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Networking, global economy and theatre makingE = Erik Söderblom, theatre director and artistic director. H= Jukka Hytti, producer. A = Annika Tudeer, editor. E & H started the Baltic Circle project in 1996. A: I would like us to speak about how it all started and where you are heading, as well as talking about to be part of an international theatre scene. H: Should we talk about the stages? The first lasted from 1996 when we started until 2000 and the festival then. Now we are finishing the second stage. E: If we try not to get it like a post-script. For me, the festival and the network are too different things. There is the network that should be kept very informal and very open, more like an anti-organisation. To maintain a kind of chaos. Then we have the festival, that wasn´t the point of the network from the start, but is a quite natural outcome of the work that we have done. I think that Helsinki needs a theatre festival. This is also why we have put so much effort in organising these festivals. If we go back to the crash of the Soviet Union, when things started to move in this region. The Baltic countries were geographically nearby, but mentally far away: it was hard to go there and hard to meet people outside the official organisations. Cities were closed. In the mid 90´s things changed and it was possible to go there and see what kind of theatre was made. And so we went. First without any financial backing, just to make friends with people. Soon we found out that there were really interesting theatre lives in cities like Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius... Since we were theatre makers ourselves and not representing any organisation, we could meet with people without any expectations. Quite soon we came to meet the right people, the ones that then were starting off. Now many of them are internationally famous. They have made an artistic and also in some case a commercial success. And at the same time left the economical level at which we are working. This organisation is a generation thing, as we grow older and become more established we change. But I would like to keep Baltic Circle as an open and informal network concentrating on phenomena that are now starting to happen. We are looking for people that are on the edge of something — whether they are young or old. H: For me it looks like that the network in the future is different from the festival. People are coming and going. Although it started like a Baltic region thing it is expanding. Now we have some friends from Ukraine, Armenia, Montenegro, Croatia. People in Italy have been interested in this area as well. The network is fluid. A: Network is great, but it always puzzles me when talking about networks, that what do they do, or do they actively do anything? H: The network is not working. It just is. E: It is an open house, a house with open doors. Those who want can go there. H: It is a meeting point. The meetings happen often during festivals, not only the Baltic Circle festival but also the Homo Novus festival in Riga, Baltoscandal in Estonia,the New Drama Action festival in Lithuania, the Baltiski Dom festival in St.Petersburg where we have organised big seminars for our önetwork. E: I feel like a double agent. On the one hand we have the grants and the funding, so we need names and a structure, on the other hand we have the living fluid of creative theatre making. The point for us is to work against the kind of heavy organisations that the festivals tend to become. H: That is the paradox of the producer. E: Yes. I see theatre in society as a kind of surface between an invisible mental sphere and a concrete physical sphere where things get flesh and become concrete. Theatre should be testing the political truth in society. Therefore every society tends to restrict theatre in some respect. There is ambivalence: supporting and restricting at the same time. Working in this double field of ambivalence is very interesting and it is also what we are doing. On one hand we organise ourselves and build structures around the phenomena. The structures start to direct what we do, how we see things, and guide our awareness of what happens. H: I have noticed during the last 10 years that it is very easy to agree with Erik’s artistic points of views. A. The paradox is also created by the structures that funding demands. H: We are doing this like a piece of art. We take risks. Putting 80 freelancers together to work during three months and tell them why we haven’t decided the festival programme yet? The latest premier of a guest performance was a few weeks ago in Sweden. E: This is what this festival is compared
to most others. We are not going to performance shops to buy, then
trying to sell them to someone else. From the start we are a group
of theatre makers. The basic is the meeting of theatre makers. It
is a picnic in dark A: Do you have a theme for this picnic-festival? E: One of main reasons to arrange this festival is to find out what its theme will be. The themes of the festival will show us the themes of theatre of today. One theme will surely be that of changing borderlines. All these walls in society that crushed in the last decade. We will see how this reflects on theatre. The former political borders between east and west are not there. The genre borders are not there anymore, theatre mingles with dance, cinema and vice-versa. Even the border between what you could call life and theatre is blurred. Life becomes a set of stagings. This is a theme at the festival. How the phenomenon of theatre today is changing and moving in an interesting way away from theatre. Take us for example. Here today in this interview Jukka and I play the roles of a producer and a festival director. This is also theatre — you have to fulfil the act of a theatre maker in the