of superiority, yet “marginal” and vulnerable. This marginality the Shakespearian critics perceive and discuss, but they attribute it partly to the author’s emigration, forced or voluntary, from Stratford to London, and mainly to the fact that the trade of dramatist was barely respectable and drove him to the margins—literally so, inasmuch as the theaters were forced to locate away from the city center, in the shadier neighborhoods, and figuratively inasmuch as writers and actors for the stage were not presentable in good society.

Let us accept this critical hypothesis about Shakespeare for the sake of argument: if he was so constantly vulnerable to ostracism, how did he acquire the upper-class contacts and the knowledge of the lifestyle of the great aristocracy that were indispensable for the Bard to be able to write what he wrote, to think and be what he was? (The position of the Florios at court and their high-level relations are, by contrast, matters of fact, and their marginality different in kind.) Hence, so the Stratfordians reason, the virtual anonymity to which Shakespeare resigned himself was the condition, the sacrifice, necessary to maintain a decent reputation and not be shut out of aristocratic company.

But there is not the slightest hint, much less proof, that the man from Stratford ever kept such company, and such discretion and reserve about putting himself forward is in utter disharmony with the mentality of someone immersed in the theater world as author, co-owner of playhouses, and full-time actor. Jane Kingsley-Smith performs feats of acrobatics in finding reasons to justify the importance of the theme of exile, which she sees as no less than a constitutive element of the Shakespeare canon. So she piles up quotations touching on exile from two areas, that of the Protestant exiles who left England during the brief reign of Mary Stuart (of whom Michel Angelo Florio was one), and that of the Catholics persecuted or forced out of England during the reign of Elizabeth.

This double-sided historical experience is supposed to have given rise to a powerful, romantic image of the figure of the exile, a representation that Shakespeare is supposed to have internalized to the point that it became one of the most dramatic and powerful elements of his own poetry. In an attempt to bolster a line of argument that she herself knows is flimsy, Jane Kingsley-Smith advances the thesis that Shakespeare experienced the occasional prohibition of theatrical shows by the local authorities as a species of exile! This is a card castle erected out of hypotheses so weak that the eager scholar herself is forced to conclude that “the interpretation of banishment remains problematic” (ibid. 19, 20), all the more so in that

. . . banishment was ‘mainly a memory’ in late sixteenth-century England. Shakespeare’s audience might have been familiar with banishment as a practice in Roman imperial and European medieval law, and as a punishment incurred by the poets Ovid and Dante, but such an audience could not have drawn upon any personal experience of banishment.

On the contrary! It is well known that Renaissance Italy possessed a rich culture of exile, a diaspora of major dimensions that heralds the migratory exodus of the late nineteenth century, and that many European nations, France in particular, benefited from it. J. F. Dubost notes “Exile became a prominent trait of Italian political culture, and a relatively common experience for members of urban patriciates: every state had to reckon with its fuoriusciti [exiles].” [4]

If the emphasis on the theme of exile, and the passion that Shakespeare puts into it are not owing to familiarity with the phenomenon in England, then a different explanation for them must be sought, and there is nowhere else to seek it than in the life and personal experience of the person wielding the pen. If one reads the rest of Kingsley-Smith’s study, in which she reviews the eight plays that convey the theme of exile most strongly (As You Like It, King Lear, Coriolanus, The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, Henry IV), one is struck by the yawning gap between her interpretive hypothesis and the theatrical texts themselves, in which one encounters the true, authentic expression of the drama of exile, which is felt as the loss of part of oneself, especially one’s language.

The language I have learn’d these forty years,

My native English, now I must forego:

And now my tongue’s use is to me no more

Than an unstringed viol or a harp,

Or like a cunning instrument cased up,

Or, being open, put into his hands

That knows no touch to tune the harmony:

(Richard II, 1.3. 160-165)

Loss of language and identity recur obsessively down to The Tempest with such frequency and intensity that it is absurd to reduce them to a literary expedient, much less to the fantasy that Christopher Marlowe lived on as an exile in Italy. Referring to Richard II, King Lear, Cymbeline and Sir Thomas Moore (of doubtful authorship) Kingsley-Smith writes:

How terrible would it be to be forced upon the kindness of strangers, deprived of one’s tongue and thus of one’s humanity, to be singled out as an outcast by one’s peers? […] Richard II suggest that the play was intended to frighten its audience with the loss of England and thus of themselves. However, the reach of Shakespeare’s banishment plays is much broader, questioning the conditions of identity itself, […] Of course, Shakespeare’s drama of exile is self-consciously metatheatrical. […] perhaps the most obsessive concern of these plays is language, wherein lies the originality of Shakespeare’s representation of exile. […] language equals creativity and thus power. Language-loss equates to silence, impotence and death. (Kingsley-Smith, 29-30)

A “much broader” reach indeed, which one hardly knows how the man from Stratford would have achieved, but which rings precisely true as a description of the exile status of the Florios: Giovanni remade himself as John and redeemed the loss of his mother (father?) tongue and took revenge on fate through literary creation in his new language at a level reached by only a few other writers in exile (Ovid, Dante, Joyce). All of them, however, continued to employ their mother tongue. In creating thousands of words, in translating, in composing poetry and drama, Florio took back with interest the energy and power that had been lost. Yet all this was passed off as the work of another, who was nonetheless the English half of himself.

The works of culture and erudition of Michel Angelo and John Florio are the product of conscious activity, on which these exiles built their careers. The theatrical works and the poetry are the writings in which the unconscious speaks and the hidden truth is revealed; these are the works they entrusted to time, to a future humanity. Not a biographical truth, certainly, but a profound one, through which every reader has known Shakespeare without knowing that he was really someone else.

The signals sent by John Florio that he was Shakespeare are numerous in the plays and sonnets. The most substantial part of the collection published in 1609 under the name of Shake-Speare consists, according to A. D. Wraight, of the forty poems he calls “The Sonnets of Exile.”[5] Precisely the sonnets that for Wraight recount the tragic tale of the exile of Christopher Marlowe are for me the symbolic, intimate, poetic account of the life of the Florios and the exile status that loomed so large in it.

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself, and curse my fate,

(Sonnet 29)

This is not the place for a line-by-line commentary on the poetry of the Sonnets. The point is rather that “the tragic autobiographical themes of the sonnet-story” (Wraight) originate in the workshop of the Florios. Whoever the individuals may be concealed behind the names “lovely boy,” “fair youth,” “dark lady,” “rival poet” and “W. H.,” they are in any case persons belonging to the vast circle of relations, friends, and lovers (more or less heterosexual) of the Florios father and son, over the period from 1550 to 1609. Exile is one of the strongest proofs of this theorem, along with the realist obsession, the pregnant presence of Ovidian subjects, the extraordinary richness of the language, and even the events surrounding the cryptic edition of the sonnet collection, including the part played by the shady printer Thomas Thorpe: all these things confirm the Florian authorship of the Sonnets.

According to A. D. Wraight, the publisher was aware that this was a less than orthodox publishing project: “There is evidence that T. T. must have known that the true story of the Sonnets was dynamite!” The explosive secret was not that Marlowe in unlikely exile was the author, but that John Florio was—the most prominent foreigner on the Jacobean scene, closely linked to the royal family. These 154 poems in blank verse (an Italian import), “never before Imprinted,” were written by the father and the son at various points over a long span of time, as the publisher’s notice implies, and then assembled and printed by John using the already-established pen-name Shake-Speare, not to drive sales but in homage to his father, and to advance the heroic enterprise to which he had devoted himself for decades.

Francis Meres alludes to a personal, special motivation behind the sonnets in a well-known passage written in 1598, calling Shakespeare the author of “sugared Sonnets among his private friends.” The following year it was the turn of the publisher William Jaggard, a piratical entrepreneur who put out a poetic anthology entitled The Passionate Pilgrim containing five sonnets by Shakespeare. This anthology was printed without Shakespeare’s authorization, say the critics, but the author strangely failed to protest, either in 1599 or in 1612 when the second edition came out, edited by Heywood (Diana Price, Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, 2001, pp.130-131).

Thomas Thorpe was the pirate publisher who, a year after the complete edition of the Sonnets, published Epictectus his Manuall by John Healey and dedicated it to John Florio! In the dedication(“To a true favorer/of forward spirits, Maister/Iohn Florio”) Thorpe refers to the fact that Florio had ensured the patronage of William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, for Healey’s first book, Discovery of a New World, dedicated to the Earl in 1609.

This was a satirical translation of a short work in Latin, Mundus Alter et Idem, by Joseph Hall, published in Germany in 1605; Frances Yates believes that Florio had a hand in the translation. This leaves no doubt about Florio’s high standing in the Pembroke entourage. William Herbert, we recall, is almost certainly the W. H. of the sonnets, and would be the dedicatee of the First Folio of 1623. The whole affair is recounted in extensive detail in the book of Frances Yates, who concludes:

Yet in that year [1609] Thorpe addressed to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke – via Florio – a translated satire, and to a “Mr W.H.” a sonnet-sequence by William Shakespeare. (Frances Yates, John Florio , 1934, pp. 283-292)

As all exiles, Florio has strong and tender liaisons with his roots: Italy, the land and its people, its literature, its language. But John doesn’t exaggerate, doesn’t make a display of his origins, doesn’t reveal particulars about his private life, just as Shakespeare doesn’t. His stance is vigorously transcultural: tied to his origins, but not viscerally. So John Florio shuns overemphasis, using his enormous baggage of knowledge of Italian with discretion, avoiding involvement with the most flamboyant Italianizing trends while striving to inculcate a taste for Italian language and literature through conversation, lessons, booklets, dictionaries, translations and three dozens of immortal plays.

[1] Lamberto Tassinari was born in Italy. After obtaining a “laurea” in Philosophy from the University of Florence, he worked as a teacher and in several publishing companies. He moved to Montreal in 1981. Two years later he was one of the founders of the transcultural magazine ViceVersa which he directed until its last issue in 1997. Between 1982 and 2007, he taught Italian language and literature at the Université de Montréal. In 1985 he published a novel, in 1999 a collection of essays, Utopies par le hublot and in 2008 Shakespeare? È il nome d’arte di John Florio. He is currently at work on his second novel and on a production of The Tempest to be staged in Naples. For the first time ever, the play’s autobiographical nature will reveal the underlying, true identity of the Bard, John Florio. Additional material and copies of the book John Florio: The Man Who Was Shakespeare are available at www.johnflorio-is-shakespeare.com.

[2] Jane Kingsley-Smith, Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile, 2003, p. 1.

[3] A.D.Wraight, The Story that the Sonnets Tell, 1994, p. 11.

[4] J.F. Dubost, La France italienne: XVIe-XVIIe, 1997, p. 53.

[5] A.D. Wraight, op. cit., pp. 184 ff.

Michael Chekhov : Teaching (Acting) in a Foreign Land

(Editor) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 06:10:00 +0900

Michael Chekhov : Teaching (Acting) in a Foreign Land

Liisa Byckling[1]

Born in St.Petersburg in 1891, Michael Aleksandrovich Chekhov died 64 years later in the United States (1955 in Los Angeles). A nephew of the playwright Anton Chekhov and a member of the Moscow Art Theatre's First Studio where the Stanislavsky system was forged, Chekhov had a celebrated acting career in Moscow. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and evolving communist cultural policy, however, forced him to leave his homeland. As an exile in Germany, France, Latvia, Lithuania England, New York and Los Angeles, he established a series of acting studios in which he tried to bring to artists in other countries and in other parts of the world new insights into the system developed by his own master, Konstantin Stanislavsky, along with a range of approaches to acting that was clearly his own. The adventures he had communicating this Russian style of work in English to artists working with him from across Europe, the United States, Canada and from as far away as Australia at a time when the Stanislavsky system was just becoming known was a source of linguistic frustration for him over the years as well as a source of linguistic frustration. What follows is a look at Michael Chekhov’s life and work across these many borders written by Chekhov specialist Liisa Byckling of Finland.

While operating his own acting studio in England in 1936, Russian-born Michael Chekhov tried to communicate to his students the very Stanislavskian notion that "We must learn to control our bodies by our feelings. To be an actor means that I must be the master of my body; my body is the instrument of my will, of me. I am. And my body is the instrument by which I can present myself to my audience. I give myself to my audience. Without me, my body is a corpse; for what purpose am I on the stage? To radiate my spiritual being. I am, and my body obeys my will."

One of the most genial and knowledgeable actors and acting teachers of the last century, Chekhov himself embodied the complete synthesis of inner feeling and outer form, which the American director Robert Lewis would later call "total acting". The concept of Chekhov´s method was clearly based on the Stanislavsky system and especially the work at the Moscow Art Theatre’s First Studio (including Vakhtangov´s productions). Chekhov expressed the spirit of turn of the century Russian culture, symbolist poetry and non-naturalistic theatre. His favourite writer was Dostoevsky. Another of his spiritual fathers was the symbolist writer Andrei Bely. His other sources of inspiration came from philosophy, legend and fairytales.

Chekhov conducted classes on his own for the first time between 1918 and 1921. He wrote: "I will never permit myself to say that I taught the Stanislavsky system. Much of what Stanislavsky gave us was assimilated by me on a permanent basis and formed the foundation for my subsequent... independent experiments in the art of theatre."[2] As in the classes of Stanislavsky, Chekhov's teaching was based on Stanislavsky's term “etudes” referring to a non-scripted scene performed by actors (in American usage it is called improvisation).

He wrote: "Often a study etude would grow into a complicated and long stage performance. We would play it for several days on end, and for that purpose would use the whole of the flat in which I lived, and often even went into the yard and the street. We loved space and did not restrict ourselves in it."[3] Other exercises consisted of concentrating on inner objects, seeing the role as an image, activating imagination with questions. Chekhov found ways to induce a mood that allowed for creative work using various techniques, anything that triggered the actor's imagination or enticed the subconscious out of hiding. Chekhov warned that all devices must be imbued with inner content and meaning; they should not become mere technical exercises. In his studio, the actor aimed at creating a feeling of truth and inspiring imagination.

Among the many sources for his work was the First Studio (founded in 1912) at the Moscow Art Theatre and led by Stanislavsky and Leopold Sulerzhitsky. In this early work, Stanislavsky sought means to focus the actor's inspiration and to do this he turned to yoga and other spiritually-related disciplines. These exercises were directed toward the development of what had been called a higher consciousness. Not surprisingly, Chekhov later found similar ideas in Rudolf Steiner's anthrosophist philosophy of teaching and Chekhov clearly incorporated Steiner’s own Germanic concept of the "Higher Self" into his acting method.

In the first Chekhov studio there was also intensive work on fairytales. As he put it, "I am convinced that the fairy tale, as a form of artistic work, contains deep and powerful possibilities for the development of the gifts of young actors.... It stimulates creative imagination, it raises the consciousness ... above naturalism, it miraculously interweaves tragedy and humour, it develops a sense of artistic style, it demands clear and exact form and does not admit of internal artistic falsehood which so easily penetrates on to the stage."[4]

In 1923, the First Studio became an independent theatre , essentially a Second Moscow Art Theatre with a performing style close to Expressionism and with Chekhov as its director. He resumed classes to develop methods of acting for the new theatre. Rehearsals for him were more like explorations. “Each new production gave us the opportunity of researching and developing new methods of acting and directing".[5]

Certain aspects of the studio work were set out by Chekhov in his autobiographical memoirs The Path of the Actor (1928). He speaks clearly of feeling dissatisfaction with the customary methods of working with words and gestures. Chekhov described how new exercises were practiced under his leadership.

"We approached the script...through movement.....During our work on Hamlet, we endeavoured to experience the gestures of words in the way they sounded and to this end we selected corresponding movements to fit the words and phrases. We imbued them with the force we required, added the particular emotional colouring and executed them until our inner feeling began to respond to them fully.” The results of the experiments in the studio left their mark on the production.

Later, Chekhov set out his method of acting in his American books To the Actor: On the Technique of Acting (1946 in Russian) and To the Actor (1953). One of the main requirements was complete integration of both body and psychology. In the first nine exercises (Chapter One) Chekhov laid the foundation of his acting technique. "By means of the suggested psychophysical exercises the actor can increase his inner strength, develop his abilities to radiate and receive, acquire a fine sense of form, enhance his feelings of freedom, ease, calm and beauty, experience the significance of his inner being, and learn to see things and processes in their entirety.”[6]

Chekhov offers excellent exercises for awakening, opening and contracting the sleeping muscles. Exercises aim at achieving the sensations of freedom and increased life. Then follow exercises with the imaginary centre as a source of power within the actor's body; exercises with different kinds of movements with the whole body for creating strong forms; exercises of sending rays from body into the space around; exercises utilizing four kinds of movements – what he called moulding, floating, flying and radiating -- reproduced in the actor's imagination only. Again, Chekhov revealed clearly his emphasis on the harmony of the actor's body and mind.

Chekhov writes about another rehearsal method, the working gesture or psychological gesture. "We cannot directly command our feelings, but we can provoke them by certain indirect means....The key to our willpower will be found in the movement (action, gesture).... The strength of the movement stirs our willpower in general; the kind of movement awakens in us a definite corresponding desire, and the quality of the same movement conjures up our feelings.”[7] Psychological gesture is therefore being used for creating the character as well as giving a condensed version of the character.

The principles of Chekhov's rehearsal work had elements in common with the “biomechanics“ of another well-known Russian director, Vsevelod Meyerhold, particularly in the way that the actors went from movement to feeling. Meyerhold taught actors to focus on gestures and movements as a way of expressing emotion physically. In some respects, Chekhov’s methods also anticipated Stanislavsky's own "method of physical actions" in the 1930s. It was a rehearsal technique with which Stanislavsky himself experimented in the last part of his life, by means of which the actor develops a logical sequence of physical actions for his or her role. This method assumes that emotional life can be more easily aroused and fixed for performance through work on the physical life of the role than through emotional recall.

It was Chekhov's aim to have his actors acquire a grasp of their roles in the practical sense of finding the profound connection that movement has to words on the one hand, and to emotions on the other. This served as an expression of Stanislavsky's demand not to utter the author's words until the inner stimulus to do so arises.

Eugenio Barba has written of this work noting its special characteristics. “Michael Chekhov attaches great importance to the performer's interior life. His 'first days' show, however, that everything he calls 'sensation', 'feeling', or 'psychological state' is innervated through precise physical attitudes. For Chekhov..., the work on the body-in-life and the thought-in-life are two sides of the same coin."[8]

After the October Revolution of 1917, Chekhov struggled against the ideological tendencies that led away from the ideals of spiritual values that had been established by the founders of the Studio. Chekhov wrote later in Life and Encounters, "The quality of acting started to deteriorate, and the elements of creative imagination, theatrical invention and originality were relegated a secondary role. The external influence was strong.”

Chekhov, as director of the theatre, wanted to preserve its artistic life. "First and foremost I prohibited anti-religious tendencies and the theatre of the streets and decided to stage Hamlet as a counterbalance."[9] In his productions of Hamlet and Petersburg in the Second Moscow Art Theatre, he created performances which used both symbolic and formal means of expression. Unfortunately for this work, his ideas were not compatible with Communist ideology and he left Soviet Russia in 1928.

His years of exile in Europe and later in the United States (from 1939) followed. Indeed, he never returned to Russia and his legacy came to depend on his own work abroad and the teachings and writings of those who worked with him in other lands.

In general, Chekhov’s foreign work can be divided into a) a period of directing, acting and teaching in Berlin, Paris, Riga and Kaunas (1928-34); b) a period in England and the eastern United States where he developed his anglo-american Theatre Studio (1936-42); and, finally, c) his Hollywood period, working in cinema and teaching film actors in Los Angeles (1943-55). All three were artistically rich.

Chekhov's European dreams were first realized in the foundation of the Chekhov Theatre Studio at Dartington Hall in southern England. For two years (1936-1938), he sought to train a troupe of young actors capable of creating a new standard for the theatre. The Studio prospectus stated that its goals were 1) to train young people as actors and actresses capable of creating a new standard for the modern theatre, and, 2) to form a permanent touring company to introduce the work of the Studio to the outside world.

Chekhov's exploration was founded on the Moscow Art studio model -- its organization, its spirit and principles -- which he tried to implant first on English, then on American soil. The chief aim of the Studio was "to struggle against the absence of the ideal in the contemporary naturalistic theatre." In England, students came from across the UK as well as from the United States and as far away as Australia. The work was comparable to the later laboratory of Jerzy Grotowski in Poland. In 1939, as World War II began, he transferred the studio to the United States where the Chekhov Theatre Players (1939-1942) became a professional theatre with a permanent acting company that presented plays on tour as well as on Broadway. In this Anglo-American period, Chekhov introduced his students to the principles of his own method, specifically in areas such as concentration, imagination, incorporation of character, atmosphere, and inspiration.

In the unpublished notes of the Dartington Studio work, one can find Chekhov's basic ideas. He considered the actor's imagination and body as primary instruments. "His face can radiate, but it is his body that must experience and express. The training of the body is therefore a training in awareness, in learning how to listen to the body, how to be led by it, in believing in its own strange and wonderful powers....

