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Nomadism and airport theatreZ=Zane Kreicberga, director and working for the New Institute of Latvia as a project co-ordinator. Their main activity is the bi-annual festival Homo Novus of contemporary theatre. Zane is the program director for this festival. AL=Andres Laasik, critic writing for Eesti Paivaleht. Have seen Finnish theatre since the mid-eighties, Estonia. L=Lary Zappia, a freelance theatre director in Croatia and a phd student in Toronto in Canada. V=Vivica Bocks worked on Transeuropa Festival 2003, is now working with the Tanztheater in Hildesheim, Germany. C=Caroline Hochleiter worked on Transeuropa Festival 2003, is now working at the theatre Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin. AT= Annika Tudeer, contributor - digging deeper into the idea of networking. AT: Thank you for coming. Today I would like us to discuss networking, international collaboration and trends in theatre. If we start by discussing how you are part of the Baltic Circle network and how the network works in your countries. Z: We had a meeting in the autumn, during our festival talking about future plans and how we could collaborate. Not only by exchanging performances, but also on other ways of collaboration, maybe co-productions. It is important to have meetingpoints and see what others do. Only in that way I think you can feel the process of what is going on in neighbouring countries. AL: In Estonia our audience have possibilities to see results of the Baltic Circle collaboration in the production directed by Erik Söderblom, Connecting people, that was a big success in Tallinn. Now Taxidrivers is a sold-out production. Collaborations between Finnish and Estonian theatre is not always so easy although we are so close. It seems that we know each other, but our societies are very different. Z: We do not have this kind of co-productions in Latvia. The theatre there is still very much on its own. It is not so flexible on taking someone else on board. Our organisation tries to change this and show how one can benefit from international collaboration. AL: One of the important subject of networking is new writing. Nearly all participants of the Baltic Circle area are staging new drama. The possibilities to take in new writings from partner countries is a big opportunity. C: and V enters C: Sorry, it was the time change... L: I think that most people step in to the network by pure accident. I do not really think that you can come up with a firm structure of how a network operates. It is different from case to case. There are cases were you hire hitmen at a million dollar. They come, direct and never return. I do not see this as a true result of networking. There are linguistic and cultural barriers, because transcultural bonds are hard to form. It is not an easy symbiosis to transfer something from its natural environment. A: lot of impact have been made by those productions that were born in their mother culture, — and now I play the devils advocate — and then brought into a showcase and shown in their fullnesss. I think that theatre works stronger when it has roots. I envision networks more as exchange than experimenting into hybridizations. Z: But I think that networking has different aims and forms. To make co-productions can be one, but it is also exchange on theoretical levels. Exchange of theatre critics and education, like work-shops and seminars. For me the important thing is to get an awareness of what is going on and the best way is to speak with people and meet. So it doesn’t matter how you call it. C: On one hand you need roots and a basis to make theatre, but on the other hand the view from outside can be important. One way is to ask a group from another country to work on a theme that is specific for the region they are invited to. Something that would not be of first interest for them normally. Networking functions on different levels. It is organised in terms of financial structures, like in EU 2000 you have to figure out how to get five collaborators. So at some level you really have to invent. L: Who is going to be the fifth? L: But the impact is still quite limited. You work for two months, perform for one and then it is over. People in international co-productions will have tons of money, but the larger community will benefit more of exchanges. I think that the Baltic Circle has more impact in Helsinki than one single international co-production. AT: There are also scheduling problems in international co-productions. After dispersing you might not be able to get together for another year. On another level there are companies that are based on friendships, where you work together because you like each other. What I have found very intriguing in this kind of work is to get to know a different working culture. Z: This is the main thing, I think. When a collaboration is organic and comes from a relationship that was before. We should think about how we can support that kind of work. How we can develop a system that can support activities that are organically developing from relationships between people. Not with rules and requirements coming from the outside. L: Europe has places that are structured for meetings like this, since several decades. If you look at Barbas work, Odinteatr and what Peter Brook is doing. You get people from all across the world. They come there to do truly intercultural performances. AT: We tend to forget Barba and Brook in these discussions. Maybe because they are another generation. Their work is transcultural on a grande scale. But it is as if it is stemming from another cultural climate, another era. Whereas we are talking on a smaller scale when talking about international collaborations, where also nationality in a paradoxical way plays a strong role. AL: International collaboration is fruitful if you start it carefully with limited numbers of partners. For example, the Swanlake is made with Russia and the Taxidriver with Finland. It easier to operate if you do this complicated work with only a few partners. You can address the problem of different understandings, face the differences and make use of them in the performance. AT: Theatre is so language based, which makes the willingness to collaborations difficult sometimes. L: That is the trouble with western theatre. We are mainly focused on logocentric theatre. Luckily there are other forms. Mainstream theatre is logocentric which is a great fortune and misfortune at the same time. It makes networking much more difficult. I am coming from a corner in my country that is bi-lingual. I belong to the Italian minority and worked for four years as the artistic director in the National theatre there, where we had two Italian speaking and two Croatian companies. They share the same building, but there are very few co-productions. I do not like this aspect — but minorities have this feeling of being threatened, that they are going to assimilate and vanish. So, we have net-work crusaders who exclaim “let’s all work together in an open minded attitude”, and on the other hand we have people who are afraid of loosing their roots. You guard your territory, especially with smaller nations. It is understandable that people feel a little xenophobic. You look with suspicion on any kind of initiative. On the other hand , in Canada they pride themselves of not being a melting point like the US, but a mosaic. “Every little stone remains untouched and can keep its own individuality”. Toronto is a city with 30.000 