face of publicity. This is another ambivalence. A: You are talking about society as a spectacle, where the public sphere is a stage and everyday life is more or less a staging. How do you see the political aspect of this theatricalisation of society? E: Society is changing. New walls are built. Walls around the new economic powers, around companies. In Russia we see Lukos Oil. There society has been replaced by the oligarchs now fighting for their place in the middle of power. We see multinational companies building walls around their virtual fortresses. And in the case of Lukos an attempt from the society to break these walls. In Russia this attempt might succeed — or lead to a bitter fight ending up in civil war. In the west the society has raised its hands in the air long ago. If you think about the trinity: church, society and the companies. There was a time when the church was to support society and take care of the weak. Now society has the same role in relation to the companies. Society is there to sanctify the companies and clean away the wrecks — the unemployed and the sick. But the real political power is hiding itself in the companies. In companies you may vote if you have shares. Without shares you have no right to vote. The new democracies are the democracies of the owners, of those who have, but not of those who do not have. The state does not have real power anymore. Companies have their own flags; they pay in options or in shares, which really is the currency of the company. At the same the currency of the national country is either not there anymore, or a mere technical matter. H: This reverts back to older times. This kind of community in a company is like the feudal system. They are more vulnerable and therefore build fortresses. E: We live in feudal states, with cities build around the fortresses of commerce, led by chief executive-owners — the dukes of today. If you are inside you are safe. Outside there is no law at all. You are inside if you have a job. If you drop out you are lawless. H: The state is so connected to the business companies and the global economy, so the state is demanding the third sector to take more responsibility. A: This is quite different from the 70´s or the 80´s when you could pinpoint power structures in society. Today, because of global economy, relations and structures are not graspable. Somehow this also reflects back in the making of theatre and the structures governing theatre. E: As I suppose we’ll see in this festival also. Attempts to find out were the power hides, who or what is really ruling us. Theatre is a small unit thing. Handmade. And at the end a very cheap art form, compared to many others. Basically it is people gathering in a room to hear a story. This festival is there for people for whom theatre is a way of constructing and making their world visible. Whether they are audience or theatre makers. Theatre is not just the performances. It is not just the building. Theatre is a way of looking at things, of relating to things. With the crush of the genre borders we see this theatrical and carnivalistic way of relating to the world spreading out from the theatre into related art forms — an example of that are the fictional documentary films shown in the festival. Theatre is an attitude towards life. A: I would like to go back to what Erik said about the need of personification in the art scene. On one hand you need a visible official persona to embody your artistic ideas — you are a commodity. On the other hand we have invisible networks that are needed in order to promote the ideas that this persona-commodity is bringing forward. So we are operating in a world where visibility is connected to visible personas, but behind them are invisible and anonymous networks. Where one prominent feature is that they consist of these individuals. E: Internet is that. The anonymity is also a shelter for a new kind of power and a new kind of democracy. People start to think in a new way. The official truth that we are presented with is clearly seen as theatre. Everybody knows that television news is a format. The format is ruling everything that is shown of the world. A collage. Where is the truth? It hides somewhere. A: What about theatres in this global market? They are rather bound to smaller communities. What about collaborating across borders interculturally and transnationally? H: Transnationality or internationality in a work cannot be a self-value. I have seen so many artificial co-productions, where the main thing has been to collect people together and then collect money. We try to avoid this kind of international co-production. E: Things must happen organically. The reason cannot be that you have to have three countries or five countries or whatever to get EU-support. This is part of the ambivalence I was talking about. I see this kind of EU rules as a vehicle by the establishment to make theatre rather not happen. H: So we have to fight against these kinds of structures and use them at the same time. E: Let us put it this way: Jukka has been hard at work to collect money for a party. To be honest — what I really would like the festival to be is a one-week party. That somebody else is paying for. H: And my task is then to make the report look like as if there hasn’t been a party at all. E: You can also see this festival as a one week on performance. A: With you Erik as director. E: Hopefully a surrealistic one. A: So, what is going to happen after this? E: After the festival? The future you mean? H: We have some plans. But let’s do this festival first. And hope we will survive. E: And Helsinki needs a theatre festival.
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Erik Söderblom [photo: Krista Keltanen] 
Jukka Hytti [photo: Krista Keltanen] 
[Strip: Jaakko Toijanniemi] |
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