"We are trying to develop a new type of actor with a technique [which enables him] when he appears on the stage to have his whole being ... in a state of radiating(... burning with archetypes, moving easily, concentrated. ... When we master the technique then we will begin to create." Chekhov outlined a fundamental process of stimulating creative imagination. He used elements of the Stanislavsky system as parts of his own method and developed them further. The teaching staff at Dartington numbered eight. Chekhov believed that all actors should have some knowledge of scene design, costume making, technical production, music, and even playwriting. Peters Vasaraudzis from Riga was an assistant teacher. George Shdanoff and Henry Lyon Young were resident playwrights. Others taught gymnastics, music, singing, sculpture and speech.

In the beginning, students did both improvisation and self-written sketches which were built up into playlets. Then scenes from Don Quixote, Balladina by Slowacki, Peer Gynt, Joan of Arc, and Shakespeare were rehearsed. One fairy-tale rehearsed in the first semester was The Golden Steed, an adaptation of a play written by a Latvian poet Jan Rainis.

Later texts by Dickens, Dostoevsky and commedia dell'arte were rehearsed.

Chekhov helped students become sensitive to their bodies in space and use their bodies so that they could make an audience feel the space around them. Chekhov outlined a fundamental process of stimulating creative imagination. He believed in the "wise" body of the actor. "Words are so clever but movement is simpler. Therefore we begin our work with movement, with psychological gesture, and we let words come on the movement. In this way we shall be less afraid of words when we come to them. Your body must say the words. "Movement is an essential part of the actor's art not only because he must learn to trust his own body implicitly as an instrument, but because movement and feeling are inextricably related. We must learn to use our bodies with joy, with power, with the knowledge that we are artists in all we do. We must acquire the psychology of the juggler. The actor's body [shows} the road to emotion." Chekhov helped students become sensitive to their bodies in space and use their bodies so that they could make an audience feel the space around them. "You must master the space with music and with your body."

Whenever Chekhov was asked a question about Stanislavsky, he'd say: "I cannot answer that fairly. I haven't been in contact with him for several years and he was always changing." This pupil of the Russian master would not commit himself at all to the particulars of Stanislavsky's system because he knew how dynamic and ever-changing it was. Even if Chekhov used many exercises from the First Studio, he hardly mentioned Stanislavsky's name in his classes and did not ask his students to read Stanislavski’s writings. In Chekhov's opinion, Stanislavsky's method was covered only partly in his own much more complicated method.

Continuously Chekhov would remind his students that acting was a calling, demanding complete devotion, that there were no short cuts, only hard work, and more hard work. Memoirs by Chekhov's students and in my interviews with them show how his pedagogy fed a receptive but often unsophisticated student body.

Deirdre Hurst du Prey said: "I think quite frankly that we were very inhibited at times, both by the Method -- some of which seemed strange at first -- and because it was so demanding. We felt we would never achieve the standard that Chekhov wanted. We loved and believed in him. We wanted to create "the Theatre of Future" with him."

Felicity Mason writes: " We were often completely transported outside our normal selves. We were expanded into new dimensions, where embarrassment did not exist. Because of our exercises in empathy and team spirit, there was singularly little sarcastic criticism, envious competition, or a negative approach to the work. We felt free to laugh at each other."

“The ideas which Chekhov set for the group were high,” Dorothy Elmhirst wrote in The Drama Review in 1983). “They worked long hours with him every day. The first year of the studio was designed to lay the groundwork, with speech and movement classes, gymnastics, improvisations and exercises,...The weekly schedule shows how the classes were planned. Speech in the morning, followed by a movement class, and then class with Chekhov or rehearsal of certain scenes. After lunch and rest, more rehearsals, tea, more rehearsals, supper, and right on into the evening with lessons or rehearsals. Constant work. If you weren't taking a lesson or rehearsing , you were working on your own because you had to do a great deal of work on your parts, a scene you might be directing, writing a play, or creating settings or costumes. He often scolded us because we did not do enough preparation work."

Christopher Martin, head of the Arts Department at Dartington, wrote: "I should like to describe to you a class I witnessed just after the Studio had opened. You must imagine a bare studio, a few chairs, a piano and a group of some twenty students. They were asked to leave the Studio and then come back in ones and twos, imagining that they were entering a cathedral. Their first efforts were clumsy and ill-conceived. Later, as they became more practised, they succeeded in evoking for the spectator the atmosphere of a cathedral, even to the existence of pillars and chairs.

“On another occasion, I remember, they were asked to imagine that they were joining a crowd at a football match. Again, with practice, they made the spectator feel the excitement of a large crowd about to watch some thrilling game....From such simple beginnings students pass to improvisations which are more complicated. They come, in time, to the portrayal of definite types, definite characters. At these they work till the assumption of character ceases to be imitative and has become second nature. They must create for themselves not only the voice and movements, but the makeup and even costume. In this way the character to be assumed becomes, in time, part of themselves." (C. Martin 1936. Dartington Hall Records)

Visitors came to classes almost every Saturday. Among them were American actors from the Group Theatre -- Stella and Luther Adler, and the director Robert Lewis. Robert Lewis wrote about Chekhov's work in his book Slings and Arrows. He spent a weekend at Dartington in June 1938 studying Michael Chekhov’s teaching methods.

"Chekhov himself was a devout man, and all his pupils seemed to absorb something of the master's spirituality. As I walked over the beautiful grounds, I saw a girl sitting alone on the grass looking at the classroom building with worshipful tears in her eyes." Lewis visited a class on improvisation with excerpts from The Deluge by Henning Berger. Lewis wrote: "But since there was no emotional sense of fire -- or danger -- it seemed to me it could have done simply by assigning space relations in the beginning. The crystallization, I felt, could not be found truthfully without the essence. If the movement could have been added to, or derived from, the psychological groundwork, they would then have approached the acting style of their master, Michael Chekhov, who was always overflowing with true emotion....

"What the company seemed to be acting were the 'qualities' without the psychological underpinnings of the deluge. I realized that this principle of design was great for a director's guide, but without the actors being trained for the inner experiencing of the nature of the situation for each character, it made for effective groupings but poor individual acting." (Lewis, Robert. Slings and Arrows. New York 1984, p. 96)

Chekhov certainly felt those difficulties as a cultural transplant, as is evident in his letter to Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst at the end of the summer term of 1938: "The longer I am out of Russia the more I begin to think that my devotion to this fire is not at all Russian as I thought before -- it is a human thing and I am sure that...perhaps the form in which I express my personal fire sometimes is Russian but not the fire itself, and this is not the point which I could not explain to my dear and beloved children, but it is the point without which we will not find each other to the last depths. So I am looking toward the fire next term. " (Chekhov to D. Elmhirst, August 16, 1938, Cornwall. Dartington Hall Records.)

Events in Europe prevented Chekhov from fulfilling his plans for the Studio in England. After the Munich crisis of 1938, the lengthening shadow of tyranny became insupportable for Chekhov; and at his request, the theatre studio was transferred to the United States to continue the work in a less threatening atmosphere. A farewell performance was given by the students in Dartington in December 1938. Two years was, of course, too short a time in which to demonstrate positive results, but there is every reason to suppose that had political events taken a different course, the Studio would have consolidated its position in England.

Chekhov believed that in America there would be more interest in Russian training and students would be more eager for the method. His new Studio was opened in January 1939 in Ridgefield, Connecticut, a few hours north of New York City. For the next 13 years, the large estate was his home, his studio, and his theatre. Substantial financial backing was secured from the Elmhirst Foundation and Beatrice Straight. New students were auditioned for the Studio. Among the 22 members of the permanent company, 17 were American-born; others were Canadian, Australian, English and Austrian. In Ridgefield, Chekhov trained an acting company and dealt with specific problems that were part of the actor's experience. For this Russian-born actor this meant reconsidering his methods and facing the harsh demands of the commercial theatre in the US.

In the US, the Chekhov Theatre Players became a producing theatre with a permanent acting company presenting plays on Broadway, but mainly on tour. Produced by Beatrice Straight and Alan Harkness, they played in numerous American universities to sell-out crowds and enthusiastic audiences. The first tour took place in 1940. For two months, the company travelled by truck, bus and car and performed in 15 states. This tour included Twelfth Night by Shakespeare and The Cricket on the Hearth by Dickens. Directing them, Chekhov brought to the American stage Russian and continental ideas and his own interpretations. The Chekhov Theatre Players were finally able to demonstrate a way of playing the classics that seemed relevant to contemporary audiences.

Chekhov wrote to Dorothy Elmhirst that he was thrilled and encouraged. "The success which they have had they deserve completely and fully. Their maturity which begins to be seen is of such a kind which can never be compared with the cliched-maturity of so-called professionals. They remain fresh and young in their spirit in spite of the experience which is being so quickly accumulated. It gives me also the greatest joy and proves to me certain principles which I believe in and confirms certain points of the method." (October 25, 1940. Complete text of the letter is published in Byckling 2000, 343- 345. Dartington Hall Records).

The following year the troupe toured a second time with King Lear. Clearly obsessed by the idea of transforming material values into spiritual values, his production was set in abstract space, a geometrical system of planes reminiscent of Gordon Craig. In December 1941, the company brought Twelfth Night to Broadway. Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times praised the production calling it "a pleasant little holiday from the routine of hit-and-flop playgoing". In the winter and spring of 1942, the company toured to Florida, Texas, Oklahoma and the midwestern states.

It is certainly hard to assign a place to the Chekhov Theatre Players within the American theatrical pattern. On one hand, it was an itinerant organization; on the other, because it continued to operate a school from which new talent was continuously enlisted into the company, it could also not be compared to the commercial theatres on Broadway.

Chekhov had certainly integrated the American work experience into his teaching. In this sense, it could be argued that a branch of the Moscow Art Theatre was in the US. Indeed, when his company opened on Broadway, it was a genuine revelation of Russian theatre methods.

During this same period, Chekhov also conducted drama courses for professional actors, among them many from the recently expanded Group Theatre. (See Lessons to the Professional Actor edited by Deirdre Hurst du Prey, 1986.) But once again, his fondest hopes were shattered by political upheavals. America's entry into World War II meant that most of the leading actors were leaving for military service. In 1942, the theatre was forced to close.

The farewell performance of the Chekhov Theatre Players took place on Broadway in September of that year. Chekhov himself appeared in two one-act plays at that time based on his uncle's short stories. He was hailed as an extraordinary performer "who has hitherto been known to New Yorkers only as an uncomfortably Slavic director" to quote John Mason Brown. However, Chekhov's own acting career did not continue. Though he was offered parts by Elia Kazan and many other American directors, he declined them all because he was uncomfortable with his own Russian accent, something most international exiles have to face at some point in their careers if they are actors.

Many of his American actors from the school, however, ended up with huge and successful careers in Hollywood and New York. Hurd Hatfield became famous in the film Portrait of Dorian Gray; Ford Rainey had a substantial career in cinema and TV in Los Angeles. Chekhov's assistant George Shdanoff opened a very successful acting school in Los Angeles. Other students included Terence Morgan, Ronald Bennett and, the most famous of all, Yul Brynner, who was also of Russian origin. Beatrice Straight formed Theatre Inc. in New York and also won an Academy Award in Hollywood.

In 1980, some of his former students – including Beatrice Straight -- his most consistent sponsor -- opened the Michael Chekhov Studio in New York City. There the Chekhov training method was resumed. Straight argued long and hard for the Chekhov technique and spoke often of it as suiting the needs of contemporary actors who must pick up ideas quickly and use them instantly. She argued that it freed actors from the problems of over-intellectualizing, and of separating their minds from their bodies.

A new generation of Russian-influenced teachers was, in this sense, trained in New York in the 1980s. One of them, Leonard Petit later brought the approaches to Finland where for many years he conducted master classes at the Theatre Academy in Helsinki. In this same decade, Michael Chekhov’s artistic legacy was rediscovered in Russia, and he once again became a major figure in his native country.

As for his Hollywood work, Chekhov was certainly interested in applying his teaching to the fast pace and fragmented nature of film and television. From 1948 to1955 he taught improvisation and gave lectures on acting and the creative process at The Drama Society in Hollywood. He also gave private classes to film actors at his home in Beverly Hills until his death.

During his exile years, he published his memoirs Life and Encounters (Novyi Zhurnal, 1944-45) and O tekhnike aktyora (1946). In 1953, his text To the Actor was published in English in New York. In these books, Chekhov argues that the body of an actor must undergo a special kind of development, extreme sensitivity of body to the psychological creative impulses. In his opinion, this could only be achieved by psycho-physical exercises. (Chekhov 1953, p. 2). He argues that the actor must not think of himself as a photographer of life, but as an interpreter, who "lets the spectator see beyond life's surfaces and meanings", to convey to the spectator a kind of revelation. (Chekhov 1953, p. 3) For Chekhov, the work on the body-in-life and the thought-in-life were two sides of the same coin.

Indeed, , Chekhov's psycho-physical exercises are still used today in American practice. Joanna Merlin's, the author of the popular acting training book Auditioning, herself studied in Chekhov's classes in the fifties in Los Angeles, and in later years she worked in many international workshops. Her exercises include the use of numerous Michael Chekhov “psychological gestures.” Even now, they blow a fresh and invigorating breeze into the heritage of Stanislavski and the career of the great exilic artist, Michael Chekhov.

Bibliography

Barba, Eugenio, The Paper Canoe. A Guide to Theatre Anthropology. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

Byckling, Liisa, Mikhail Chekhov v zapadnom teatre i kino. (Michael Chekhov in Western Theatre and Cinema). St. Peterburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2000. 560 pp.

----, Pisma Mikhail Chekhova Mstislavu Dobuzhinskomu (gody emigracii, 1938-1951). (Letters from Michael Chekhov to Mstislav Dobuzhinski: The Emigre Years). University of Helsinki Press, 1992. 2nd ed.: St.Petersburg: Vsemirnoe slovo, 1994.

Carnicke, Sharon Marie. Stanislavsky in Focus, Harwood: Amsterdam, 1998.

Chekhov, Michael, To the Actor on the Technique of Acting. New York: Harper and Row, 1953.

----, On the Technique of Acting. Mel Gordon, ed. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.

---- , To the Actor: On the Technique of Acting. Revised edtion. London: Routledge, 2002.

----, Literaturnoe nasledie v dvuh tomah. 2 vols. Maria Knebel et al eds., Moscow: Iskusstvo 1986. 2nd ed.: 1995.

Chekhov Theatre Studio. Dartington Hall Records. England. (unpublished)

Citron, Atay, "The Chekhov Technique today" in The Drama Review, (T99, Fall 1983).

Lewis, Robert, Slings and Arrows. New York: Stein and Day, 1984.

Merlin, Joanna, Auditioning: An Actor-friendly Guide. New York: Vintage books, 2001.

[1] Liisa Byckling is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Helsinki, Finland and a specialist in the study of Michael Chekhov.

[2] Chekhov writes about his studio in Literaturnoye nasledye (Moscow, 1986), pp. 98-107.

[3] Chekhov (1986), vol. 1, p. 103.

[4] Ibid., p. 105.

[5] Chekhov, Zhizn i vstrechi (Life and Encounters), (New York: Novyi Zhurnal, 1944 – 1945), op.cit.

[6] Chekhov (1953), To the Actor, p. 20.

[7] Ibid, pp. 63 and 65.

[8] Barba, p. 78.

[9] Chekhov (1986), p. 202.

Through the Eyes of the Other: The Many Faces of Japan’s Chong Wishing/ Jung Euishin/Chong Wishin

(Editor) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 06:05:00 +0900

Through the Eyes of the Other: The Many Faces of Japan’s Chong Wishing/ Jung Euishin/Chong Wishin

Interviewed by Manabu Noda[1]

In a world that is becoming ever more multi-cultural, the voice of the Other, the whole notion of what is referred to as Alterity, becomes an important part of culture generally and an important aspect of theatre in particular. In the west, multi-culturalism has become almost a norm. In other parts of the world, however, it is still unusual. Among the most fascinating of such “othered” artists working in theatre is the Korean-Japanese dramatist-director Chong Wishing (also known as Jung Euishin and even Chong Wishin depending on who is addressing him and where they are from). Never seen by those around him as fully Japanese and yet also not accepted as fully Korean, this important artist speaks in the following interview of his career in Japan as writer-provocateur and director as well as cultural outsider. The interview was conducted for this issue on Theatre and Exile by Japanese critic Manabu Noda during October 2011 in Korea where Chong was then working.

Q: What brought your family from Korea to Japan originally?

Chong: The first generation of what is called Zainichi Koreans (Koreans resident in Japan) came for many different and complicated reasons. Some were forced to come during the colonial period; others came to escape poverty. My father’s case was different. He came to Japan by choice when he was 15, before World War II started. He wanted a Japanese education. So, unlike the so-called “newcomer” Koreans who are predominant in the Korea Town area of Tokyo today, I am one of the descendants of this earlier generation.

Q: So do you consider yourself Korean or Japanese or some blend of the two?

Chong: I am a Zainichi Korean, a Korean who lives in Japan. But the fact is I was educated in Japan, I write in Japanese and I write on Japanese matters. In that sense I consider myself a Japanese playwright. But being a Zainichi Korean makes my work a little different. My plays are written from a minority point of view.

Q: Did you ever go to a Korean school?

Chong: No, my education was thoroughly Japanese, from kindergarten to university. Everybody knew that my family were Zainichi Koreans. My father dealt in scrap iron. There was no hiding the fact who I was.

Q: Was there discrimination?

Chong: I myself was not openly discriminated against in any way, though I did hear of discrimination against Zainichi…. My father always wanted me to get trained in some marketable professional skill, to major in science. I was the fourth of five brothers....They all followed our father’s educational policy and acquired scientific qualifications, but I just didn’t have the brains for science.

Q: How did your parents raise you when you were little?

Chong: During the 60s, my parents were too busy running the scrap-iron business to raise five boys, so I was sent to live with my grandmother in a different Korean community until I was old enough to go to elementary school. That was an all-Korean settlement and one perhaps left behind by the times. In spite of the rapid economic growth around it, most of those who lived there still raised pigs and tilled fields. My grandmother was someone who would say, “I want to die,” or “I want to go back home” quite often, so I came to have an outlook on life like, “Well, it’s all about dying after all.” In a sense, living with my grandmother alone when I was very little may have formed an attitude within me as a playwright. It definitely shaped my personality.

My father, too, led quite a unique life as a Zainichi Korean. There weren’t many Koreans who had chosen of their own will to come to Japan for Japanese education when they were fifteen. Back then, I suppose, Japan was an El Dorado for him, and he must have been brimming with the expectation that he could be more successful with a Japanese education than a Korean one. So he came to Japan. But then the war started. He was a student, and was soon mobilized into the military. Years later, I accompanied my mother to see his family in Korea for the first time. I realized at that time that he himself did not want to go back home because he knew that he would then be seen as an outcast, as someone who had sided with the Japanese. In this respect, my family is quite an unusual example of the Zainichi Korean.

Q: In your plays, you often portray the diversity of the Zainichi Korean community and you keep a certain distance from them. Has that been because of the uniqueness of your family within the Korean community in Japan?

Chong: Yes, being a minority within a minority has made me a rather distanced observer.

Q: After dropping out of university, you attended the Yokohama School of Broadcasting and Cinema (present the Japan Academy of Moving Images), and then got a job as an art assistant at the Shochiku Studio. It was at this time, in the early 80s, that you joined the Black Tent, a theatre company founded in 1968 by Makoto Satō, Kaitarō Tsuno, Kiyokazu Yamamoto and others. That company put an emphasis on touring in their huge black tent and became one of the country’s leading counter-culture companies. How did you connect with Black Tent?

Chong: I was attending drama school. When I graduated, a Zainichi Korean friend of mine who was a Black Tent member asked me casually to join him. The Black Tent was running its Red Classroom project back then with the credo: “Theatre is open to everybody.” The company was diversifying its activities into many branches to open up theatre, and people of all ages and from all walks of life were joining. Old. Young.

In my second year with Black Tent, the company staged Taitanikku Chimbotsu (The Titanic Disaster) as part of a project which was launched to unearth young talent, and I was at that time one of two people chosen as playwrights from those members who had shown an interest in writing. I then wrote and directed my first play, Itoshi-no Medea (Beloved Medea) which was nominated for the Kishida Kunio Drama Award for promising playwrights. And here I am, still writing plays.

Q: Did you intend to be an actor initially?

Chong: I actually started backstage. I was mostly involved in lighting, technical work, then became an assistant director, and so on…. In fact, I was really struggling to find something I could commit myself to, but still unsure about what it should be. After dropping out of university, I was constantly wondering about my future generally. As a Zainichi Korean, I was well aware that I would probably not be employed by most ordinary Japanese companies. Then I encountered some good films and thought I would like to go in that direction. I actually started to work in the film industry.

Q: When you left Black Tent, you helped to create the theatre company Shinjuku Ryōzanpaku which did many of your plays. Among them, Sennen-no Kodoku (A Thousand Years’ Loneliness) and Ningyo Densetsu (The Mermaid Legend) both toured to Korea. You left the company in 1995, but your plays continued to be staged not only in Japan but also in Korea. Can you speak about those experiences?

Chong: We played The Mermaid Legend on the banks of the Han, the river that flows through the city of Seoul. Staging a performance there was actually against the law -- – tent performances were regarded as a political meetings back then in Korea -- but we managed to put the show on anyhow. It caused quite a stir. Apparently, pirate video recordings of the performances still circulate.