equity actors (union belonging actors). There you have people who never can land a job neither in the movies or the theatres because of their accent. They can work on an international project once or twice in a year. Then the audience close their ears and make the effort to understand this person who is talking with a not perfect accent AL: In small countries theatre has a task to serve the language. Theatres should serve the language in order to protect it. It is somekind of mission, therefore this restriction. On the other hand because theatre must reflect the life, accents should be there. But it is always very special situations when accents are allowed on stage. C: It depends on the kind of theatre you do, if you do a bi-lingual project. If you have an accent you have the accent as the actor, not the character in the play. L: There is a theatre in Stuttgart that shows only works by and with immigrants. I was talking to an actor from ex-Yugoslavia who worked there. He said he was really happy to have found work as an actor, but he had this feeling of being isolated in a ghetto, acting and working for immigrants. It is like a little island in the sea of another country. C: Regions and small identities become more and more important. A big question is to try to invent projects where the theme is really specific and at the same time open. To pin-point something that is specific for the area where the project is done, but also address issues that are found in other places, like ghettoising. Z: For me it works as a rule that if something is deeply rooted in one situation –national or cultural and is answering crucial questions of those people living there, it is also interesting for me. L: The theatre of no-belonging. Theatre is like a curse, it has this group of people that make theatre for everyone but make theatre that does not belong to anyone. You can call it airport theatre. You have these groups that are travelling and get huge funds, but they never truly belong to their mother country. You can never see them in their homeland because they are always on tour. AL: Nomadism. Theatre without any roots. And theatre that is not interested in roots either. AT: But there are also quite a lot of people who do not feel that they have roots, or that their roots is in another community than their home country. It might not be a bad thing to make this kind of airport theatre. Z: We have been working for some five years on this issue. It works like this - you go to one festival and meet people, your work is seen by important people and from there it goes on. I also see a danger in the festival touring, because you might change your mind and try to make the performances for the festivals. The aim is not to show performances in different countries, but when it happens it is good; you get feedback and feel another cultural background. You might find new aspects of yourself and your work. That is important, to know yourself better through this communication with other countries and cultures. AT: What you say leads also to the idea of trends, do you as programmers, journalists and researchers follow up trends? Z: I do not really know what trends are. With our festival we try to think what would be interesting for our audience. We might not bring a very popular performance that is travelling through different festivals in Europe. But we also want to show theatre that is not usually seen in Latvia. C: I have to return to the idea of audience and how it works in theatres. Recently I have been in two extreme situations. In Hildesheim where there is hardly any theatre life and now in Berlin where there is so much. The Hildesheim audience was very interested, they wanted to see things and discuss. In Berlin there is so much theatre and much less audience. Nobody is interested in anything. When you think about who to invite, you feel that you have to invite people with a strong vision. But it is not always interesting to invite those who are touring all the festivals. The big question is how to set frames for those artists that are not so strong or so far in their work. Last week we made a festival called No name. That was the frame for German groups that had not been to Berlin before. Another possibility is to have themes. We have lots of projects that want to be presented, but we know that many are so small so they don’t reach out. Now we are putting them together to give them more strength to be recognised. Z: There are very fast changes. First you invite someone unknown and then suddenly they are so big that you cannot invite them anymore. If you jump on this international train it goes very fast. L: It is a train without schedule, you do not know when to catch it. Are these trends not somewhat repetetitive? The age of returning of the image, the age of theatre going political... back to the story. It is basically the same thing. V: Trends are made by critics who try to find a line. Then looking forward to what fits into this trend. AT: On the other hand people happen to deal with the same issues at the same time. I use to think that trends have more with form than content to do. L: But theatre was never really avant-garde. Theatre is probably the last of all art forms that change. The cutting edge is everywhere else: architecture, visual arts, music, literature. Theatre is slow, its nature is to be on the tail of events. Yet we are living in the age of borrowing. The nature of the beast — that is theatre — is to rely heavily on borrowing from other people.You are definitively borrowing whether you are looking for trendy things or not. I am writing a thesis on copyright and theft, because that is what we actually do: we steal and try to copyright it. It is not like in the renaissance where were paying hommage by taking someone’s work and rework it. Today it is called stealing. Even if you exactly take something inspiring and place it out of context, it will be different, translated into your own langauge and culture. Even when we think that we are really avant-garde and radical, I think that we are essentially conservative and traditional as an artform. Think about how much has changed in the art world and still 99 % of the actors are rooted in Stanislavsky. Even the most avant-garde directors are working on how to influence the actors. AL: Stanislavisky was radical. L: So was perspective in the renaissance. AL: Talking about mainstream it also have an impact on the radical movement. In Tampere Theatre festival last summer, I realised that Finnish new writing has become an art of mainstream. The audience is looking for Finnish authors. The same is happening in Estonia. It is a new situation. In Finland; the Q-teatteri, Kom-teatteri and Ryhmäteatteri always staged their own stories. It was an alternative theatre, but now it is part of the mainstream. In the mid 90´s von Krahl staged their own stories. Otherwise very few new plays were staged in institutional theatres. Now every theatre is producing new plays and the audience is very interested in new writing. But what is radical now? AT: And that is an excellent question to end our conversation. To be continued, hopefully!
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Zane Kreicberga [photo: Krista Keltanen] 
Andres Laasik [photo: Krista Keltanen] 
Lary Zappia [photo: Krista Keltanen] 
Vivica Bocks [photo: Krista Keltanen] 
Caroline Hochleiter [photo: Krista Keltanen] 
Annika Tudeer [photo: Krista Keltanen] 
[Strip: Jaakko Toijanniemi] |
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