Q: You then were offered opportunities in Korea.

Chong: After I left Shinjuku Ryōzanpaku, I was commissioned to direct the Japanese staging of my Annindofu-no Kokoro (The Heart of an Almond Pudding) which premiered in 2000. In 2006, this play (in Japanese) was performed alongside a Korean version created by a Korean director and Korean actors. Later, The Winter Sunflower was performed by the National Drama Company of Korea and seemed to be very well received by Korean audiences. The Winter Sunflower is a play about being gay – not a big deal at all in Japan, but I had been warned before the show opened in Korea that Korean people would not find it acceptable. But after its performance in Korea, a lot of theatre and film began to pick up on gay themes.

Q: How much of your time do you spend these days in Korea?

Chong: About a third of each year. My plays are now regularly being staged and published in Korea. Yakiniku Dragon has been a hit of sorts and I guess I have become something of a popular writer, more popular than I would have ever thought. Now I’m working on a new piece at the Michoo Theatre Company in Korea.

Q: Since 2007, the New National Theatre (NNT) in Tokyo has been staging a series of your plays based on the history and memories of Zainichi Koreans. Like a Little Wild Flower (2007) and Yakiniku Dragon (2008) have been staged, and in March 2012 they will stage Pāmaya Sumire (Sumire’s Beauty Parlor) which is about carbon monoxide poisoning in a coal mine. Like a Little Wild Flower was the second in a trilogy of Three Tragedies from Greek Myths. The play is set in Japan in 1951, when the Korean War was in progress. The Trojan War has become World War II, and the story of Andromache is revamped into a tragic love quadrangle. Then came your multi-awarded Yakiniku Dragon, which was a joint production between the NNT and the Seoul Arts Centre. In both Like a Little Wild Flowerand Yakiniku Dragon, I find the subject of wandering, as many Zainichi Koreans who appear in the plays cannot settle down at one place. I know that the theme of the vagrant (and often absent) father appears a lot in Korean literature. When you write, are you conscious of wandering and the lack of belongingness as themes in your plays?

Chong: My grandmother was a photo-bride who left Korea to meet her husband in Japan when she was fourteen. My father left Korea when he was fifteen. And I am always aware of the fact that I am not a Japanese citizen in Japan. Even in Korea, I know that I am not a native. I don’t even speak Korean properly. So my ambiguous identity is definitely reflected on the characters and stories that I create. Yes, the sense of wandering is in my writings. My family lineage may be characterized by wandering. I am still wandering between Japan and Korea. So it goes on.

Q: Tragedy and comedy also alternate constantly in your plays. One moment there is a romantic and tragic scene; the next moment it snaps into a scene bursting with laughter. It seems to me that this rhythm is also closely connected to your depiction of love affairs. Quite Brechtian, but idiosyncratically yours. Do you think there is a connection between this style of yours and your being a Zainichi Korean using Japanese as your language?

Chong: Over the years I have come to commit myself as a writer to the kind of theatre that chronicles as well as examines the times. When I heard some time back that Zainichi Korean residents were all to be evicted from their homes near the Osaka International Airport in Itami, I went to interview them for my Yakiniku Dragon. This ghetto – that’s really what it was -- was started by construction workers and their families when they were building a new runway for the Osaka Expo. Most had originally worked in coal mines in Kyūshu. They told me how they had to migrate within Japan looking for jobs when the mines were abandoned. That was an eye-opener for me. I was seeing history from the perspective of the oppressed, from the standpoint of those who are neglected by our history books. The oppressed and downtrodden are not necessarily innocent and beautiful at heart; they have their ugly sides, too. But I was seeing their stories. As for style, I guess I do always think that life is double-sided with comedy and tragedy being played out together. You may find something tragic, but if you take another look from afar it may appear to be hilarious. That’s Life as I see it, Life with a capital L. My own experiences and my personal view of life inevitably find their way into my plays.

Q: I saw Yakiniku Dragon twice in its 2011 revivals: one in Tokyo and the other in Seoul. I found that generally the Korean audience was more prone to laughter than the Japanese. But there is one scene in which the audience in Seoul went all quiet: that was when one second-generation Zainichi Korean snaps at a new-comer Korean saying that his sort of people cannot truly appreciate Zainichi Koreans’ feelings. Didn’t bringing Yakiniku Dragon to Korea require a lot of courage?

Chong: From the start of that Japan-Korea joint production, I was intent on writing about Zainichi Koreans. That was essential to me because the Zainichi Koreans have been abandoned and neglected both in Japan and Korea – especially in Korea. People don’t understand Zainichi Koreans.

Q: In Korea?

Chong: Yes, even in Korea. They don’t know about us. There’s no mention in their history textbooks. And their typical image of Zainichi Koreans is polarized between the rich and the poor. No diversity or gradation. They don’t know how Zainichi Koreans have lived, or their historical backgrounds.

When I came to Korea for the premiere of Yakiniku Dragon, one Korean journalist didn’t mince words with me when he said, “Koreans are even more ignorant about Zainichi Koreans than Japanese, so I don’t know how this play will be received in Korea.” Well, I had already suspected that, so I was convinced that staging a play about Zainichi Koreans in the national theatres of Japan and Korea would really be meaningful. I wanted both national theatres to do my play about these abandoned people. So, when I was asked what I would write about, I said that I would write about Zainichi Koreans, whatever the reception might be. I guess that throwing stones at both countries was pretty much in my mind from the beginning. It was a pleasant surprise that the play was appreciated in both places.

Another pleasant surprise for me was that the Japanese audience did not restrict the scope of the story to the particularity of the historical background of the Kim family but saw in them something they could associate themselves with, something that is quite connected to their own picture of family. I wondered why so many people in the audience were so deeply touched, tears running down their cheeks, by this story of a Zainichi Korean family. Then I thought that they were moved because they saw images of themselves in the past, what they used to be like, what was lost in that age of rapid economic growth – family ties, the feelings of a small community.

Q: Kōhei Tsuka (1948-2010) was like you another Zainichi Korean playwright who caused quite a sensation during the 70s and 80s. When he visited Korea in 1999 with the Korean version of his Atami Murder Case it is reported that the cold response deeply disappointed him.

Chong: He said that he had come to loathe Korea because of that. A great shame.

Q: Cultural exchanges between the two countries have changed very much since then, but still I wonder if you did not fear the possibility that you might be disappointed in Korea in the same way?

Chong: I think that Tsuka’s generation of Zainichi Koreans had to embrace a rather warped blend of inferiority and superiority complexes about Korea. Some of the characters in my Yakiniku Dragon are portrayed as Zainichi Koreans with the same feeling, which, I believe, is the bottom line for Tsuka’s plays. That feeling might have changed, though, if his plays had been more favourably received in Korea back in 1999.

Part of that failure, I suppose, was because of his kuchidate rehearsal method -- he would not only change and add lines in the rehearsal room constantly but make his actors recite them on the spot in the manner of delivery by Tsuka himself. That technique enabled him to convey to Japanese actors the idiosyncratic rhythm of his own Japanese but it simply did not work with Korean actors. It is frustrating to have to communicate through an interpreter and he felt it as well. It is not easy to have a translator between you and your actors. This happens when I work with Korean actors.

Q: Did you write the Korean lines in Yakiniku Dragon yourself?

Chong: Only the basic outlines. The Korean nuances, I’m afraid, are totally beyond my command of the language, so I relied on the translation by a native Korean speaker in Japan for that.

Q: In your plays there are all sorts of Zainichi Koreans who are not necessarily on good terms with each other.

Chong: Yes. I wrote a play when I was in Korea about the Koreans who were convicted as B-class war criminals. Their honour was restored only recently (in 2006) in Korea, but until then they had been stigmatized as wartime collaborators with the Japanese. They were victims of history in a way, being conscripted by Japan and ordered to commit atrocities during the war. My own father was considered a wartime collaborator, too, working for Japan’s military police, so I can understand the suffering they must have gone through and the cruelty that assailed them.

Q: While pointing at the historical chasm between Japan and Korea, your Yakiniku Dragon, it seems to me, also gropes for points of cultural contact at the same time. The play has both Japanese and Korean songs. I had the impression that you foregrounded the moments of rapprochement between the two countries more tenderly than in previous works. You may have depicted Zainichi Korean and Japanese lovers in the past, but I don’t think you had any of them trying to show respect for the other through culturally encoded conduct. Am I right in detecting a change in your attitude?

Chong: I think I took that cue from changes in the relationship between Japan and Korea generally. The Korean TV serial drama Winter Sonata was a tremendous hit in Japan. It drastically changed attitudes toward Korea. The Korean wave initiated by this show was followed by the huge influx of Korean pop music into Japan. Such enthusiasm for things Korean by the Japanese would have been unthinkable ten years ago. The kind of Japanese who earlier would come to Korean barbecue restaurants – like those I presented in Yakiniku Dragon -- were mostly working-class people. That was what it was like back in 1970. But nowadays lots of Japanese from all classes go to Korea Town and many of them talk about their favorite Korean food being this or that. So I think the Japanese attitude towards Korea has changed enormously.

Q: Do you feel more at home now in Korea?

Chong: Perhaps I have learned to take a more and more realistic view when working in Korea. I now simply consider myself a foreigner in Korea, someone being hired as a foreign theatre director. It’s probably normal. The fact is I do have to overcome a language barrier in creating a piece of theatre. When my vision seems different from that of my Korean actors, as a foreign director I have to stay cool and explain to the actors what it is that I want to do. And if that doesn’t go down well, well then, I really do have to stay cool and think about what kind of modifications I can make.

In the past, I felt the same thing Tsuka did – a strong sense of alienation about being treated as a Japanese – because I used to think “this is my homeland,” the same blood runs in me. I’ve also had some backbiting in Korea. You know, “What is this Japanese doing here.” That sort of disparagement. I can understand Tsuka’s resentment, his sadness. The irony, of course, is that in Japan as well I am not seen as a “genuine” Japanese. In this sense, I have no place I really belong to – although if asked where I’m from, I’d have to say Japan.

So working in Korea now, I tell myself not to expect too much. I can’t assume that people there will have any special in-depth understanding of my work. More and more, I feel I’ve got to be cooler in my approach, more realistic. Communication is vital in creating a play, and I keep striving to make it better, but what I realize these days is that it has to be based on a realistic appreciation of difference. I think I am finally becoming cooler and more realistic when I work in Korea. Yes. I think I am.

[1] Manabu Noda is Professor in the School of Arts and Letters, Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan. As a theatre critic and researcher, he has published books and essays on British and Japanese acting and theatre history. He is currently on the editorial board of Theatre Arts (IATC Japan), and Critical Stages (IATC web journal). This interview, originally conducted in Japanese, was translated into English by himself and was condensed from its original length for this issue.

Yury Lyubimov in Interview with Maria Shevtsova, 15 April 2011, St Petersburg.

(Editor) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 06:00:00 +0900

Yury Lyubimov in Interview with Maria Shevtsova, 15 April 2011, St Petersburg.

Edited and translated from Russian by Maria Shevtsova [1]

Maria Shevtsova: You have had a rich life. What do you see as being the happiest period of creative work in this life?

Yury Lyubimov [2] : [long pause] I am deep in thought. [long pause] I would probably say The Master and Margarita [1977]. As usual, nobody believed that this would pass censorship and be staged, although it [the book] was published. I convinced them that I was taking the Russian version with cuts, and not the full version, which we had but which did not exist abroad. It was about this time that I met Katerina [Lyubimov’s wife]. Inwardly, I dedicated this production to her: it’s the way things coincided.

The production worked out for me, whereas no one has ever managed to do it. Something has always happened to this production. Either the tapes were lost, or people only took one side of it. [Andrzej] Wadja, among the Poles, took only the Woland line, and he did not appear to be happy with it.

As usual, the actors were rather reticent at the beginning but, afterwards, they said they would like to play it. I will not name names, all the more so because some of them are still alive. Actors are complex people; they are deeply ungrateful and treacherous – worse than women.

Or men?

Well, yes. You won’t say it better than Chekhov did: An actor is about seventy-five years behind a normal person. Rare is the writer who tore actors to pieces as much as Chekhov. He could not bear them, and he wasn’t particularly kind about his own wife [Olga Knipper-Chekhova at the Moscow Art Theatre].

And The Master and Margarita?

I made this production surprisingly quickly and easily – over forty-five rehearsals, and it is still being performed. Every production, like every child, comes out in its own way. Sometimes it is very difficult, not least because of censorship. Where The Master was concerned, they constantly called me in. They would ask me, ‘Who gave you permission?’ And I would say, ‘I am not dong anything unlawful. All of you know I have been rehearsing this and now you are asking me who gave me permission. It’s strange. You constantly speak with me like public prosecutors, as if I were some kind of criminal. It has been published, so why can’t I do it? So I finished the production, called the [Party] committee, and the committee approved it, but you keep telling me I cannot do it.’

It was not only the themes of The Master and Margarita that made the work sensitive but because it was theatre, and theatre brings people together.

Of course.

And it was the Taganka Theatre, not any old theatre.

Well, they were always on my back. They didn’t like me. I was different, and not one of them, although my grandfather was a serf and an Old Believer. My father was wealthy, for which reason he was incarcerated. They incarcerated my mother, as well, and also my aunt; and, as a child, I went back and forth carrying sugar, dried bread, and so on, as people did for those who had been put away. My mother was born in Rybinsk and I had to travel there and get through to her despite the fact that they tried to stop me because the train came in at night. I suppose my character is impertinent and daring. I banged on the doors and then hit the iron gates with my feet and then threw stones at the gates. Eventually somebody looked out, swore at me and called an officer or someone else in the higher ranks. So they let me in, and my mother began to weep. Even then [at that early age], I showed my character and told her not to dare to cry in front of these people. So I was toughened up early. And I went through two World Wars. There were three of us, myself and my brother and sister. We were lucky. They could have separated us, and then we would have had nothing at all.

In 1964 you staged The Good Woman of Szechuan at your acting school and then transferred it to the Taganka.

Yes, the production was successful and began to get good reviews, so the press and the working class supported me. I made the production in my third year of studies and did this quite consciously because the production could run for one year and allow me to have experience, [to learn] how to play before an audience, sing songs and really enter into contact with audiences through songs and understand what political theatre was. No matter how you might want to get around it, Brecht was the founder of political theatre. The Soviets put a label on me, saying that I worked in political theatre and, since I was working in it, I had to be put under surveillance: not a step out of line, or I would be shot.

I always polemicized against socialist realism – it was boring, it was gibberish, the same kind of gibberish as Stanislavsky’s system, which they shoved in because it was convenient for the Soviet regime.

Well, they made it convenient.

Of course they did! Poor Stanislavsky. The point wasn’t a system. He wanted to create a manual to help actors, but this is nonsense because you cannot do that. It won’t help in art. You can’t learn from a book how to act. Everybody teaches [from it] in the same way and you get a cliché, but a cliché kills individuality. What is happening around us in the theatre, especially in repertory theatre, is complete idiocy. It is the destruction of everything. It involves tonnes of paper [work]: How much money are you going to spend on nails? – and other such nonsense. And then there are tenders! With all this rubbish going on, I handed in my resignation. You cannot possibly work in such conditions.

I have taken from Brecht’s aesthetics, but I am not this or that, or whatever people want me to be. I think I am my own person. My practice is enormous. When they threw me out of the Soviet Union, I travelled the whole world, and I also staged thirty operas in various theatres across the world. I staged opera when the Italians called me; [there was] Luigi Nono, a composer on the left, who was very gifted and wonderful person. This was the Berlinguer period. [Enrico Berlinguer was the leader of the Italian Communist Party, 1972-1984.] The Italians always thought they would create a different [political] system, but I told them that nothing different would come of it, that nothing different could come out of communism. Communism was a wild utopia.

I constantly quarrelled with the political powers. They were always cutting something out of my productions. They threw me out of the theatre about four times. They found in me someone on whom they could construct their ideological struggle. They found someone whom they could continually hit.

Where did you hear that they had taken away your citizenship from you? [1984]

In London, and the BBC also came to me and told me. They [the Soviet powers] told me my office was being painted. They appointed [Anatoly] Efros [to head the Taganka], but he should not have gone. He knew me well and we had stood up to the authorities together. I helped him when they deprived him of the possibilities for working in Moscow; and we expressed our contempt for our rulers out aloud to them.

Can we say that your theatre themes were provocative? You could have chosen different themes and performed differently.

No, I couldn’t have.

Why not?

I must be a protestor! But why did they call me back? For political reasons: ‘We are good, so please come. We are open.’ [YL in reply] ‘I didn’t crawl to you. You invited me, and now, too, if you don’t like me, I can hand in my resignation’.

Did you want to come back to Russia?

I wasn’t overjoyed by the prospect. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev asked me to come back. The actors wrote to me, asking me to come back. They rang me at night, together, when I was in Washington, telling me everything had changed with [Nikolai] Gubenko, who was now in charge of the Taganka.

[Here Katerina, Lyubimov’s wife, asks if she can add something and says:

It was necessary for Gorbachev that such people as Solzhenitsyn, Lyubimov and Rostropovich come back, and, after that, Gubenko was made the Minister of Culture of the USSR. In other words, this was necessary for them and not for Lyubimov, or Rostropovich, or Solzhenitsyn. Perestroika was then underway, and the idea was to return these names to Russia.]

[Lyubimov continues] It was political. They needed us.

Do you regret having come back?

It is difficult to say. You know, working here was never great fun, and now it’s simply impossible. First of all, I’m old [94 years old], so I can choose not to work. Yet, I have more than half a century of activity behind me, and I would like to pass it into good hands and not into bad ones, which could destroy it in half a year. There is no doubt about it: they would destroy it.

[1] Maria Shevtsova is Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at the Department of Theatre and Performance, Goldsmiths, University of London. She is an invited theatre critic at the annual Golden Mask National Theatre Award and Festival in Moscow, among other festivals. She is the co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly published by Cambridge University Press, an editor of Critical Stages, and on the editorial boards of several international journals, including Polish Theatre Perspectives. Shevtsova works closely with directors and theatre companies, and her numerous publications include Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre: Process to Performance (2004), Robert Wilson (2007) and Sociology of Theatre and Performance (2009), which also reflects her theatre-criticism and theoretical concerns.

[2] Yuri Lyubimov was the long-time Artistic Director of Moscow's Taganka Theatre and a frequent critic of Soviet cultural policy. He lived in exile for many years in the latter part of his life. He was interviewed in St. Petersburg where he was honoured for his contribution to Russian and international theatre life.

Editorial Comment | The Critical Act of Conversation

(Editor) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 05:55:00 +0900

Editorial Comment | The Critical Act of Conversation

Randy Gener [1]

In perhaps the most ambitious set of artist interviews so far gathered for Critical Stages, this Interviews section ranges far and wide and traverses four continents (Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas) in search of its chosen subjects. In all of these interviews, the critics were given the task of tracking down a theatre artist whom they felt deserved to be more widely known by an international audience.

Writing from Macedonia, for example, the critic Nelko Nelkovski said that he felt compelled to interview the theatre director Srdjan Janićiević because of his “multidisciplinary approach.” “Srdjan,” Nelkovski added, “has created an interesting and authentic theatrical language.”

Writing from Africa, Dr. Ngozi Udengwu suggested several Nigerian playwright/directors whom she wanted to interview. She settled on Stella ‘Dia Oyedepo, whose work Udengwu has written about extensively in the past. “Stella is perhaps the most prolific and most commissioned playwright in Nigeria, perhaps in Africa,” Udengwu said. “She has written more than 300 plays and dance-dramas.”

Mumbai-based critic Deepa Punjani tracked down Ramu Ramanathan, whom she called “one of our most important contemporary playwrights writing in English. His latest play Comrade Kumbakharna will be performed at the upcoming Rangashankara Festival in Bangalore, after which it will tour to other cities and towns in India.” Having seen Ramanathan’s play Kashmir Kashmir during a recent trip to Gujarat, I was intrigued. How could one not refuse such a glowing recommendation?

Interviewing Teatro Praga from Lisbon, Portugal, Tiago Bartolomeu Costa had the most unusual assignment. He raved on about this collective’s “wonderful and elliptical theatre.” And then he presented me with a q&a article that was not an interview with one subject but a group response by tightly knit band. “Andre, Pedro and Ze Maria are part of the Teatro Praga, and they always answer collectively, since this is the way they work, even if Ze Maria is a dramaturg and Andre and Pedro are both actors and directors. The group has three other members: two actresses and one producer. They make no distinction in terms of their hierarchy inside the group.”

As I was gathering and editing these interviews, I was also serving as a juror of the International Theatre Festival MESS Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina. As coincidence would have it (a happenstance that German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig himself would appreciate), I was invited to take part in a German and American Media Dialogue organized by the German Embassy in Washington, D.C. back in the United States on the very same day that I was scheduled to see a Bosnian production of Schimmelpfennig’s Arabian Night, a popular work that I have previously seen in both German and English languages. I asked myself, “Is this whimsy or fate?” And it was then that I decided that I would interview this German playwright for Critical Stages.

In choosing our interview subjects, each one of us exercised an essential critical act. If as Peter Brook once said that for an artist the choice of what one works on is an artistic act in itself, I would venture that the same goes for critics who decide to confront artists with questions. Indeed, all of interviewers depart or rebel from the typical slate of questions. It is of course fascinating to see how artists from four different continents respond to a similar set of questions — their replies reveal the hidden or neglected sociopolitical issues that our so-called globalized world frequently fail to expose — but it is even more significant when the critics probe the artists further about their work, their lives and their ideas.

In the latter sense, the Romanian critic Ioana Moldovan’s interview of a legendary Romanian actor and general manager may be the most rebellious of all these interviews, because she decided to completely depart from the programmed set of questions I gave her to ask. The result is a lovely and poignant interview that remembers the Bucharest theatre of old — a poignant memory piece that says as much as about us today as it reveals so much that we might have never known about Romanian theatre, had she not decided to take a wholly alternative (and dare I say, very Romanian) interview approach.

Enjoy these conversations as much as I was thrilled to curate this Interviews section.
— Randy Gener

[1] Randy Gener is a writer, editor, critic, playwright and visual artist in New York City. His photographic installation-art piece, In the Garden of One World, recently debuted at New York’s La MaMa La Galleria. Author of Love Seats for Virginia Woolf and other Off-Broadway plays, he is the recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award, the highest accolade for dramatic criticism in the United States, and NLGJA Journalist of the Year, among numerous other awards, for his critical essays in American Theatre magazine, where he works as contributing writer. He also won a Deadline Club Award from the New York chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists for “shedding light into censorship and repression of the arts.” Gener most recently helped curate, produce and create “From the Edge,” the USITT-USA National Pavilion to the 2011 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space. His website is theaterofOneWorld.org.

“We Make the Sublime Maneuver, Constantly Putting Ourselves on the Verge of Falling” — An Interview with the Portuguese Collective Teatro Praga

(Editor) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 05:50:00 +0900

“We Make the Sublime Maneuver, Constantly Putting Ourselves on the Verge of Falling” — An Interview with the Portuguese Collective Teatro Praga

Interviewed by Tiago Bartolomeu Costa [1]

The individualities that form Teatro Praga — a group of artists who began to work together in 1995 in Portugal without a director — state that they “embrace an unrepeatable theatrical practice.” According to the company’s website, www.teatropraga.com, “They [the performers] are always different, in constant metamorphosis and subject to unpredictable variations of themselves. The group [members] find their difference and identity not in questions such as ‘What do we do? What has been done?’ but in a necessity and will to live in confrontation with the answers that arise out of those questions.”

This is how Teatro Praga describes itself and its body of work. But a curious particularity in the work of Teatro Praga is revealed when the company members are able to combine intense references that are as broad as philosophy, theatre theory, sociology and economy. The group says: “Our performances are happenings which, whilst maintaining the physical form of theatre (fiction), search for the ‘utmost responsibility of the spectator,’ i.e. the chance to find a community amidst the fictional chaos.”

What these statements mean is that throughout the years Teatro Praga has managed to prove that it is possible to conciliate a theatre that proposes a reconstruction of the theatrical hierarchy while maintaining the art form’s principal purpose — to question why do we go to the theatre. In Portugal, a country that has a very recent history of contemporary theatre (no more than 30 years) and which still suffers from a lack of visibility abroad, Teatro Praga’s discourse is able to move along the frontiers and to present itself as a political theatre in the sense that “political” means a public intervention.

What follows is a wonderful and elliptical discourse not just with one member of Teatro Praga but with the entire collective. In reply to questions posed, this group response comes from André e. Teodósio, Cláudia Jardim, José Maria Vieira Mendes and Pedro Penim — all of whom are based in Lisbon.

To emphasize this point, Teatro Praga has declined to submit to Critical Stages not your usual company portraits of its members. Instead, Teatro Praga prefers to identify itself through a company logo.

1. In your country/city, is there any major issue (e.g. a contemporary social problem) that artists fail or neglect to address on stage? Why? Is this due to censorship, or to a blind spot in the community's shared perception of the world?— or to a community’s consciously or un-consciously avoiding it?

Although I don't think that in our country artists fail or neglect any major issue as a theme for their production, I do think that the problem of their productions is due mostly to the following:

a) the way artists formalize their productions (which are mostly done as an outgrowth of anachronic tastes — they are out of sync with the zeitgeist: not old-looking, not future-looking, but the format they present is normally out of time even when the questions raised by the artists are pertinent to everyone on that exact time);

b) the themes they normally talk about are consensual (as a result, no one apparently doubts those evident truths which they are apparently fighting against); and

c) the need for a theme in a theatre production (which again levels down art into a cultural/entertainment project — which is amusing if one is into animating libraries, hospitals and so on).

So, there is no censorship, and not even a blind spot on the community's shared perception of the world. Quite the opposite: what the community is unconsciously avoiding is dissent or difference. The Portuguese theatre community is afraid of losing its notion of democracy which confuses equality with being equal! As a result, art loses terrain.

2. What, if anything, is difficult in communicating with the designers/directors/actors/playwrights? Why? How early and how often do you exchange views about the coming production? Have you designed shows yourself, and if so, does that make communication easier?

I guess that what is difficult is to find people who demand of themselves to work in a fundamental way (not in a fundamentalist way). What I mean by “fundamental” can best be understood when it is opposed to someone who's just trying to fulfill the needs of the performance (which are invisible) in the most literal way — without risk but, above all, without thought. Fundamental in the sense that the result of their actions short-circuits other people's ideas. I guess that happens due to the burden of academic teaching and the power of media heritage (as if a painter could only paint forever). For example, in their personal lives, set designers display great taste in their choices, but when they work in theatre, their designs suddenly become "theatre-like." It is still the power of Aristotelian mimesis seizing people’s habits (the democratic misunderstanding, as I mentioned above).

Because in our company we devise our work, we all have to lose all media interests and just talk about abstract notions related to the performance we are creating. That means that our communication afterward is easier (everybody is acknowledged with the performances issues) and that our process is fundamentally against disciplinary totalitarianism. Art was never about discipline — although I will not guarantee it is not about being totalitarian. (Laughs)

3. In your creative process, which part do you enjoy least? Why? How do you tackle it?

I would say presenting the performance itself. I guess we would be happy just having ideas, and building the performance until the premiere. But anyway, we tackle it by the feedback. It is always worthwhile when you have audiences who've seen you perform are then provoked to think out loud (either in happy or sad terms). So we go on.

4. During your career, have you ever received a particularly insightful piece of criticism? When, and what did it say? What made it especially important for you?

That is a hard question when the creative process itself is as critical as it can be! We are always fighting (we are like an army of thought). I guess you mean criticism in newspapers and other publications, and on television. Well, we have had all kinds of criticism. We joke about stupid texts saying bad things about us, and we are always proudly angry with bad texts that declare bad things about us. The in-betweens don't matter (good texts saying good things and good texts saying bad things — which are very rare). Of course when a good text is really good, it is important for us in the sense that the text itself contains the answer for our next production. A good text shows us where we do fall on the pattern, and that makes us want to run away and go someplace else.

5. In what way do the devised performances of Teatro Praga address the current zeitgeist? For those people outside of Portugal who have not experienced the themes/questions/issues you explore, how would you describe your work?

We always say that we are info-maniacs (we try to absorb everything that is around us). In that way we can somehow manage what we call the sublime maneuver, that is, using everything that is available to us in fragments, condensed together in one time and one space (an Event). That Event is a monster. Some call it the return of the real. We say it is a real monster that was always here, but we manage in our everyday lives to turn our eyes away from it. You may ask why should that Event be pertinent to us? Because for us that Event is responsible in our current zeitgeist for the opportunity it gives us to underpin and destroy things which are everyday being naturalized (being that naturalization is even more monstrous than the real monster). However, it is not as if we are fighting “real” with reality or fiction. We are making the sublime — we are constantly putting ourselves on the verge of falling — we leave behind nature and are heading to humanization — and vice-versa, that is, leaving behind humanization and heading to nature. Nature not in its form but in its potential power to destroy.

[1] Tiago Bartolomeu Costa is a theatre and dance critic based in Portugal, working for the newspaper Público and founder of the performing arts magazine Obscena. He is the receipient of the International Cultural Leadership Award by the British Council (2009–2010) and the International Prize for Cultural Journalism Carlos Porto (2011).

“Fear. Hope. The Life Force”: Why I Write Plays — Interview with Craig Lucas

(Editor) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 05:45:00 +0900

“Fear. Hope. The Life Force”: Why I Write Plays — Interview with Craig Lucas

Interviewed by Randy Gener [1]

CRAIG LUCAS, Playwright, Screenwriter, Film and Stage Director

Although they are realistic in character detail and plot, Craig Lucas’s fable-like plays almost always depend on the formal magic of inventive artifice and the forceful complications of dark fairy tales.

In his best-known play, Prelude to a Kiss, which he has adapted into a Hollywood film starring Meg Ryan and Alec Baldwin, a young couple, Rita and Peter, meet, fall in love and marry. At the wedding reception, a strange old man kisses Rita, and they switch souls. The man’s personality enters Rita’s body, and her personality moves into his body. Prelude to a Kiss, which premiered in 1990 at the height of the AIDS scare among gay men, fancifully deals with the sudden and unexpected onslaught of disease and the proximity of death. It is often read as an AIDS allegory. Like Prelude to a Kiss, Lucas’s screenplay to the film Longtime Companion (one of the first Hollywood films to depict gay characters in the main roles and to acknowledge the AIDS crisis in the 1980s) also centers on a kiss. One of its characters is a writer for a soap opera, and he writes a scene with a gay kiss, which is seen by a host of gay male characters and one straight woman, whose number slowly dwindles as the AIDS epidemic rages on and the plot depicts a single day for each year of the 1980s.

Another example: the plot to his 1988 play Reckless, which Lucas has also adapted into a film starring Mia Farrow, is so improbable that it speaks truthfully about the loony incoherence of life. One moment, an angelically perky housewife and mother of two boys, named Rachel, is snuggling in bed with her husband and listening to the comforting croons of Bing Crosby’s “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” Next thing you know, Rachel has accepted a ride and is speeding down the freeway, leaving behind her kids, her name, even her wedding ring, which she throws out the window. Thinking that she is having a “euphoria attack,” convinced she’s “going to be terminally happy,” Rachel learns that her guilt-ridden has hired a hit man to kill her. Panic-stricken, she is forced to flee in a housecoat and slippers and embarks on a bizarre odyssey, a tumble through a cruel wonderland as if on a perpetual freefall. “Things happen for a reason,” Rachel keeps saying in her sensible-mom way, until she is forced to ask, “Or do they?”

Considered one of America’s master dramatists, Craig Lucas was born on April 29, 1951, in Atlanta, Georgia. His mother abandoned him in a car. She left a note explaining that she could not afford to care for a baby. Eight months later, Lucas was adopted by an FBI agent who worked on that era’s communist scare investigations, and his wife, a painter who had converted to Episcopalianism from Judaism. Lucas grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs where the family later settled.

From an early age Lucas was involved in performing; he entertained patients at a children’s hospital at age 12, participated in drama clubs in school, as well as took piano and dancing lessons. Studying creative writing at Boston University, his mentor Anne Sexton advised him with his writing; she said, “Make it strange.”

Before becoming a playwright, Lucas worked as a musical-theatre performer on Broadway. In the mid-1970s, he appeared on stage in the choruses of Shenandoah, Rex, On the Twentieth Century, Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and in the lead role of the musical revue Marry Me a Little. Lucas’s plays have been produced by many leading U.S. companies including the Atlantic Theatre Company, Vineyard Theatre, Lincoln Center Theatres, the Public Theater, Long Wharf Theatre, Roundabout Theatre Company, and Intiman Theatre of Seattle where he currently is an associate artistic director. As a director, Lucas has staged Harry Kondoleon’s Saved or Destroyed (2000); Play Yourself (2002); and This Thing of Darkness (2002).

Lucas’s later works, which include The Dying Gaul, God’s Heart, The Singing Forest and Prayer for My Enemy, have become even darker in theme and execution. The latter play, for instance, grapples with the Gulf War, alcoholism and the definition of family. Lucas is also an accomplished librettist; his libretto to the musical, The Light in the Piazza, based on the novel by Elizabeth Spencer and with music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, is currently one of his most produced works in the United States.

Lucas’s next production is King Kong—Live on Stage, a new musical authorized by the estate of Merian C. Cooper (creator of King Kong and director of the 1933 film). Featuring animatronics, puppetry and circus arts, Lucas wrote the book to this show, produced by the Australian-based company Global Creatures, staged by opera director Daniel Kramer and with new music and period songs arranged by Grammy-nominated composer Marius de Vries. In an official announcement, Lucas says, “I am thrilled to be part of this project, working with a team of world-class colleagues, a producing dynamo, on a myth that speaks to man’s precarious relation to the natural world, poised as we are right now between annihilation and a slim chance of salvation.” King King will premiere at Melbourne’s Regent Theatre in early 2013.

In the past several years, Lucas has declined to give interviews to the press. This conversation is an exclusive for Critical Stages.

1) In your country, is there any major issue (for example, a contemporary social problem) that artists have failed or neglected to address on stage? Why? Is it because of censorship, or a blind spot in the community's collective perception of the world? A community’s consciously or unconsciously turning a blind eye?

What all of us are failing to note or appreciate, in my humble opinion, is that we are on the verge extinction. Hollywood and videogames seem to me to be doing the best job of making us face the true consequences of our collective actions. We are right on the brink of being done for.

What do you mean by “we are on the brink of being done for“? I mean, we’re all going to die someday. Without a doubt.

That’s a completely different thing than the end of human life.

What do you mean exactly by “true consequences of our collective actions”?

I remember in the 1970s when Americans were first told that oil was a commodity that was going to be increasingly expensive and less in existence and that the environmental effects of our addiction to oil was going to despoil the planet. And I remember all the same voices in the U.S. Congress and public life, almost exclusively Republicans, who said, “That was hysteria and everything was just fine.” It may be too late to save the earth’s atmosphere, and we may in fact die by drought and fire and warfare over dwindling food and water and arable land. With the nuclear capacities we have help to spawn and scatter around the globe, it seems more a likelihood to me than a possibility that we will die by fire and very soon. Anyone who doesn’t recognize the reality of that possible scenario is living a dream.

Every scientist I know is pessimistic. I have a friend working in Africa with non-human primate. He just wrote to me yesterday that orangutans will be the first to go, and there extinction is an absolute certainty. We are living out a fantasy if we don’t see how unstable our economic greed has made the entire world. We armed and trained and financed Osama Bin Laden and then acted surprised and outraged when he used what we have him to attack us. What kind of insanity and blindness is that?

Are you seeing a moral failing by all of humanity? Violence? War?

Yes.

Is it a Christian sort of moral failing?

Yes.

And what is this obsession of yours with videogames?

I think young people’s engagements with videogames is an attempt to find something in the physical world that they can have some effect on—any effect. It makes them feel efficacious and smart and deft, which they are. But the world no longer gives them as many options for realizing a self unless they belong to the ever-tinier subset of humans living at the very top, holding onto all the wealth and power.

What drives you to keep writing then?

Fear. Hope. The Life Force.

What is it about writing plays that speak to you deeply—that allow you take up every morning to do it, even though it is so difficult to make a living at it?

It’s an ancient art form that brings living human beings together, which is less and less the way of our world. People are more often alone with their texts and screens and LED and plasma TV screens in their air-conditioned cells while the atmosphere is getting hotter and hotter, and people are asking, “What moral failing are you talking about?”

2) What, if anything, is difficult for you in communicating with a director? Why?

I find directors ideal collaborators. I don't remember any history of feeling they don't understand or hear me correctly. I consider directors my closest colleagues, as a writer, along with actors.

How early and how often do you exchange views about the coming production?

I talk about everything all the way through the process, including years afterwards, if the conversation is welcome. Some directors are more interested in talking about the larger connections between the work and the real world. Bartlett Sher and Mark Wing-Davey and Daniel Kramer are all deeply engaged with questions of how to be in the world. Other directors have seemed to me to be more focused on how to give the audience what they think they want, and that doesn't sustain me for very long.

Having directed both in films and stage, does this fact make communication with another director easier?

Absolutely.

3) Would you say something about the language you use when writing plays and how you arrived at this language? Or what do you expect from the actors who perform your words?

I use the language that I hear. It is question of what appears through my fingers and measuring it against certain kinds of rhythms and reverberations I carry within me.

From actors I hope for a point of view, a depth of investment in the character's reality, and a willingness to speak up, to fully commit, to invite me in rather than to demonstrate and underline.

In your creative process, which bit do you enjoy least?

Opening a play in New York.

Why?

It stops being a conversation about what is being expressed and it becomes a laundry checklist of which performer was best, who's hot, what movies and TV shows they've been in, how much money they have, why the show wasn't or was as cool as this other show, and gossip, gossip, gossip about everything and anything but the subject matter of the play.

How do you tackle it?

I stop listening and do the things I care about.

In an interview by someone else you said, “I've always experienced life as a mixture of great joy and great sorrow. I was just talking to somebody about Reckless and I remembered that I was writing it while the first of my friends were dying of AIDS.” Would you mind telling me more about this experience?

Hard to put oneself back in that time, it was so unimaginably strange and new and psychotic-seeming: friends and colleagues dropping from view, suddenly gone. It was not conceivable in 1981 and 1982, when I wrote that play, that there could actually be a new virus that would spread only among homosexuals in New York City (and Haiti, and people receiving blood transfusions). It was such a wildly improbably manifestation of one’s own sense of isolation and self-hatred, i.e., internalized homophobia. How does one react to the impending sense of cataclysm while simultaneously achieving any healthy sense of self-respect while the entire culture is suggesting that one is sick and twisted and despicable for the way one was born, or for something that one did not consciously choose? It was crazy making.

You re-wrote Reckless extensively before it assumed its present form. In what ways did those events in the early 1980s affect the way you wrote or re-wrote the play?

Who ever knows? It all goes on beneath the surface, or so much of it. One is always trying to tell an engaging story but if the ship is sinking and the deck is on fire and no one is listening and everyone is acting as if everything is fine and yet you may sicken and die at any second…. It makes for a dislocated sense of reality, or, more exactly, for a sense of a reality that has come loose from anything familiar.

What can you tell me in terms of how you created Rachel as the main character of Reckless? Where did she come from?

She is part of my mother’s identity—a kind of plucky American optimism married to a potentially deadly manner of denial in the face of trauma.

4) During your career, have you received a particularly insightful piece of criticism?

Many times.

When was that?

John Lahr's review of Prayer for My Enemy in The New Yorker last year was the most eloquent appraisal of my intentions I've ever received. Routinely, Frank Rich, Robert Brustein and Michael Feingold have written appreciations of my work that have struck me to be honest attempts to engage with the heart and brains of the work rather than the icing on the cake or the pretty distractions of the actors' physiques and physiognomies.

Do you remember it well enough to quote?

Not normally.

What was so important about it?

Giving audiences a window onto the intentions and formal aspects of a new work, something that is rare and intensely valuable. What Frank Rich did for audiences while most New York critics were dismissing the composer Stephen Sondheim's earlier masterpieces.

If you were given a chance to speak directly to the critics, is there something you can say to them?

I would say: You have an incredibly important job. Don't waste it by primping or, worse, pimping your wit.

5) Will you introduce us to your most recent or upcoming work? What do you see as your future five to ten years from now?

I have a new play written for [American actors] Elizabeth Marvel and Bill Camp. I have a one-woman play I've written for Carol Kane. I am writing the books to two new musicals. And I have completed an opera with composer Nico Muhly that premieres at the English National Opera next spring and at the Metropolitan Opera after that. I have written a screenplay for Leonardo di Caprio about Timothy Leary. I have written a screenplay based on the novel The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon. I have a screenplay based on my play Small Tragedy. And I have a new screenplay, which is a science fiction romance.

In what way would you describe your most recent plays have become radically different (or the same) as your early works?

I think I am still trying to get to the heart of what it feels like to be alive right now. I’m less eager to appease an audience at once with laughs and charm. I’m more willing to challenge them, because I find that when I go to the theater or to see a film, that I want, to be respected in my intelligence and my ability to grapple with contradiction.

“Looking Back Now After Seven Decades of Theatre Activity” — An Interview with the Romanian Actor and Director Ion Lucian

(Editor) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 05:40:00 +0900

“Looking Back Now After Seven Decades of Theatre Activity” — An Interview with the Romanian Actor and Director Ion Lucian

Interviewed by Ioana Moldovan [1]

The Romanian actor and theatre director Ion Lucian was born on April 22, 1924 — a time when Romania was a different country, and its capital city, Bucharest had just begun to resemble Paris, the marvelous city that captured the imagination of Romanian high society.

The country was a monarchy, and the city’s most glamorous artery was Calea Victoriei, a strange cross between Broadway, Pennsylvania Avenue and Fifth Avenue. On Calea Victoriei was the Grand Theatre of Bucharest (later known as the National Theatre), which had been inaugurated on the last day of the year 1853. The Grand Theatre was completely destroyed on August 24, 1944 by a Luftwaffe air bombing, one day after Romania switched sides and left the military alliance with Nazi Germany.

Member of the Hall of Fame of the National Theater in Bucharest, Lucian is now 87. A legendary figure, Lucian is one of the few people still around who can talk about the glamorous days of old, when the Romanian theatre was owned and managed by private companies. His artistic maturity — which he speaks about in this interview — happened during the harsh years of communist terror in Romania.

Lucian’s escape from Communism was to fall in love with children’s theatre, a passion that materialized in the opening of two children’s theatres in Bucharest — one of them, called Excelsior, being his latest endeavor. Excelsior Theatre for Children, which was founded in April 1989, has re-opened a new building on May 4, 2011; it is the first theatre in Bucharest since the 1989 Revolution to be built completely from scratch. With a capacity of 181 seats and laid out on three floors (a total of 600 square meters usable space), Excelsior has a theatre hall and foyer situated on the first floor, balcony and booths on the second floor, and administrative offices on the third.

In 1942, during wartime, the National Theatre of Bucharest hired you as actor. How does a young man end up in a theatre when the world is crumbling down all around him?

My beginnings in theatre were the game of fate. Looking back now after seven decades of theatre activity, I think this is the right approach to the matter. Although it was a happy encounter right from the start, I was interested in theatre only because it was a way of earning some money. You see, my father wanted me to become an engineer. But on September 7, 1940, Romania had to give up Cadrilater, a territory located in between the Danube and the Black Sea. It became part of Bulgaria. My father was trapped there and could not return home to Bucharest. Being a young man, I’ve felt I had to contribute to the financial stability of my family until his return. So I applied for a job as an extra for the National Theatre. Everything was going smoothly until one day the Minister of Education, Petru Andrei, gave an order that high-school students were banned from entering places where sport events, cinema and theatre happened. His order was forced by a terrible crime committed by a schoolmate of mine from Lazar High who killed a teacher in cold blood. It wasn’t a political crime, it wasn’t a hate crime, just a moment of madness that came upon my mate and that forced the officials to press for urgent and strict acts. It was the end of 1940, and I found myself unable to go to theatre and earn my honest living due to a very harsh decree that was banning my presence in the theatre.

The financial stability of my family was in jeopardy, and I had to find a way to keep going to the theatre, but in a legal way. Soon I found out that the Conservatoire (the academic institution that was training actors and actresses) was awarding student IDs even without having graduated from high school, the only requirement being to pass the entrance exam. So I went to the Conservatoire, and I passed the exam. This changed my life completely. During my first year as an acting student, the National Theatre needed five new actors as Romania entered the war (June 22, 1941); some actors of the theatre decided to join the army. So they were short on actors! But I was not allowed to attend that casting, as I was only a first-year student. The casting was for final-year acting students and those who graduated within five years.

On the day of the casting, George Calboreanu (great Romanian film and theatre actor, 1896–1986), saw me, and as everyone there knew me as the young kid of the company, he asked me why I was not trying my hand on the casting, too. I told him I was not allowed due to my age and early stage of studies. He thought otherwise and intervened on my behalf. So I was allowed to try. The jury was made of Liviu Rebreanu (president, great Romanian novelist), Maria Filotti, Marioara Voiculescu, Ion Manolescu, George Calboreanu and Pop Martian (all great actors). I placed third, out of 136 wannabes. The fact that I was selected without having received a proper acting training for more than a few months encouraged me to keep on following the acting/theatre path. I was hired in 1942; I was almost 18 years old, and during the first three seasons I was cast in 74 different performances. My greatest exit then was being awarded the part of Hlestakov in Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General directed by Ion Sahighian.

What did it mean to be an actor in wartime working for the most prestigious theatre establishment in the country?

It meant a lot. Getting hired by the National Theatre, as in any theatre of those times, was a difficult thing, but the real competition started once you were hired. One success meant all eyes were on you. Romanian theatre then, as now, did not function with the help of agents. But we had a marvelous group of theatre critics who would not miss a talent and would write in support of anyone they spotted, lobbying for them publicly. If you had a second success as an actor, the theatre managers began to inquire about you. If you succeeded a third time in a production, that was when serious negotiations begin. You were regarded an established actor only after nine or 10 great consecutive successes. But if the 10th production was a failure, you had to consider starting all over again, as people in the business were quick to bury you; they would say you had disappointed everyone or that you might not have star qualities after all.

How was the theatre public then?

Bucharest had 1,000,000 inhabitants and 22 theatres — all but one owned by the state. All the rest were private businesses, and the theatres were filled to capacity every night. Romanians have since then been forever in love with theatre. That’s why we’ve always had great theatre and great performances that could stand in competition with any other acting school in the world. Romanians are the only people who have given five sociétér[2] for La Comédie-Française. We were the only nation granted this privilege of having Romanian actors awarded memberships with La Comédie-Française. Romania was on the map for any serious theatre company in Europe; every summer, a great European actor was having a grand tour in Romania, stopping over in Bucharest.

During wartime, I remember the theatres were packed. Cinemas were popular at the time, too, but people were more attracted to theatre, as they loved the live proximity to actors. This is why during the war, despite the air raids and bombardments, the theatres were packed. Theatre was a nonstop activity in those days. In 1944, after the National Theatre’s building was bombarded, the actors were split into three smaller companies, and they toured the villages around Bucharest.

Since there was no such thing as a National Theatre at the time, which path did you take?

After three seasons, at the age of 21, I had the honor to see my name printed in neon letters as big as my body on the buildings next to the Athénée Palace, the most famous hotel in Bucharest then (and nowadays, too). My name was next to the name of Maria Tanase, the great Romanian music legend. We were cast in a Noël Coward play together. All theatres were interested in me, but I chose to go to Budapest to make a film. When I returned in the beginning of the 1945/1946 season, the only place I could find work at was at the Operetta Alhambra Theatre, where I worked for the next two years (1945 to 1947).

And what happened to the film?

The film was a flop, but I was interested in that experience. It was my debut in a film directed by a Romanian from Timisoara. The director rented the film studio in Budapest and filmed three versions of it: one in Romanian, one in Hungarian and one in German. In all three films, the leading lady was his daughter. I did not care too much about these arrangements, as being part of that film project put me into the proximity of such actors as Theo Lingen (1903–1978) who had my part in the German version and was an actor in more than 100 roles in films, half of those in films directed by him. The part I portrayed was played in the Hungarian version by Latabár Kálmán. Lingen was interested in me as an actor, and he showed me a few tricks. My film training on the set lasted for three and a half months. So at my return in Bucharest, the season was on, and only the Operetta Alhambra had work I could take. But I see that as another fortunate kick, as I can say about myself I’ve performed in all genres of theatre.

What can you say about theatre before and after the Second World War?

I remember that almost all the foreign playwrights would visit to see the opening nights of their plays in Bucharest. A lot of them were so excited about what they saw that eventually they took the Romanian productions of their plays on European tours. Those were good times, when Romanian actors could afford a month of vacation in Paris, even if we all were low-income people. All of us were having these trips for artistic reasons, to tour Paris’s artistic scene, to get inspired and discover new texts and playwrights. It was a time of great cultural effervescence.

Romanians have lost a great deal due to Communism. Even through the Second World War and the German Occupation, we could still manage as theatre professionals. The German-imposed theatre repertoire was of high quality. In late the 1940s and 1950s, the communists forced us to play only a limited number of texts and authors. But this forced us to be better at acting, as revenge for what we could not perform. We’ve developed a whole new way of acting, the how-we-wanted way. Communists loved theatre, but they did not figure that protecting the theatre they’ve protected an institution that fought for the moral well-being of the nation. Under communism, theatre was the star of the Romanian culture.

Can you recall how it happened: the nationalization of private theatre companies?

In 1945 we still had private theatre companies. In the autumn of 1945, it was decided that all theatre would become state-owned, and so in 1947 there were no private companies anymore. The masters have changed overnight! In 1947, I was freed from my contract with the Operetta Alhambra. I was a bit worried about my future. One day I received a called from Mrs. Lucia Sturdza-Bulandra who was designated to establish the first communist theatre: the Municipality’s Theatre. Mrs. Bulandra had two lieutenants, her helpers, both with strong communist pasts: Jules Cazaban and Beate Fredanov. She called me and told me she wanted me to join the new company. The only thing still in question was my fee. We started to negotiate. Inflation was starting, so I suggested that I be paid with the equivalent of 20 seats for every night I was performing. Mrs. Bulandra went to the Mayor of Bucharest, General Victor Dombrovski, to see if my request would pass. The theatre belonged to the municipality now, so he had a word in any decision. He laughed at my proposal and apparently he said: “Mrs. Bulandra, let it be his way as he is a smart fellow! But feel free to keep negotiating the number of the seats involved!” So from 20 seats, we came down to 10 seats.

All of this happened on August 13, 1947, and everyone was curious about the price of the seat (or the ticket price). On August 15, 1947, the Romanian economy had to face a drastic monetary instability. The Bulandra Company settled the cost of its theatre ticket to 125 lei per evening. [Author’s note: Due to inflation, new monies were issued. No matter how much money one had, everyone was entitled to only 150 lei. No changing of old money was allowed. Overnight, people lost everything. Bulandra’s 125 lei ticket price was pretty much the amount of money people received from the state.] My deal made me the most well-paid actor of the theatre, earning almost double than Mrs. Bulandra, the theatre manager. And this went on for almost a year! Then the mayor of Bucharest invited me to pay him a visit and advised me to sign a regular contract and submit to a monthly salary, no matter how many nights a month I would perform. So I did. I stayed with the Municipality’s Theatre until 1952.

How did you get involved with children’s theatre?

I am considered a real theatre founder, as I was part of the artistic crew that established the Municipality’s theatre in 1947, Nottara Theatre in 1952, the Comedy Theatre in 1960, “Ion Creanga” Theatre for Children in 1964, and in April 1989, I established Excelsior Theatre, another theatre for children. In 1964, the Municipality’s theatre had a Soviet play for children entitled Natasha and the Bear. One of the actors, a Mr. Dabija, was a great joker, and he was arrested for an innocent joke that offended the political regime. The next day the play was due to be performed, so Mrs. Bulandra asked me to fill in the last moment. For me it was a life-changing moment, as I fell in love with the public, all made of children. I’ve felt their love and seen their honest and warm reactions. I’ve found in the audience made of children something an adult public can’t offer to actors. So this has affected me, and I was happy when Mrs. Bulandra started to ask me to direct theatre plays for children.

Then in 1964, the Bulandra Theatre Company was placed at the theatre hall of St. Sava College in Bucharest until the renovation work at the headquarters of the company was completed. But Mr. Miron Constantinescu, the former Minister of Education, gave Bulandra the college hall with the condition that they do something in return: the promise of a children’s performance on June 1 that same year. Mrs. Bulandra forgot about it completely. On May 4, she received a call from the minister, reminding her about the children’s play. It was too short a time to stage one of the Romanian stories for children that made up the season of such children’s theatre events, so all I could think about was to write a simple play. I wrote it in five nights with the thought that it would be performed only for one night! But the play I wrote, entitled The Disobedient Cockerel, has been performed ever since without interruption for 54 years now. It has been translated into eight different languages. This was the final act that completely changed my life; it reoriented me towards young audiences.

You are a custodian of the next generation of theatre audiences. How do you see them? What do you think about the future of theatre generally?

What’s to come in Romanian theatre after my generation is gone is something I am asked constantly. I think Romanians have a great future in theatre, and I truly believe each generation has its uncontestable amount of talented people. All theatre people are trying to find new ways to express artistically. But I think 80 percent of all theatre experiments are parallel to the real thing and end up as a research papers in a library! I sense we’ve reached the point of the mechanization of the soul, when one pushes a button and one gets theatre. Now things are so different. No sooner than 30 years ago, when someone had tickets to a theatre performance, there was a whole ritual of dressing up with one‘s best clothing, showing up to the theatre and entering it as in a temple — almost a mystical experience. Now I feel people go to theatre in between a cinema break. It’s not right to see Chekhov’s Three Sisters with the actresses dressed as if they were circus people and asked by the director to use the samovar only for peeing in it. I want to see theatre that changes me, that makes me walk the streets afterwards in search of an answer! I am happy when I see a performance executed in good faith, with respect to the audience, playwright and the text. Experiments do not make me happy, just as I don’t agree with the politics of theatre.

[1] Ioana Moldovan,34,has been a member of the Romanian Section of the International Association of theatre Critics since March 2007. She is a theatre critic for Revista 22, a political weekly magazine. Since March 2007 she has been a member of the professorial staff of the “I. L. Caragiale” National University of Theatre and Cinematographic Arts in Bucharest – Department of theatre Studies, Cultural Management and theatre Journalism. Between 2006 and 2009, she was involved with ACT theatre in Bucharest, the first independent theatre stage in Romania, where she served as a cultural manager. She is also a 2010-2011 Fulbright Junior Grantee with the University of Southern California–School of theatre, in Los Angeles, where she pursued research on the topic of “Open Society Theatre.”

[2] Sociétérs are members of an artistic community. For actors, this designation means to be so highly regarded that the theatre would pay their salaries for the rest of their lives or get a share of all the theatre's income. It's the ultimate gesture of recognition and appreciation for an actor.

“That Point in the Drama Where It Starts to Hurt, That's Where the Work Gets Interesting” — Interview with Roland Schimmelpfenning, German Playwright and Director

(Editor) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 05:35:00 +0900

“That Point in the Drama Where It Starts to Hurt, That's Where the Work Gets Interesting” — Interview with Roland Schimmelpfenning, German Playwright and Director

Interviewed by Randy Gener [1]

Thanks to a growing international reputation, German-language stages may now claim a new star on their marquees: a popular new dramatist who has taken his place alongside such favorites as Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller and Ibsen. His name is Roland Schimmelpfennig, a 44-year-old Berlin-based author and director, who is one of the most prolific and heralded young dramatists in Europe. At age 38, he had already written 16 plays that have been translated into 20 languages. In the summer of 2010, he was awarded the Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis, regarded as the highest honor for a playwright in the German language. Previous winners include Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek and East German playwright Heiner Müller.

Born at Göttingen in 1967, Schimmelpfennig first worked as a freelance journalist and author in Istanbul before starting to study as a theatre director in Munich's Otto Falkenberg School in 1990. Then he became an assistant director and later a member of the artistic team at Munich's Kammerspiele. At present he is house playwright of the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. Schimmelpfennig lives in the Prenzlauer Berg section of eastern Berlin, with his wife, the playwright Justine del Corte, and his two children.

The following interview was conducted a couple of hours before the November opening The Golden Dragon, which had its U.S. premiere at the Studio Theater in Washington, D.C. Schimmelpfennig joined me, along with Peter Kümmel, theater critic for the newspaper Die Zeit, and Peter Michalzik, journalist and theater critic for the newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau, all of whom flew from Germany. Together we all participated in the first-ever German and American Media Dialogue, a symposium organized by the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany. The Media Dialogue was an initiative that launched a sustained dialogue among theater critics between the two countries. It took place at the Goethe-Institut Washington.

Without question, Schimmelpfennig’s most famous work is the 2001 play Die arabische Nacht (Arabian Night), an absurdist and intricately plotted drama in which five characters experience an erotic urban fantasy in a nondescript housing project somewhere in Germany. One of the fascinating qualities of this glass-menagerie of a fanciful play, which opened at the Staatstheater in Stuttgart, is the way the author springs his characters into coincidences that ensure they all come into contact with one other, or at least spur memories of such contact in an otherworldly realm of mystery.

Such leaps of fancy are deployed in The Golden Dragon, which won all major German-language theatre awards since it premiered in the fall of 2009 at in Vienna and has since had over 40 productions worldwide. Taking place in the cramped kitchen of an Asian restaurant, where four cooks pull the tooth of a young Chinese co-worker, the play whimsically depicts how that tooth ends up in the Thai soup of a flight attendant, whose existential crisis becomes dramatically linked to the alienated lives of the 15 characters using brief and surprisingly comic scenes, thus suggesting a connection that they themselves rarely recognize. In a sense, The Golden Dragon is about illegal immigration and human trafficking, but this political theme of the lack of rights of illegal immigrants is depicted in a kaleidoscopic fashion and from varied perspectives. The social drama is served in morsels that are poetic, dream-like, brutal but enigmatic, filled with bitterness and poignant desire.

In Berlin (or maybe in Germany as well), the big issue has been the situation of immigrants: what we call integration. We are confronted now with a situation where we can see that, after 30 or 40 years of immigration, not all of the immigrant workers mingled or integrated with the German society, because they were supposed to go back to their countries; that's why they were hired. Of course, they did not go back to their native lands, and they had brought their families over to Berlin, luckily, and they are now part of the German society. This situation is not comparable with the American situation. The immigrant situation in Germany or maybe in all of Europe is something special and something that has yet to be dealt with onstage.

I see now, in the last year or 15 months, that other cultures are dealing with that immigrant problem. I see a few Turkish immigrant theatre-makers who have started to reflect on their situation; they are writing their own plays, which is very impressive. To be clear, I think there may be some writers in Germany who are probably touching on the immigrant issue by now, but it always takes time to hear their writings onstage. We will maybe see their plays in a year, if they are fast. Even if you write a play, you have to find a theatre that wants to produce it. Unless you have your own company, or you have a group of people who can put on a production very quickly. Theatre is so slow, which is what makes it difficult for theatre to deal with daily political problems. But there are advantages in that [deliberate pace] as well.

I'd say there is not yet a play about the financial situation in Europe or in Germany, which is of course not a city-related problem but a global problem. That is something that would be very interesting to write about: to write about money. But the issue is also very difficult to grasp, because it is such an abstract thing. You would have to find a way to get back to the human factor: to tell a story about money, not only talk about money

2. What, if anything, is difficult in communicating with the designers/directors/actors/playwrights? Why?

Working with German directors can be very difficult. I often have the feeling, which is maybe is a German phenomenon, that German directors are more interested in their own images than in the core of the play or in that point in the drama where it starts to hurt; that's where the work gets interesting to me). It so happens that German directors are very superficial with actors; they don't see the plays for itself; they are fascinated by the performer or the pretty way of lighting or the different airs of whatever. That's always the problem — to communicate what I think is the depth of it all. German directors can be very arrogant. They are spoiled. They have been very successful in the 1980s and 1990s with the traditional regietheater, so you don't always find the right director who really wants to follow the play. This is something that has never happened abroad, for example; it is something that would not be possible in the U.S. or in England, where the situation is still the other way around.

I have been lucky, because I have been working with Jürgen Gosch who is a very important and influential director who does not work in the regietheatre mode. Even when he deals freely with the text, he always cuts to the heart of it. He does not try to be smarter than the play. Recently, I have been directing some of my plays myself, and that's been an interesting experience.

When you do find a director who is indeed simpatico with your dramaturgy, how early and how often do you exchange views about the coming production?

If that point is clear [if there is an agreement with the playwright and the director], I don’t have to communicate very much to the director, because I hand over the work to him or her. That's the nice thing about it. In the ideal state, even if you write the play by yourself in a cabin and then you give it away, the play is out in the world, and then it is left up to other people to go through with it.

How often do you exchange views with the director?

It depends. Usually, if they are interested at all, there is a meeting one or two months before the rehearsals or before the production starts. Sometime I attend the first or the first two rehearsals, but that is something I have avoided more and more, because usually everybody is tense, and nobody has had yet the experience to ask the real questions about the play. I am just being a pest. I feel useless. If everything goes smoothly, I will maybe go up maybe two days before the opening.

What if you want to make changes before the opening?

I tried that once; I did not succeed. Usually if they are on track, you can't do much about it. Unless they really damaged the play which luckily has not been the case.

So have you directed shows yourself, which I suppose does make that make communication during production easier?

For example, with the very first production of The Golden Dragon, I thought I was so secure and I was so smart. I know it all, I know how it works, I just have to go there and do it. On the first day of rehearsal, I started to sweat. I realized, This is really difficult. I just can't do it just in my head. I need these actors; I need their inspiration. You can't do it by yourself. I directed the premiere of The Golden Dragon in Vienna at the Akademietheater [a smaller, early-20th-century house, the second stage of Vienna’s legendary 19th-century Burgtheater]. It was during the opening of the new Burgtheater when the German director Matthias Hartmann took over the artistic director in 2009. He took over as boss. Hartmann started in the Burg with an epic production of Faust; I started at the Akademietheater with Golden Dragon. It was a luxurious situation because he was had the heavyweight, big-budget super-project, and I was coming in his shadow. We had lots of success with The Golden Dragon; he didn’t. We were sort of the underdog, which is a very good position.

After The Golden Dragon, I premiered this play, Peggy Pickit Sees the Face of God, in Toronto; I directed that play in Vienna, too. In December 2011, I am going back to start rehearsals on a new play, The Flying Child, about a man who doesn’t realize it but he drives over his own little boy with his new car. He is in a rush; it’s dark, and he goes down the road, and he just touches the kid, he bumps the child, and the kids goes flying in the air. It tells this terrible and horrible story; it is going to be a very interesting production; it's like a big chorus.

3. In your creative process, which part do you enjoy least? Why? How do you tackle it?

Let me describe it to you. First you have an idea for a play. You walk around with this idea for months and sometimes even years until I get to the point where I really know how I want to do it. But this moment — it can happen one morning when you get up and you're in the shower and, plunk, the idea gets into your head and you know how it all works out — this is the point which you cannot plan. You can work on the concept, but there is this final kiss of inspiration that you just have to wait for. That's painful because you really can't push it, and it can really take a while, and that makes me very nervous. Once you are over that point, you get into the second phase where things go very smoothly until let’s say two-thirds of the process of the writing is finished and then usually then you come to last and hardest of the surprises — all this bullshit of "yes" or "no" — and you have to go through that process, and then you are over it.

What do you mean by “yes” or “no”?

There is always a point when I ask myself, "Is this really good enough, what I am doing?" That is something nobody can answer for your. It is something you have to find out by yourself. You can walk around and say, Please read it and tell me if it is really good. But finally, that question is something you have to really find out for yourself. I have to be happy with it in the end. If it is a success or not, I have to be the one who says, “This is really what I had wanted to do.” That is always a barbaric situation because that forces you to achieve a level of honesty about yourself. Once the play is finished, it is pretty amazing; as soon as it is completed, the whole play is for me untouchable. It is gone. I can hand it over to the director. I would never change a word anymore. It is out there, living its own independent life.

You describe very well that part which you enjoy the least. So how you do you deal with it?

I used to have some techniques. Usually it’s about entertainment. In the moment of worst crises, I tend to go to see blockbuster movies just to sort of blast my head away. That’s one possible technique which I haven’t done for a long time. A reduction of sleep is very good, too: getting up very early. Less poison or more poison — whatever — you can work with that as well. The most basic thing I've found out is you have to sit there and stare at the paper and don’t run away from it. It is possibly the most effective way.

4. During your career, have you ever received a particularly insightful piece of criticism? When, and what did it say? What made it especially important for you?

It was not really criticism. but it was something that I worked out and which took me sometime. The “criticism” has something to do with social relevance. I think we had a dinner party with friends of mine. My wife is a writer herself, and she had been writing a version of Medea. And we started to discuss Medea and our conversations became more general: touching my work and touching her work. And then it came up, this insight: that the work must cut through the society — that the greatest writers like Shakespeare always deal with all classes in one play — and that was a key moment for me, something I did not realize before. This cutting-through-the-society was something I had not always integrated in my own work. At that point, after that conversation, something changed inside of me. It was not conscious, maybe it was unconscious, but I started to write in a different manner. Afterwards, I wrote Arabian Night, which coincidentally became my big breakthrough play. Since then, this [theme or approach] became a permanently returning issue in my plays.

5. Why are you a playwright?

A good question. I think in dialogue. It is something that comes naturally to me. My whole perspective of the world is immeditely transferred into a theatrical point of view. I observe people. I listen to parts of conversations in the subway, and it immediately turns into a scene. I can't help it. Lately, I have been working on a novel. I had been writing little pieces of prose. This time the work is bigger, and it [writing a novel] really feels awkward in a way that I have never felt when I write drama. I feel like I am walking in somebody else's shoes. It is really bizarre.

6. Do you see yourself as documenter? A chronicler? A social critic?

No, I don't see myself as documenter. There is too much of let's call it magic realism or fantasy in my work. I always have this little itch where I just want to jump into another level, to somewhere that is surreal. My plays are not documentaries. Of course, I am trying to figure out the major issues of our time, and not just to create my own little fantasy world here. What I do is some sort of echo of the world that I live in, or however I can conceive it in a way. It's not only about me, me, me — it is about me and the others.

7. I like to think of what you do in your plays as leaps of fancy. What is the function of these leaps of fancy, or what you call magic realism?

It often helps to sketch the real world and observe it in a sharper way. Let's look at Arabian Night: although it has all this magic realism or surreal elements, this play basically deals with the sad, daily routines of a woman who can't escape her own fate; she leads a monotonous life. The only whole thing around it is to just focus on that existence, and that's why I like the tools of fantasy. The dramatic action in Arabian Night is a little bit the same thing in The Golden Dragon. In the second play, if I did not have this fantastic tale of the tooth in the soup bowl, which is of course not very realistic, I would not be able to connect as quickly the lives of the sick Chinese and the flight attendant [two characters who do not belong in the same social worlds]. Using this tool, they can connect very quickly, so that's a very powerful tool. It is also a very entertaining tool, something that gives me freedom and also a focus.

8. The word "global" has been used to describe your plays. You also identify yourself as a German writer. Do you see yourself as a global writer?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. There are plays like Push Up 123 and Arabian Night which are global pieces of writing. When I wrote Push Up 123, I had in mind that it should be possible for other cultures and other countries to follow it, so it is not a local play. I have nothing against local plays, but this one was designed to work in London, in Paris or wherever. Luckily, amazingly, it really happened; it has been performed in Chile and all over.

Another successful play of mine, the 2004 drama Die Frau von Frueher (The Woman Before or The Women from the Past (depending on how the title is translated) — it was produced in New York City where it was directed by Daniel Fish; it was a very strange production — in the case of this particular play, I had no idea that it would have an international career. Then I saw a reading of it in Istanbul, and I saw a production of it in Tokyo. The views of these two very different cultures are very different. In a Muslim country the whole idea of faith and marriage is different and perhaps more traditional than in Germany. I have no idea of the concept of it in Tokyo. That was not an international play, but it became an international play.

Other plays of mine are too big, have too many characters (some have 30 or 32 characters), are too complicated and maybe too German so they can't travel as easily everywhere, and you can't do them in the free market.... Let me correct myself. I don't think I have ever really written a particularly German play. I have not yet worked on a German play; I would like to do one though, about the Holocaust, Auschwitz in particular. But maybe that one is not going to be a really German play once it is written. I don't know yet; it's one of those ideas that I walk around with in my head.

9. Wow, the Holocaust in your mind. Earlier in our conversation, you spoke of the phrase "when it starts to hurt" and you talk about this notion of depth. In terms of understanding how you view your own work as a dramatist, these ideas seems key. Can you explain?

I want to touch people, not in a cheesy way, but I really want to make them identify with what is going on onstage, especially if you tell the story of the underdog like I did in The Golden Dragon and Arabian Night. I want the audience to participate in a real way; I don’t want them to just nod and agree, “I know. Life is hard.” I want the plays to achieve more, and that's the important thing. I want to seduce the audience to really get into it. That is only possible in the theatre if there is a certain amount of truth, and if there is truth, there is pain as well.

10. Do you feel that the fact of being borne in a divided Europe, although this is not the main subject of your works, that aspect of it is almost always present in your work?

It is present. And it is not only the idea of a divided Europe that is present, but German history is very present in a way. Sometimes German history is not visible on the first or second sight, but I carry it around with me. And it is still there even when we are freer and more free-minded — but it is the shadow or let’s say this consciousness about our positions is always present. Always in my work, there is always a certain mistrust. For example, in Push Up 123, this new corporate generation is portrayed and satirized in the new economy for their seemingly different styles — but you see that underneath the working lives of these people lies very high amount of oppression and an archaic, hierarchical world. Even though things seem to be very different and modern today, that play describes a very cruel and archaic world. The Golden Dragon in a way is a global play, but it also gets down to the very heart of it, which concerns personal needs, personal problems fears and pains.

Many of my generation in Germany will probably will not see themselves as a freer and more international generation, but I totally agree that being born in a divided Germany, everything has now changed so much after 1989. Now we live in a European or let’s say an international world which is much, much wider than it was before in Germany. Even now with Europe going through a difficult and deteriorating phase, I think that this generation is something that has never existed in Germany before: young people who can speak languages, who can travel, who are open-minded, who are free of all the old shit. I don't know if this is because of the Internet or the state of pop culture after 1968, but there has been a big change, and that is what makes it very interesting to write in these days.

11. Of the plays you've written, which one would you say is your most personal work?

There are two plays that I would call my personal favorites. There is one play that not been translated called Angebot und Nachfrage (Supply and Demand). It is a two-character play about two unemployed actors, a young woman and an older guy. They don’t get jobs anymore, like a lot of friends of mine who work as actors. They are trying to survive. What do you do if you are born an actor and nobody wants to look at you anymore? It is a very sad experience. That is one of my personal favorites. Another one also has not been translated, and it is entitled Calypso, about two couples in a drunken evening somewhere in a city like Hamburg. That play has a lot to do with me and my personal fears.

12. Are you satisfied with your evolution as a playwright?

I am never really satisfied; that is something one can see in my work. I always try to look for something new. I have never tried to follow the same track; especially if you look at the plays in a chronological fashion, you will find always these are plays work like opposite magnets. They don't resemble each other. Golden Dragon has a certain resemblance to Arabian Nights in terms of technique, because they are narrated theatre where the actors make contact with thr audience and just tell the story in order to make things happen in the audience’s imagination — things that can’t be shown. In Arabian Night, for example, you have a man who is transformed into this little person in a bottle sitting in the sofa, and there is a caretaker who is suddenly standing in the desert.

On the other hand, The Golden Dragon has nothing to do with Arabian Night. There are 10 years in between the writing of these plays. There has been a lot of evolution. The Golden Dragon is the more political play. It cuts through society from top to bottom. It is simply written by a man who is 10 years older. If I take a look at the four or five early plays that were internationally successful, you can see that I like to go back to sofa plays or office dramas with old-school dialogue. I have to free myself after I have written the play to go as far away from it as I can. I always try to raise a certain energy, a certain amount of pain as in The Golden Dragon, to really get to the bottom of things as fast as I can. This is what links those internationally successful plays, although they are in fact very different works.

[1] Randy Gener is a writer, editor, critic, and artist in New York City. He represented the U.S. media in the first-ever German and American Media Dialogue, a symposium organized by the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany and launched as a sustained dialogue among theater critics between the two countries. Author of Love Seats for Virginia Woolf and other Off-Broadway plays, Gener is the recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award, the highest accolade for dramatic criticism in the United States, and NLGJA Journalist of the Year, among numerous other awards, for his critical essays in American Theatre magazine, where he works as contributing writer. He also won a Deadline Club Award from the New York chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists for “shedding light into censorship and repression of the arts.” Gener most recently helped curate, produce and create “From the Edge,” the USITT-USA National Pavilion to the 2011 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space. His website is theaterofOneWorld.org.

“I Believe in a Theatre That Lives and Breathes Like a Rock 'n' Roll Band” — Interview with Srdjan Janićijević, Macedonian Theatre Director

(Editor) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 05:30:00 +0900

“I Believe in a Theatre That Lives and Breathes Like a Rock 'n' Roll Band” — Interview with Srdjan Janićijević, Macedonian Theatre Director

Interviewed by Nelko Nelkovski [1]

Srdjan Janićijević (born in 1970) is a Macedonian theatre director from the middle generation who, with his fresh way of thinking and his innovative approaches, plays an important role in late postmodern theatre in the Republic of Macedonia.

To understand the breadth and the versatility of his work, the following roundup breaks down his creative contributions to recent major productions:

2011 — Scheherazade: A Black Comedy in 1001 Minutes — Writer, Director, Set Design & Video

2010 — Don’t You Faust Me — Writer, Director, Video & Set Design

2008 — Dracula by Dejan Murkowski — Director, Set Design & Co-composer with Pogan Pagan

2005 — Cupidona: Punk Opera — Writer, Director & Composer

2004 — The People Next Door by Henry Adam foe the Albanian Theatre in Skopje — Director & Video

2001 — Pavilions by Milena Markova — Translator & Director

1999 — Shopping & F*** by Mark Ravenhill for the Macedonian National Theatre in Skopje — Translator & Director

1993 — Pea Grain and the Princess, a puppet performance — Director

Videos of Janićijević’s directing work can be viewed on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/srgian

As a child, Janićijević began his education in Skopje, where he attended what was at the time the only state-owned institution, the Faculty of Dramatic Arts of Ss. Ciryle and Methodius University, where he took classes in intermedial directing (which includes theatre, film, television and radio). He showed a special interest in painting in high school and studied the fine arts for two years.

Janićijević’s interests are many, and he has since become an important representative of recent Macedonian art scene. Janićijević is a fixture in the music scene as the composer and band leader of Pogan Pagan. Working in film and television, he creates original cartoons that reflect his sense of adventure and fresh spirit; those cartoons can be viewed online at http://srgian.w.com.mk/. Recently Janićijević has recently turned his attention to writing plays, and he regularly writes for films, commercials, campaigns and other events.

Still, Janićijević’s primary artistic activity is directing. The wide-ranging aspects he has displayed in various fields of artistic endeavors form part of a signature, a language and a habit. His presences in Macedonia’s particularly bright contemporary art scene, music scene and theatre scene mark him as one of the most important theatrical directors of our time.

In the following interview, Srdjan Janićijević responded to a wide range of issues. His views, attitudes and approaches accurately describe the current theatrical moment in the Republic Macedonia. And it is from this perspective that he builds an extremely interesting and authentic theatrical language.

1. In your country / city, is there a problem (e.g. contemporary social problem) artists fail or neglect to show on the scene? Why? Whether this is due to censorship, or is it a blind spot in the common perception of the world community - and community-conscious or consciously avoided it?

Macedonia has long been a fairly closed boundary, politically (the European Union’s so-called Schengen wall) and economically. Its isolation has confined its citizens in a fairly small space, and occasionally tendencies of self-isolation appear as a counter-reaction to this situation. The modern world suffocates in its own political, economic and ethical absurdities, like a fish quivering on dry soil, and we, Balkans, enter this modern world with a rather reluctant spirit, exhausted from our own (Balkan) problems, and with a different mindset.

This leads to the self-isolation. We suddenly woke up out of our nightmares to enter another nightmarish reality. This makes us a little autistic toward the global zeitgeist. It is a pretty unhealthy environment for any attempt of vital art. On the one hand, we frequently see so-called “art” maintained by local political principles still contaminated with “Balkan mindset.” But this “art” which massively occupies the cultural scene is nothing more than a clumsy and vulgarly assembled political pamphlet. This “art” leaves a narrow space for critical and independent viewpoints on real problems. On the other hand, there exist fully autistic forms of “dead" art, which essentially nobody touches. Of course, there are wonderful exceptions to this, but unfortunately they have proven to be either too late or short-lived. Frequently I wonder why most of my performances, even though they are popular, have been taken off the repertoire. Perhaps the answer lies here somewhere.

2. What is difficult or complicated for you in communicating with the designers/actors/playwrights/directors? And why?

I believe in synergy, a theatre that lives and breathes like a rock 'n' roll band. The energy, passion, intellect and diversity of each member of my team are very important for the vibrancy of my performances. Therefore, with the artistic and technical part of the team for most of my projects, I rarely have a problem. I have had creative and aesthetic differences at certain moments with various individuals, but for me they all are part of that synergy.

The general problem is always the production. Normally it needs funds, and funds are not easily obtained, especially if the projects greatly differ from the norm in terms of aesthetics and from an ethical standpoint. My performances have no problem with audience attendance. There are audiences who are eager for a different theatre attitude. That in itself should facilitate my production — but it doesn’t happen. Instead, too often, when I finish the project and the performance has its premiere, those who ought to be the most responsible for the production’s life after its opening relate entirely contrary to the logic of production — they show no interest in managing it. This attitude is probably a leftover of the extensive transition of Macedonian society. I do not think our government takes modest actions for culture, on the contrary, but there is a problem with the management of those cultural assets. So the answer is: I have very complicated communication with producers or managers, because routinely they are unconcerned with their own productions, which I find very odd.

How early and how often do you exchange thoughts with them for your next show?

It depends. I'm a director who attends almost all my performances after the opening night. Normally it binds me more with the team, but sometimes I’m very selfish in a way of keeping ideas for future projects. I do not want to burden anyone with my own possible plans for something that I did not exploit entirely. But even when my theatrical ideas are full-blown, I want sometimes to live alone and self-seeking within that world.

Have you worked a designer of your performance yourself and if so, does it facilitate the preparation of the play?

I am rarely interested in realistic set-design. It is a part of the whole concept and context that bring the performances I work on to a deeper aesthetic and essential intensity. For me, the stage is also an actor, a partner of the actors. I see the set-design as a part of the game where space plays along with the actors; it is not just a space where actors perform in. In the last three projects I worked alone on the set-design. It is very handy for the production, because in the very early phase of staging the performance you know the space you have to occupy.

In most other cases, however, you are limited to what someone else can bring as a part of the team, as a bright idea. Without a set designer you’re restricting yourself from opening perspectives you would not have noticed. And this affects the work not only from a design point of view, but on a level that might be more essential, more captivating, for the perception and potency of a performance.

Please briefly describe your directing method.

Lately I insist on not having one. I try to work so that my method is informed or created by the project I am working on. The methods of the last three performances I did were completely different, for example. In the first one (Dracula: Philosophic Porn by Dejan Dukovski), instead of first offering an explanation to the actors, I presented them with an entirely surrealistic video art. In the second project (Don‘t You Faust Me), the method I used closely followed the so-called “school rules and with artisan approach” way; as a result, the actors made fun of me, because it’s not what they had expected of me as a working method. In the third production (Scheherazade: A Black Comedy in 1001 Minutes), I worked with actors at the desk for an extremely long time; I've never worked so long at desk; we were endlessly rechecking and exploring the context, and the subtext of the lines of dialogue — and I was the person who wrote that play! I could not believe it myself. Why was I was doing that? But this approach was extremely precious for the performance and for me as an experience. So as my actor enter into a new role, I try to enter with a new working method for the next performance.

How do you see the director within the context of late post-modern theatre? What are a director’s place, meaning and function in this new context?

I have a degree in directing. But I’ve worked on many different theatre and non-theatre projects not only as a director. Usually we don’t see directors on stage as actors. But I have appeared as an actor playing main roles in several performances and movies. That was an enormous help for my work as a director. I’ve directed three performances which were I wrote. I’ve worked on set design, as stated above. I’ve directed and animated short movies just for fun. I had a photographic exhibition. I’ve been designing for more than four years theatre posters, and so on and on….

So the question you are asking is fairly complicated for me, because I have seen the signature of major directors in certain conceptual artists, as well as of painters in those who are considered “professional” theatre directors. A concert of “The Residents” was one of my deepest theatre experiences, no less than a Robert Wilson’s performance. I cannot give you a correct answer. It is like asking, What is a painter today? A composer? I’ve seen painters in the works of those who are considered professional theatre directors. I cannot give you a precise answer. For me, Michel Houellebecq (after reading his last book) is right now the biggest visual artist of the 21st century (I see him as a painter, an installation artists, a conceptual artist), and yet, he is a literary writer (he is one of the greatest contemporary authors) — who, on the other hand, directed the stupidest film in the world. Finally, this question is only important when I sign the contract for a fee, and for the Internal Revenue Service.

Describe briefly the process of choosing the topic/play/work, and the process of preparation from the first idea to the first performance?

Probably my works chose me. Some things smolder in me for years, but I have not been mature enough for them. Until the first rehearsal, I am not a very systematic person. I think that each process should be completely different from any other until then. What would be the point otherwise? I do not work the same performance.

How much does working with a permanent team affect the quality of the future scenic art?

It depends. Normally, it's a nice and pleasant feeling when you're in a familiar environment. Sometimes, this leads to remarkable solutions, and after that you should stop. When you feel like you are at the peak of the cooperation with this team, you should put at ease of one another. Make love with others. After a certain period of time, you can collaborate again but free of the common dust.

What is essential for the success of a theatre director?

It depends on what you mean by success. For me it is sincerity (being ingenuously truthful, straightforward, and accurate). This may sound clichéd, but, believe me, it is very difficult as a director to execute that onstage. There are many conductors, half-conductors and insulators who block your way to address directly. What does the director work with? What is the organ (όργανον) or instrument he works with? It so happened that today I had a press conference marking the 200th performance of my first show The Pea Grain and the Princess, which opened 18 years ago and which is for children. [Author’s Note: In the Republic of Macedonia, a country with two million inhabitants, few plays have had this many performances.] On the same day, I opened a new show, Don't You Faust Me, my nihilistic version of Faust filled with deconstruction of all our myths and decadence. A journalist asked me how it is possible to work on so many different plays. My answer was the same. I have managed for a good part of my plays to present something with full clarity, directness and honesty of thought and emotion — to bare everything on stage and allow the audience to see it clearly. That, to me is success. I have seen many "good" performances that did not mean anything or that did not say something. You simply leave empty.

3. In your creative process, which part do you enjoy least? Why? How do you deal with it?

When I have to reconcile the different rhythms and beats of the work with the crew. As I mature more as an artist, I see that my work is actually about the enchantment of directing — to manage the creation of a composition with a different rhythm and beat so that it sounds as a composition, and not as an unpleasant noise. The noise in the theatre should be composed or directed.

4. During your career, have you ever gotten a particular insightful part of the criticism? When and what was that? What was it that made ‌‌that an especially important critique for you?

That’s funny. I've read various reviews, with complete theatre illiteracy. For example: The Liberation of Skopje by Dushan Jovanovic, which is considered now as one of the masterpieces of former Yugoslavia playwrights, was evaluated by the theatrically educated critic reviewer as a “properly written play.” But I have seen some journalists whose task was only to provide information about the performance, and yet I was surprised by the extremely precise and substantial nature of the critical thinking in their articles. Sometimes I don’t want to rationally label my obsession about certain phenomenon in my performances. I just want to leave it with some surreal affection. But these journalists have managed to define very accurately what’s behind that surrealism. I find this relationship very ardent.

5. How would you rate the development of the theatre in Macedonia since its independence till today?

I think it had a very strong momentum in the 1990s of the last century, which later slackened. I would like to avoid the impression that the strong artistic energy in the 1990s has disappeared with the ethnic conflict in Macedonia in 2001 between the Albanians and the Macedonians, but I can’t. Since then, it was as if suddenly the gates were opened for kitsch to come in. All the criteria were knocked down and became extremely low. The whole energy was drained in a blink of an eye.

6. How do you see the level and development of theatre in the Balkans?

Honestly, I think it is far less advanced than it was before. The ex-Yugoslavian theatre has a cult status — for good reason, given everything that has happened.

7. What is your current occupation and what are you working on?

Lately I’ve been writing plays. I plan on writing more, because I feel such a need for it. It just happens that, over the last few years, I have started to feel an attack from different worlds and universes, from which I seek to be liberated.

8. Can the theatre change the world?

Can the world change the theatre?

[1] Nelko Nelkovski (born in 1970) has an M.A. in theatre studies. He is a theatre director, critic, writer, musicians and Secretary for International Cooperation at the Macedonian National Theatre. He serves as President of the Theatre Youth of Macedonia, the IATC Center for the Republic of Macedonia. Theatre Youth of Macedonia is a Macedonian center for such international organizations as ASSITEJ, AITA/IATA, IATU, AMATEO and IDEA. Nelkovski is a doctoral student of theatre students at the Institute for Sociological Political and Juridical Research in Skopje, where he is working on his doctoral dissertation "Theatrical football, a comparative method for treating mutual catharsis phenomena of “theatre” and “football.” He is chief editor of the newspaper and electronic portal www.teatar.com.mk. He writes and publishes plays, essays, theatre analysis, poetry and fiction. He has directed 25 plays, five television series and more than 300 hours of television programs. An active member of numerous international theatrical organizations and associations, he has participated in more than 80 international congresses, conferences, symposia and festivals in the world. His website is www.nelko.mk.

“Trying to Look at Opera From the Pillars of Theatre” — Interview with Ruth Margraff, U.S. Playwright and Librettist

(Editor) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 05:25:00 +0900

“Trying to Look at Opera From the Pillars of Theatre” — Interview with Ruth Margraff, U.S. Playwright and Librettist

Interviewed by Randy Gener [1]

The playwright and librettist Ruth Margraff has been called a leader in the new opera movement in America.

Margraff, who is an associate professor of writing and playwriting at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, has toured with her Café Antarsia Ensemble and with her work throughout the U.K., Canada, Russia, Romania, Serbia, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Greece,Turkey, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Croatia, Japan, Egypt and India.

Educated at Brown and Yale Universities, she started out performing in churches all over the Midwest to raise money for her father, an Ohio preacher and her mother, who became a peace-keeper in Bosnia. “Being thumped pretty often with the Bible in the Bible belt,” she says, gave her a “wealth of King James imagery and hellfire swirling through [her] language.”

Playing the accordian and Cretan lyra in the band Café Antarsia Ensemble, a four piece acoustic group that plays world folk songs inspired by Greek blues and Balkan Roma gypsy music, Margraff often refers to her written work as world folk opera. “Almost everything I write comes from music,” Margraff says, “so I’ve been put in the categories of music theatre or experimental opera, new opera.”

In addition to playing with her band, Margraff has delved into collaborative projects. She has worked with saxophonist, composer and activist Fred Ho to write six martial arts operas. Her artistic process, she says, is about trying “to be awake and alert” and the need to respond to the world, “even when it is involuntary or brutally laborious.”

Margraff is a recipient of four Rockefeller Foundation commissions, a McKnight national commission and residency with the Playwrights' Center, a Fulbright New Opera Award to Greece, and two NYSCA Individual Artist awards, in addition to awards from TMUNY, TCG/ITI, NEA, Arts International, and Meet the Composer, among others. She is an alumnae of New Dramatists and a member of Hourglass Group, Theatre Without Borders, and League of Professional theatre Women, and represented by Susan Schulman.

A collection of her plays, entitled Red Frogs and Other Plays, will be published in early 2012 under the NoPassport Press literary imprint. The book brings together the title play, The Elektra Fugues and Stadium Devildare. A preview-edition-only is available right now print on demand for $15 at

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/red-frogs-and-other-plays/18701900.

1. In your country/city, is there any major issue (e.g. a contemporary social problem) that artists fail or neglect to address on stage? Why? Is this due to censorship, or to a blind spot in the community's shared perception of the world? — or to a community’s consciously or un-consciously avoiding it?

In Chicago, I’ve come to recognize three blind spots that echo nationwide: war, class and a deep prejudice against thick description. That’s the last taboo — the tongue of the poet. There is an impatience for the play to spell itself out, to come clean. I feel this bias is linked to America’s apathy toward war and class — two other complex blind spots avoided like the plague, which I tumble with headlong inRed Frogs and Other Plays. Most U.S. narratives depict characters that struggle with class conflicts, but they won’t directly address class as a central issue, because most of our theatre’s audiences belong to the upper-middle class, and they are worried about losing their status: the fragile status of being in the know, of being in the audience to begin with. Most theatre artists also come from the upper-middle class or have to make their way there eventually to stay in business. Or they have to write for and serve that upper-middle class audience if they want to stay in business. This condition is the glass ceiling dramatized in my play Red Frogs, this is the reality program of Stadium Devildare, and it finds its roots in the dysfunctional family of The Elektra Fugues.

America waged wars, because we were duped by language. America couldn’t read the lips of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their corporate cronies. We are involved now in class warfare, of which Occupy Wall Street could be seen as one manifestation, because we can’t understand the onslaught of language hitting us like a typhoon everyday about who we are supposed to be and what we are supposed to buy. We are duped as to what class we really are. The wealthy people do photo ops as if they were one of us — if we only had more confidence. The poor vote as if they are rich. All three of my plays (Red Frogs, Elektra Fugues and Stadium Devildare) tackle violence, class and language in some way. Elektra Fugues is embroiled in a war that erupts from a tonal pitch of dissent and truth. Red Frogs teems with over-the-counter girls who try to ignite a revolution based on Marxist poetics but end up weeded out and hogtied by the torso of it and thrown back out into the sea. Stadium Devildare reimagines the Iraq war as a reality program on the verge of syndication. My most radical gesture in these works is the poetry in which I choose to traffic. I have been saying for a while now that form is more radical than content. What we fear most is that reality is in any way formless.

I always think I am not a lucky person. And yet when I look back at these plays which span over 10 years of my writing, I realize that I stumbled upon something marvelous when the director Tim Maner and I came up with the Opera Project.

I now know how rare it is to enjoy the longevity of my collaborations with the director Elyse Singer, a stability which made it possible to have long conversations with the designers of Red Frogs early on, and I remember especially set designer Juman Malouf whose imagination was truly inspiring to me as a writer. I remember conversations I had with the designers also of Theater of Note: some long emails I exchanged with them long after the production took place. I had the luxury of collaborating with the Rudemechs actors of Austin on Stadium Devildare over a whole year because of a TCG grant. The close relationship I had with the designers Nancy Brous and Allen Hahn was unlike almost any other I’ve enjoyed with designers before or since, because Tim Maner envisioned us as a team that collaborated on more than seven projects over five years. Because of Tim’s role at HERE Arts Center in Soho, we spent a lot of time together and ransacked sources of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850s Courtesans, the Greeks, nuclear winter Christmas, and so on.…

I feel the great loss of the Opera Project designers as they have all left for the opera or commercial theatre and as the composer ran off into the world of classical ballet.

3. In your creative process, which part do you enjoy least? Why? How do you tackle it?

I dread the doctrines. Having come from religion, I recognize the scent of conformity, and I rebelled hard when I was seventeen from pretty much every dogma. It’s hard to go back to any form of church. And it is hard to think of theatre as church, but frequently the theatre system behaves as if it were a kind of church. I have tackled this repulsion in many ways. Sometimes I use realism as a brushstroke; you might say I turn to hyperrealism with the aim, at least, of turning “reality” on its axis. Today I think of what I’m doing as cubist; in fact, I’ve written about this a bit and have started preaching a few sermons on it for my students. I want to make art, and often making theatre gets too social at the expense of art. I have always turned to other forms to inspire me when theatre becomes too oppressive. For many years I turned to opera: trying to look at opera from the pillars of theatre. Lately I want to write theatre inspired by painting.

4. During your career, have you ever received a particularly insightful piece of criticism? When, and what did it say? What made it especially important for you?

There are three Austin critics in particular who have given me gifts of insight into my work: Robi Polgar, Michael Barnes and Robert Faires.

Kyle Gann of the Village Voice described The Elektra Fugues as a “cascading libretto...spinning emotional and scientific orbits...eloquently subtle symbioses” — which I learned from for a long while after that. When he wrote about my Elektra as having the “vocal endurance of a quintet of Diamanda Galases...words would form into motivic images sliding into unison...spinning in emotional and stylistic orbits...mesmerizing dynamic of rich material and uncanny artistry.” When he wrote those words, it made me want to talk with him, and in a way this piece of criticism began a personal artistic dialogue with how I see my work in production, and Gann’s words have affected how I write to this day. His criticism drew me closer to the idea of the “uncanny” and to Diamanda who crossed into my frame of influence.

A Los Angeles Times critic called Red Frogs "edgy, confrontational…worthy of Jean Genet” which made me think twice about Jean Genet as part of my lineage. Los Angeles Weekly made me think of The Elektra Fugues as "sheer beauty...a hypnotic montage of words and literary images...rhythm substitutes for tone, so there are no arias to speak of — rather, soliloquies and overlapping rants of what the author describes as a ‘choral flotsam.’” This idea of soliloquy returned years later as I moved from thinking about recitative into this more-private reverie of reflection.

I would say though that the Austin and Dallas critics have been the most insightful in describing my work. The Austin critics, in particular, have been incredibly important to how I write and about how I think about writing. For example, the Dallas critic Lawson Taitte described a recent work Judges 19 as “layer after layer of richly textured emotion...imminent danger...with precision of cadence and inflection.”

5. Are you able to do what you would like to do as an artist given the current situation of U.S. theatre right now?

I have never been able to do what I like as an artist in the United States, so I can’t imagine that. I feel incredibly censored and confined and stifled when I serve American audiences and theatres. Playwrights are slaves to a certain dramaturgy that fits the reality-programmed mode. The rewards for conforming are manifold productions, critical acclaim, applause and money. I am the writer as waitress, and this is why, perhaps, the serving tray keeps recurring in my plays.

I’ll digress a little here. While going back through Red Frogs, I realized that this play is about working my way through college. Since I paid for college completely on my own and I am the only one in my family with a master’s degree other than my mother, I see college and later grad school as a pivot in my fate. I paid for college by waitressing doubleshifts at Waffle House until I discovered I could make more by being a maid cleaning peoples’ summer homes. As I mopped and scrubbed, I began to see another world I had not known and perhaps can never know from the picture windows of the affluent people in the Lakeside part of Port Clinton and then later Nantucket Island in Massachusetts. In Nantucket, I was cleaning one day for a historical romance novelist who had a brain tumor and whose mother I also cleaned for (she owned the Calico Cupboard in town) and I was in the midst of realizing that my mother had also cleaned for them both. This was when my mother ran away from our family and from religion. Sending her to, of all places, Nantucket and later Bosnia!

So I had been smelling this lovely sort of soup simmering on the stove and I was really broke and hungry, and I don’t think they had surveillance cameras back then. Anyway there was really no dust in that house but I was feeling grateful for the dog fur so at least I had something to vacuum so that I could work all day, paid by the hour. The lady had to go out with her gorgeous younger stud-muffin husband who was clearly in it for the money and/or waiting for her to die from the brain tumor so he could cash in. When they left to go to town, I ate a little of the soup on the stove to keep from starving that day. When I tried to casually ask her about the recipe, I found out that was the dog food. I tell this story now in perhaps a linear fashion, but I could not have told this story this way then, or during the writing of the play.

When I work abroad, I don’t feel the waitressing mode of playwriting as much or as deeply, but at home in the U.S., I find I’m always limited by the imaginations of those who I need to go along with me, so in subsequent drafts of my writing, I often have to re-dream something that can work for them — something that for me is much smaller than the sum of its parts. I do write my first drafts as I like; in that sense I am decadent and free. However bringing it to the stage is always an infinitely challenging and often deductive task. Each project falls somewhere on a spectrum of independent to collaborative. This compromise can be good in the sense that it takes my work to larger and more commercial arenas as in the work I have created with composer Fred Ho (Voice of the Dragon trilogy) and with seven female playwrights on Seven.[2] I am fully aware of the great need and tremendous value of working with others in productions. And yet I think of it as writing with my hands tied behind my back — restrained in some way. I have come to value this artistic restraint. When there is no demand or when there is no determined use-value to something I write (that is, when the restraints are not artistic), I feel this bondage in another, even more painful way. Most artists, I think, don’t mind the bondage, or they have been writing this way without being conscious of it in the first place. I’m saying we live in a free country where there is ominous censorship

[1] Randy Gener is a writer, editor, critic, and artist in New York City. Author of Love Seats for Virginia Woolf and other Off-Broadway plays, Gener is the recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award, the highest accolade for dramatic criticism in the United States, and NLGJA Journalist of the Year, among numerous other awards, for his critical essays in American Theatre magazine, where he works as contributing writer. He also won a Deadline Club Award from the New York chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists for “shedding light into censorship and repression of the arts.” Gener most recently helped curate, produce and create “From the Edge,” the USITT-USA National Pavilion to the 2011 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space. His website is theaterofOneWorld.org.

[2] Seven is a full-length documentary play collaboration of seven award-winning playwrights. They are Paula Cizmar, Catherine Filloux, Gail Kriegel, Carol K. Mack, Ruth Margraff, Anna Deavere Smith and Susan Yankowitz. Based on personal interviews with seven women leaders of the Vital Voices Global Partnership network who have triumphed over huge obstacles to create major changes in human rights in their home countries, the play weaves together seven interwoven stories which explore the commonality of challenge and of bravery, and which reveal their collective stories.

“We Have Been Silenced into Submission; It’s All Skin-Deep Democracy” — Interview with Ramu Ramanathan, Indian Playwright and Director

(Editor) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 05:20:00 +0900

“We Have Been Silenced into Submission; It’s All Skin-Deep Democracy” — Interview with Ramu Ramanathan, Indian Playwright and Director

Interviewed by Deepa Punjani [1]

Ramu Ramanathan is an Indian playwright-director with acclaimed plays to his credit. His latest play Comrade Kumbhakarna has been produced by the National School of Drama’s Repertory, and is touring all-over India. Ramanathan's work bears an urbane testimony to a country that has never been quite easy to decipher. Here is a writer who has transformed social and political commentary through the multi-layered tapestry of performance. A collection of eight of his plays, 3 Sakina Manzil and Other Plays, will be published by the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, and by Orient Blackswan. Informed, incisive, ironical, Ramanathan's work is reminiscent of the great tradition of the Enlightenment.

1. Is there any major issue that you feel artistes in India fail or neglect to address on stage? Why?

India is a caste-driven society. What is worrying is, India has become a theatre of the upper-caste. If you scratch the surface, the directors, the playwrights, the critics, are all upper-caste. I think it’s very exclusivist, elitist and camp-ish.

Is this due to censorship, or to a blind spot in the community's shared perception of the world? — or to a community’s consciously or un-consciously avoiding it?

If you consider the 150 tamasha (popular folk theatre form; a people’s theatre) companies in Maharashtra, you understand why. For one, tamasha is not considered art. Why so? I’ve always wondered who benchmarks what is high art or not so high…. Then there are the day-to-day issues of tamasha. Who pays to the wealthy sahukaars (money lenders) or for the chirimiri (bribe)? Who pays for the diesel; who pays for the car? Who pays for the taxes, and the exploitative licensing? Whatever remains is for government bribes. Today, the state subsidies have vanished. How can we sustain a co-operative theatre movement which involves thousands of low-caste artistes being crushed by our own government and the higher castes?

2. What, if anything, is difficult in communicating with the designers/directors/actors/playwrights? Why?

I think most of us know what we want to say on the stage. The big issue is how to say it. Google is making us stupid. They say, there are 107 trillion emails being sent in a year. That’s a bit numbing. The technology is evolving, and one can get carried away by it. Ultimately, it is the consumption of the content that makes the revolution. Atoms we are, and to atoms we shall return. To convince theatre audiences and theatre practitioners of the potency of the written word is tough.

How early and how often do you exchange views about the coming production?

We try to work in tandem all the time. For example in Mahadevbhai, Jaimini Pathak and I rehearsed on an open terrace. It’s really tedious rehearsing a one-person play. There’s the actor and there’s you. That’s it. And the actor is desperately hanging onto you for dear life. We were workshopping all kinds of staging options, when one day, I noticed the terrace flooring. It was made up of Chinese mosaic tiles. Now, most Mumbai buildings have a water-leakage problem, and so, the terrace flooring had patterns to seal the gaps. Coincidentally Jaimini was moving in and out of these patterns. That became my stage design. We kept things simple, spartan and Gandhian.

3. In your creative process, which part do you enjoy least?

The absence of space in Mumbai is a big pain. Space is power. Space provides the equity which you can encash into productions and shows. Which is why I used to workshop in colleges in Mumbai so that I got space to rehearse, a space to perform and an audience. In the past, Mumbai provided the space. Occasionally! Now it doesn’t.

Religion sells. Art doesn't. This is what Shahir Shanker Bhate told me recently. He is not a well known Shahir (an honorary title for a balladeer in Maharashtra); so he has been sitting at home. A former mill worker, Shahir Bhate has a huge reservoir of songs. His brain is the Wikipedia of Shahirs, songs, and their sagas. When he's gone, all shall vanish. There's no hard disk which will back-up the data. There’s no space which welcomes Shahir Bhate.

4. During your career, have you ever received a particularly insightful piece of criticism? When, and what did it say? What made it especially important for you?

The Boy Who Stopped Smiling had approximately 150 shows. In a way, I was attached to the play and traveled with it. At one point, Vijay Tendulkar told me, to stop doing so. He said: Your job is to write. The play is no longer yours. Learn to let go. It was a good tip. I was able to move on and write many more plays.

5. You are regarded as one of the most politically conscious playwrights of our generation. Yet each of your plays has been different, and these have reflected the times we live in. How would you describe your own work?

“Political” is a tag that I’ve inherited. Most of my friends are journalists, activists, lawyers, doctors. They are amused when they hear this. The powers that be are clever. The Andhra Pradesh Government may arrest Gaddar, Varavara Rao and Kalyan Rao in full public glare[2], but for most parts, the forces of intolerance prefer to co-opt the author. It’s easier, and no one protests.

I wrote a blog about this. Most of my colleagues in theatre believed that I shouldn't have said what I did. That a true artiste should not get mixed up with politics. I totally disagree. I believe art and politics can never be separated. You can’t separate art and politics, because politics is life. It’s also a fact that life is political, and art is about life, so it is inevitable that art should be political.

In India, the bigger issue is about the nature of complicity in an artist. That is, what constitutes complicity? Is it one’s responsibility always to act out against a tyrannical regime or to, in perhaps more subtle ways, to beat the system?

That’s what one tries to do.

6. You are known to meticulously research your subject. Historical processes are the cornerstone of a lot of your writing, and both politics and history together form the foundation of your work. Can you tell us a little about your creative process as a writer?

I enjoy researching. I’m a bit shy. Research provides me the sanctity to step outside my comfort zone and meet people. For every play, I’ve had mentors who guide me. I meet people and spend time with them. This process began in my school years where I would live life in wonderment.

I used to pass a man who would walk on his hands on the streets. Who was this man? I constructed mythologies around him. I never found the truth. Another person was a waiter who served me my first beer in my eighth grade at Otter’s Club. He would inhale cigarette smoke and exhale it from his ears. I never figured out how he could do it.

Likewise in school, we had the actor Salman Khan, and another colleague in class called Richard who did bike tricks. Salman Khan did wheelies on branded bikes while Richard did it on a second-hand Yezdi. We cheered Richard. He was our hero. Recently, I met Richard. He runs a decrepit garage. He was embarrassed to shake hands with me. He felt he had fallen from grace. That he was no longer the hero.

Today Salman Khan is the Bollywood super-star. Again a residue from our past. Unfortunately, the past is ugly and unpleasant and diseased. But for me Richard remains a hero. He fought reality. That’s always tougher. I've retained this process of enquiry in my plays.

7. In your latest play, Comrade Kumbhakarna, you have created an anti-hero: a victim of the excesses of our Indian State. He questions the very foundations of our democracy: a familiar theme in your earlier work, too. What was the starting point for this play?

Arun Ferreira, Murali Ashok Reddy, Dharmendra Sriram Bhurle, Naresh Babulal Bansode were arrested on May 8, 2007 from Dikshabhoomi, Nagpur.[3] Later Arun and Murali underwent numerous rounds of torture and have been subject to narco-analysis tests.

Likewise, Vernon Gonsalves and Shridhar Shrinivas[4] were arrested from Mumbai on August 19, 2011 by the anti-terrorist Squad and were accused of being found with explosives. A short while ago, Sudhir Dhawale was arrested.[5] The list is endless. The point is, police custody, brutal torture and public apathy.

Comrade Kumbhakarna is a response to the blatant misuse of state power. I am wary of signing petitions. There was a time I attended meetings and hearings. I used to love to participate in rallies (nothing can be more invigorating than a protest rally), but the anti-establishment space has diminished in today’s India.

8. In Kashmir Kashmir, your earlier work, and now with Comrade Kumbhakarna, I sense an increasing disillusionment with the Indian State. Do you see hope, or do you think the capitulation of the State is complete in an India that has come to be increasingly concerned with its economic success more than anything else?

State power is the ultimate victor. There is a veneer of democracy. Kashmir is one end of the spectrum; the rest of India isn’t that far off. I did moot court hearings in a reputed law college. A moot court hearing is as real as a court room hearing...except instead of lawyers, it is enacted by students.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, we put on a moot court: the International Search for Justice. The idea was to try the world's worst tyrants. And so, this moot court was about the Special Court of Sierra Leone, which has been set up jointly by the United Nations and Sierra Leonean government.

The four hours were a benumbing, and a shattering experience for me. In that class room, I heard about a little girl with no arms who said to her mother, "When will my arms grow, again?" Next to her was a baby suckling at his mother's breast. Neither had arms. As one of the students pointed out, this is evil beyond belief.

After the moot court we held a post-mortem. The judge in chair congratulated the students for their impassioned plea for democracy, justice and the rule of law in Sierra Leone and Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The students were delighted.

Then the judge in chair asked the students their position about Assam and Bhagalapur and Godhra — about the perpetrators of riots in Delhi, Mumbai and Ahmedabad. About army action in Srinagar, Ghadchiroli and Imphal. There was an uncomfortable silence. Tomorrow's lawyers and perhaps tomorrow's judiciary had no answer.

My point is, we have been silenced into submission. It’s all skin-deep democracy.

9. In spite of all the sadness, your work also brims with humor and with the music and the cultural traditions of the people you are talking about. Your characters like Bhau and Kaka in Cotton 54 Polyester 86 or like the eponymous hero of Comrade Kumbhakarna are from marginalized communities representing their unique traditions. More than ever, these people find themselves living in situations of poverty (sometimes extreme) and deprivation. On the other hand, we tend to celebrate our “folk traditions” and their performers. How do you view this paradox?

Sometimes you sit and wonder if there is a point to creativity. Perhaps there should be a share price attached to it. Then it could be quantified. Like a million dollars for Bhimsen Joshi’s voice or a mukhda by Birju Maharaj.[6]

10. A turning point in your career as a playwright was the play Mahadevbhai (1892—1942), which also turned out to be a very successful play. How do you see it today?

I attended a recent show on October 2, 2011, at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Mumbai. Six years ago, we had started a low-budget theatre festival on the campus, and it was amazing to see the students at IIT sustain the festival. It makes you happy. The actor Jaimini Pathak has performed Mahadevbhai 250 times in the past decade. It’s an achievement. It requires serious stamina and determination.

I was watching a Mahadevbhai show after seven years, and I think, the play is important for what it says. There are three regrets though: I wish the first half of the first act was better written; I wish it was a bit more critical of the Indian National Congress movement; and above all, I wish I was able to explain better the position of Bhimrao Ambedkar, who was a founding father of independent India.[7] However Ambedkar would require another play. I believe, he is one of the greatest men this country has produced …

11. You have not only written plays with an immediate thrust on our politics today but you have also written plays for children and young people such as The Boy Who Stopped Smiling and Medha and Zhoomibsh (Part I and II).

A lot of children writing in India is cute. I took my cue from Rilke, who said children are innocent but above all, they are cruel.

12. You are also one of those rare playwrights who have actually written very empowered women characters in plays such as Shakespeare and She. You have directed Marguerite Duras’s L’Amante Anglaise as well.

There’s a Marguerite Duras line: “Marriage is a hazardous activity. Especially for women.” I’ve seen this happen to innumerable women. I’ve been surrounded by strong, independent, very progressive women. It’s tough being a woman in India, but they haven’t let that deter them.

There’s another play concerning women that I am working on. Thanks to Kinnari Vohra (the lady who consented to marry me) I have been led to the Mathura Rape Case. Owing to a progressive judgment and a nationwide women's movement, the rape law was amended in 1983. Cruelty against women was made a crime in 1984. In 1986, the offence of dowry death was introduced.

The crux of the play is the rape of Mathura and the Supreme Court judgment in the Mathura rape case which was so regressive that it triggered off a nationwide movement. This is modern India’s history, which we have conveniently forgotten.

13. In plays like Collaborators and Shakespeare and She, which you have directed too, you have attempted different styles of performance. How did you arrive at these?

The brief for Collaborators was simple: Modern India died at 6.29 pm in a skyscraper in Mumbai. The composer Krishnan Anantha curated a sublime music score for the play. That set the tone for the production, the acting, the set and the overall aesthetics. We created futuristic furniture out of industrial waste. As the actors pointed out, this furniture is cruelly uncomfortable. That was true. But everyone knew we were trying to challenge the rulebook. Today the irony is, some of that furniture has gone mainstream.

In that sense Shakespeare and She was simpler and more minimal.

14. You have finally managed to overcome the questions concerning the identity of an Indian writer writing in English about a multicultural India brimming with diversity in all aspects of life. Your work is uniquely Indian and yet has a thoroughly modern sensibility to it. But for plays like Cotton 54 Polyester 86 and Comrade Kumbhakarna, you have felt it better for them to be translated and presented in Hindi. When this essential conundrum of language arises, how do you cope with it?

I accept it. I write in English which I know a bit better than the other languages. My problem is with the Hindi translators; they lag behind the other languages.

15. The city of Mumbai has been your inspiration for plays like 3 Sakina Manzil, Jazz and others…

3 Sakina Manzil was composed thanks to the inputs from Amrit Gangar. He played Virgil to my Dante. I visited Dongri, Keshav Naik Marg, Chinch Bunder (districts in Mumbai which were gravely impacted by the April 14, 1994 blast) with Amrit bhai.[8] Later, in the middle of the night, I stood in front of a building which burnt on April 14, 1944. I tried to relive those moments. It taught me empathy. Later, when the play was staged, I heard of audiences in Mumbai who saw the play and then they went off in search of 3 Sakina Manzil. They never found it, because the building is in my head. But they returned and said, it’s still the same. That’s true. The jharokhas (an old-world architectural design of balconies), the balcony, the Gujarat-Rajasthan style of architecture, little details on the shop front, the Kutchi traders.[9] And that makes you think that was so much more one could have done, if not for this ridiculous obsession with staging two hour plays.

16. Mumbai is where you live, and where you write. How do you see your relationship with Mumbai?

Mumbai is my lover. I love her and at the same time, I loathe her. To-date, even today, I discover something new in her. And that I’ve poured into the plays.

[1] Deepa Punjani is the Editor of www.mumbaitheatreguide.com. She has an M.Phil in English Literature, and her M.Phil thesis revolves around the work of select Indian women in theatre in the context of feminism and gender representation on the Indian stage. She has acted on stage, has conducted theatre workshops and has designed theatre curricula. She has lectured on theatre in schools, colleges and at universities in Mumbai and has presented papers at various theatre conferences and seminars at home and abroad. In 2008, she formed the Indian national section of theatre critics, which is affiliated to the IATC. She currently represents this section.

[2] Gaddar, whose actual name is Gummadi Vittal Rao, is a revolutionary balladeer and an activist. Along with Gaddar, Varavara Rao and Kalyan Rao are communists, activists, naxalite sympathizers (naxalite is a generic term used to represent the various militant communist groups in India), poets and anti-establishment speakers. Their political battles have been waged against the centralized government and their state governments in India, which they believe wrongly encourage feudalistic attitudes, imperialism (read globalization), and caste differences.

[3] Nagpur is a city in the state of Maharashtra. The Nagpur police arrested Arun Ferreira and his associates — Murali Ashok Reddy, Dharmendra Sriram Bhurle, Naresh Babulal Bansode — for alleged naxal related crimes. All of them have been subjected to third-degree torture by the police. Ferreira was freed when acquitted by the court, but the moment he set his foot outside the prison, he was arrested again on the pretext of two more cases.

[4] Vernon Gonsalves and Shreedhar Shrinivasan were also arrested for their suspected naxal activities.

[5] Sudhir Dhawale, a Dalit activist and editor of the Marathi magazine Vidrohi was arrested under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) by the Maharashtra state government. Formerly the untouchables of India, the Dalit belongs to the lowest caste under the caste system in India.

The Naxalite/Maoist situation in India is complex and has a bitter and unresolved history with the powers that came to be. In the past few years, activists have been routinely picked up by the state governments and put away as Naxals and Maoists. Similarly, acts such as the UAPA have been criticized for being draconian laws. State-induced terror is a reality in India and largely goes unchecked under the pretext of safety and governance. The powers in the central and the state governments of India are known to crush dissenting voices.

[6] Mukhdas are the introductory lines and also the main chorus lines in Hindustani classical music.

[7] Bhimrao Ambedkar was one of the founding fathers of independent India. He was the Chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution and leader of the Dalits.

[8] Amrit Gangar/Amrit bhai is the researcher and guide for the play 3 Sakina Manzil. ‘Bhai,’ which translates as brother in North Indian languages, can be a term of respect as well as endearance.

[9] Kutchis, largely a community of merchants and traders, are from the district of Kutch in the state of Gujarat.

“You Do Not Have to Mention Names, No Matter Whose Ox is Gored” — Interview with Nigerian Playwright and Director Stella ‘Dia Oyedepo

(Editor) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 05:15:00 +0900

“You Do Not Have to Mention Names, No Matter Whose Ox is Gored” — Interview with Nigerian Playwright and Director Stella ‘Dia Oyedepo

Interviewed by Ngozi Udengwu [1]

Stella ‘Dia Oyedepo will be remembered as the one who kept stage performance alive in an age when that art form is believed to have met its waterloo, almost displaced by the screen and the satellite television. Oyedepo keeps the flag flying for live theatre saying, “There is no excuse for failure.” She is recognised more for her performances (for which she has won many awards) than her plays. Since 1979, when she made her debut, she has written and produced more than 300 plays and dance dramas (television series excluded). And yet she has only published about thirty of them. As literary texts, her plays have yet to receive adequate critical evaluation.

Among her most adventurous plays are Beyond the Dark Tunnel, which was commissioned by the Committee on Action Against Apartheid, to celebrate the release of Nelson Mandela from prison; Burn the Fetters, which was commissioned by the French Embassy in Nigeria for the Bicentenary of the French Revolution; The Mad Doctor, an absurdist satire on one of Nigeria’s dictatorial presidents, Ibrahim Babangida. Her plays cut across themes and subject matters, but they are mostly directed at current issues in the society; thus, she has written enough plays to cater for different areas of interest.

For example, Oyedepo has tacked political matters, as in Vigil for the Prisoner of Conscience (commissioned and performed for the Association of Nigerian Authors but yet to be published), and Days of Woe. Her plays have dealt with social issues, as in Beyond the Dark Tunnel, Burn the Fetters, The Mad Doctor, See!, Doom in the Dimes and Worshippers of the Naira. Plays such as At the Devil’s Mercy and The Gentle Heart that Bleeds contend with religious–philosophical issues. She is also quite outspoken when it comes to women issues, as in Rebellion of the Bumpy-Chested (on gender war); Our Wife Is Not a Woman (on childlessness); Wife’s Fury (on wife abuse and revenge); On His Demise (on widowhood); Blindfolded By Fate and My Daughter Is an Egg (on child abuse); and Alice Oh! Alice (on sex slavery and AIDS), among many others.

Oyedepo runs her theatre in the tradition of the popular travelling theatre in which the leader plays multiple roles. In her own case, Oyedepo writes the script, casts and directs, designs and constructs the elaborate costumes, as well as composes the music (her performances overflow with songs and dances). Oyedepo is a remarkable woman who has taken theatre in Nigeria to an amazing level. She is that country’s most prolific playwright and theatre director, and perhaps in Africa as well, and the most commissioned. She is also a past director of the Kwara State Council for Arts and Culture from 1990 until 2009. Currently she is working on a project she calls Mama Africa Art and Cultural Centre.

I can’t think of any, because even the very sensitive issues like politics, we still have a away of putting them on stage and you do not have to mention names. That way nobody can pin you down, no matter whose ox is gored. I had an experience before when we staged a convocation play The Days of Woe. The provost of the college came out from the performance annoyed. A few weeks later he wanted to sack me, because he thought the play was a satire of him. Anyway I survived it.

How far did he go with his threat?

He couldn’t go far, because he could not prove anything. He could not even say it in public, that the play was referring to him. In fact that play was motivated by Emperor Bokassa of Central African Republic, another tyrant of the world. If he thinks he is a tyrant, that is too bad. (Laughs)

Did he see himself in the character?

Exactly! In the character of Agbako, that mad character, the tyrant in the play.

How did he actually do it? Did he call you to talk about it or…

He just told some people. He didn’t call me. And there after he wanted me out of the college. He did not. Rather he told some people that he was going to sack me, and one of them came and told me.

There was another incident, when we produced a play that was commissioned for the bicentenary of the French revolution and which we performed in the University of Ibadan in 1990. There after a riot broke out in the university setting, and people thought it was the play that sparked off the riot. The play was entitled Burn the Fetters. The language was strong and had potential to incite people into revolt. There was actually a revolt in the play against the tyrant. It was staged during Ibrahim Gbadamosi Babangida’s regime when things were going worse in the country.[2] There were pockets of riot here and there. It soon went out of hand in the Western axis there. It even got to the Eastern axis. But it was more serious around Lagos and Ibadan. The riot was serious. Though it started in the university, it soon spread to Lagos with masses joining in. People were fed up with the regime. At the performance, people were asking me what if I was arrested because of the message of the play. It was sponsored by Alliance Française in 1989 and had a repeat performance in 1990 in the University of Ibadan.

How soon after the performance did the riot break out?

Even at the performance people were afraid I may be arrested. I think it was the following day that the riot broke out. It was a mass riot, though the university was the boiling point. You know that in Nigeria, people do not get arrested because of performance; I hope you know that. We do not have too many incidences of people being arrested because of performance.

But Soyinka was arrested a number of times.

That was in those days. After his era you hardly hear such incidents. Today, even if you abuse them directly they do not make an arrest. They just don’t take us seriously. That is the thing.

What do you think is responsible for this change in attitude on the part of the leaders?

They obviously believe such things cannot do any harm to them. Besides, stage performances are no longer popular in Nigeria. You know we had so many performances in the Government House. The type of performances we did we consider more of entertainment value than anything else. But even when there are such message they do not think they are directed against them. They even defend such messages.

Do you think that the change from military to democratic rule has something to do with the change in temperament on the part of the leaders?

But the military rulers encouraged performances more than the civilian leaders. The politicians hadn’t the time, and I think many of them did not have the mental attitude toward performances. In the state of Kwara, we had only one civilian governor who was very much involved with the theatre and encouraged theatre performances, but he did not last long on the seat. During his regime there could be three performances a week in the Government House. After that we had a military man who converted to civilian governor. He, too, showed interest in the performance. But there after, no subsequent governor showed enough interest. They had other interests. They did not appreciate anything intellectual.

Can you give our readers an insight into the content of Burn the Fetters, the play that was believed to have sparked a riot in 1990?

Burn the Fetters was commissioned by the French Embassy in Nigeria to commemorate the Bicentenary of the French Revolution. We took the historical elements that led to that revolution and set them in African context. It portrays the king as a tyrant and the queen also as a tyrant. They marginalized the people and exploited them so much, and at the end of the day, the people rose up and revolted against them. I portrayed the queen as vain, extremely vain and callous. And in the way she changes clothes in the play, people saw a reflection of Maryam Babangida, the wife of Ibrahim Babangida, the former military president of Nigeria. Since she is dead now, I do not need to talk evil of the dead. They also saw Ibrahim Babangida in the character of the king and his agents of tyranny whom he used to terrorize the people. In those days people reacted a lot to wrong doing, but these days people no longer react against bad governance. Look at what is happening now. People are no longer reacting.

What do you think is responsible for this level of complacency on the part of the people?

I don’t know. It is very sad. I think people have lost their courage, and they are seeing things getting harder and harder, and when people are so poor they can't afford to add another burden to their lives. Many of them are afraid to lose their bread winner, so they advise them not to join.

For major performances, I hold meetings with all the groups, like when we produced Beyond the Dark Tunnel, to welcome Nelson Mandela from prison. That production was very, very involving.

Maybe if you would take us through the process of that production the question will have been answered.

It is the normal process of writing the play and showing the design to the production team, and in turn the team contributes, and we made adjustments here and there. I couldn't do much of sketching, but after describing it, we get somebody to do the sketching, and then we started the construction. We had our technical team. We had Africa carved out on a dais, we had a forest, a large forest; we had Africa like a mother with full breasts and so on.

Did you have difficulty communicating with these designers and technical team?

No. At our own level we did not have any difficulty. We did not have to do anything beyond our capabilities. Sometimes when we need special effects like fire and smoke, we have to improvise, because we do not have the modern techniques. We use gun powder to create explosion from backstage. They are not extraordinary anyway, but they are effective. The financial capability we had that time would not permit that level of sophistication. We had limited resources and so went for what is affordable which may not be as sophisticated as such. Luckily for us I try to avoid unnecessary conflicts. You would want people you can work with. You have to work with the right people. If there is somebody who cannot work with you for one reason or the other, he or she should not be part of that production. We look at the budget and decide how to manage the budget to realize what we want to do. We use the cheapest means to realize the best result. That has always been my style.

Have you ever had any such situation when somebody failed to fit in and had to leave?

Yes, there was a time it happened. Although it did not create any major crisis. There was this chap from the university, during the rehearsal of Beyond the Dark Tunnel. The boy wanted to be part of the production. And when I was busy running around doing some things and going to Ibadan to consult some people, I had to throw him out of the production. I don’t remember exactly what he did. I think he tried to incite the actors to demand for higher pay. I made him the stage manager. Actually the Committee on Action Against Apartheid sponsored it, and he thought we were making millions. That was the only incident we had. At artistic level there will always be disagreements, but it is usually done on cordial level. If someone suggests something, I respect that person's suggestion. We look at it if it will work better than mine. I accept it, and we try it.

3. In your creative process, which part do you enjoy least? Why? How do you tackle it?

When I get a topic to write on, at times you are not even given enough gestation period. Sometimes you are given only three days to write and produce. But when I have to write from my own inspiration…. The part of my creative process I dislike most...when I saw that question I wondered why should it be the one that I enjoy least? Why shouldn't it be the one i enjoy most?

You can speak on both.

Let's talk about the commissioned plays because you have such short time to be inspired. There is a pain involved in that. You still do it well, but it is more strenuous than having your own creativity. Because of the short time that you have to produce a commissioned play, you often wonder if you will be able to make it. That makes it the least enjoyable.

In your productions you usually play many roles including writing the script, casting and directing, design and costume construction …

Compose the songs.

Yes, compose the songs, thank you. Which of these tasks do you enjoy the least?

I think it is the rigors of rehearsal, the rigors of grooming people. Grooming the drummer, the dancer, the singers, the movement of the actors, the delivery, etc. Maybe this is the aspect I enjoy the least. But the writing itself I enjoy. You now have to transfer all these to people — to make people put life in the story — so you will realize the purpose of the play, that is the least enjoyed.

4. During your career, have you ever received a particularly insightful piece of criticism? When, and what did it say? What made it especially important for you?

I welcome criticism. The criticisms I get are sometimes about the way a character is depicted. At times when it gets to real argument, they may accept or they may not accept. But most of the criticisms, you look at them, you cannot contest, because anybody is entitled to his own opinion.

There is one case I remember. I had a friend, Adebayo, maybe you know him. He used to work with the Daily Times. He was a very strong member of the Association of Nigerian Authors. He has written about four reviews of my performances. I developed soft sports for his criticisms. I remember when we put on The Rebellion of the Bumpy-Chested at the University of Ibadan. He told me, because he was sitting close to me, he asked, “Why are your actors always standing up when they want to render their lines, and after rendering their lines they sit down?” It stuck to my mind. Subsequently during the blocking, I made sure that did not happen, because it is mechanical and unrealistic. That criticism may appear minor, but I used it for many years to improve my performances. It has guided me for many years.

Thank you very much for granting me this interview.

You are welcome.

[1] Dr. Ngozi Udengwu is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at Univesity of Nigeria in Nsukka. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Dramatic Arts and a Master of Arts in Literature from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. She has a PhD in Theatre Arts from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. She teaches courses and supervises projects at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She has presented papers at over twenty conferences both nationally and internationally and has also published over eleven scholarly journal articles and book chapters and has conducted workshops on literacy and reading for the UNICEF Field ‘A’ Projects. Her PhD thesis discovered seven active female playwrights in Nigeria, one of whom is believed to be the most prolific theatre director in Africa. Udengwu is currently a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Society, which is about to document, for the first time, the contributions of women in the Yoruba travelling Theatre of Nigeria. She is a member of several learned societies, including the Society of Nigerian Theatre Artists, International Federation for Theatre Research, African Theatre Association, African Theatre and Performance Working Group, International Reading Association, African Literature Association and Arterial Network.

[2] A Nigerian army officer, Babangida ruled Nigeria from 1985 to 1993.