JUKKA: We thought that today we would start by talking a little about traditions and then the discussion can go whichever direction it goes to. But since we have a guest from India here we would like to ask him about the traditions...

...because the only thing we think we know about the Indian theatre - this is a generalisation but - we know about these very old traditions. In the theatre school we have this short introduction to Eastern theatre and there is an even shorter part on the Indian theatre and it’s all about things that have happened like thousands of years ago. So we thought it would be interesting to hear about your relation to this tradition.

JOHANNA: So what is the relation between being a contemporary playwright and a person and at the same time a part of this...

SATISH: Yes, that is an interesting and enormous issue. Colonialism in India started when the Greeks invaded India way back. The tradition of colonialism goes back to the times of Alexander. I belong to contemporary sensibilities and I also belong to the generation after India’s independence, from 1947 onwards. I was born in 1949 so I don’t have any colonial hung-ups because I grew up in free India. My parents fought against the British rule but we carry the tradition within ourselves even though we had the official rule of the British regime for 200 years. The contemporary Indian theatre has got one foot in tradition and one foot in modernity - with the hung-up of colonial shadows so the modern actor is a bit in between. Because of this kind of pressure new sensibilities have erupted in modern Indian theatre. For example it started in the 60’s and 70’s when one of the leading theatre directors was part of Royal Academy of ... in London in the 50’s and when he was about to be graduated from RALA he went to the teacher and refused to graduate from there because he said that the kind of theatre they were teaching him has no relevance so he would like to go back. So he went back to India and started his own theatre group in a tribal area near Bhopal. And this group has lived for forty years and toured all around the world and he’s been dedicatedly doing all kinds of modern theatre - using traditional tribal artists. Later came the writers who for the first time took Indian myths and utilised them in their writing and performances. I myself started writing in 1973 and in my play, a Mockery of Death Rituals, I use traditional folk theatre form of my region - with modern sensibility. The folk theatre form is considered a kind of a ritual to be played in a temple. I brought it to make a statement about meaninglessness of death rituals in the Hindu community. It was kind of a black comedy. Also for example one senior writer used the myths to make a political statement against the rising right-wing politics in the region of Bombay. When you consider tradition you always have a love and hate relationship with it. Giving the modern sensibility means to give a re-interpretation of your own tradition. We also have to remember that the tradition in India is so enormous. It’s divided into several regions, languages and several subcultures. When you are watching the Kerala kathakali it is as alien to me as it is alien to you. I don’t know kathakali.

MIKA L: I was interested in this when you said that there was a play reacting against the right-wing politics... What is the relation between the right-wing policy and theatre tradition in India?

SATISH: Right-wing policy is a very subtle thing. We can’t put these things in black-and-white tones because the right-wing policy is a kind of mafia. It operates very subtly and at all levels of the society. They would like to protect their tradition. An example: the Indian woman. Any right-wing politician will glorify the endurance of an Indian woman, who is actually suffering a lot of exploitation. It is the most untouchable thing in India: the woman. So, if somebody wants to go and touch that subject, they don’t like that.

JOHANNA: What about you, what kind of a relation do you have with the tradition?

JASEN: It’s quite complicated to explain because Croatia belongs to the Mediterranean circle on one side and the northern side belongs to another circle. There are a couple of problems in talking about tradition. First of all - I live in a city that is 17 centuries old and it was build next to a city that was destroyed. And the oldest theatre in Croatia is 20 centuries old. It belonged to the Roman Empire. And even before that there were Greek theatres because we were a colony of Greece in the very beginning. Then the theatre in Croatia has a history of 500 years and then the 1000-year-old church plays performed in Latin. As you all know, in the early 90’s we had this war that split us from Yugoslavia and now we have six countries – Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia... And in the 90’s we had this need to show that we are all separate people - like Croatia is much older that Yugoslavia - so, in the 90’s we had this wave of traditional plays that were always conservative. But it was because we were not allowed to do them in the 80’s or 70’s. So there was this traditional wave. Now it has changed. The theatre model in Croatia is very unique. It is very old-fashioned. It is kind of like the only thing in which the Hungarian-Austrian Empire still lives - the Croatian theatre. The problem is that in the late 19th century they made the theatres - they are all the same. We have four in Croatia. So in Croatia we have these national houses where on one stage we have opera, drama and ballet! Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb has some 500 employees. They all share one stage. And the 550 employees, they produce like 150 performances per year. Because you simply can’t fit opera, drama and ballet on one stage. And the same thing in Split. And it costs a lot of money. Only in Zagreb it costs ten million euros per year. And they have these six, seven or eight opening nights and 150 performances, which is nothing for that money. And the same thing in other cities. All this costs like 80-90% of the money for culture. It’s like a factory. All the money goes to wages and there’s no money for the program. And especially no money for the independent groups that can’t really operate. And you can’t have really modern performances on these old stages. So it’s very old-fashioned. So now we have big discussions about the new theatre law: what to do... We have this idea that all the actors should have a contract for only two years. And it’s a huge struggle. Because now, after you graduate, you work for the next forty years in the theatre and you have your wage and you do nothing. And the third thing about the tradition... So after the war there was this need to prove that we are old people, that we are Croatians, and this also went to the kids... So now I’m doing this project with the puppet theatre, and I’m working with traditions - but with the traditions of other countries. Different traditions from different cultures for kids. I wrote a play on a Japanese tradition and I will meet Native American people...  So, this way, I’m trying to show the kids that there are different people, different traditions, but problems are always the same. And this is the way to start with the kids because the programs in schools are still quite conservative. You know the main thing in the 90’s was that when I was saying I have something from abroad they would say “oh fuck, we don’t care about the Americans, in the 7th century we had the kings and they ate with fork and spoon... We have all and we have all rights!”

JOHANNA: Does this closed, national thing sound familiar to you, living in Slovenia?

DAVIDE: Not really, I would say. But you have to take into consideration that I came from Italy ten years ago. And I am active in the contemporary art field so I don’t really... I’m not really in touch with the National Theatres and these kinds of things. And we didn’t have the same kind of a problem that they have. And also perhaps geographically the position - Slovenia has only 2 million people and it’s there squeezed between Hungary, Austria and Italy and - for two million people there is basically no market! So you have to do something to go outside. And as you do that you become more open to exchange. So basically I would say the story is quite different. Still, the problem of over financing the structures that are actually dying also exists in Slovenia. Big public institutions use about 95% of the money solely and only for maintaining the infrastructure - not to produce. While small and fast and slim independent productions - as the one we have here at the festival - actually use 90% for productions! 

JOHANNA: When the European artists sit and talk about the contemporary situation we always end up talking about the money issue - about all the money going to the old institutions and so on. So I would like to hear from you...

DAS BECKVAERK: Yes? 

JOHANNA: You are getting this award today... so tell us about you relation to money and staying alive in these structures.

DAS BECKVAERK: The basic thing is that I don’t want to care about it. I was interested in listening to what you said until you came to the point about the 90%. In Denmark, the Royal Theatre takes all the money and build a new house and no-one needs that house but I can’t do anything about it. So I just try to keep to the material and try to work and then I pay the people who participate. Every culture has their own subcultures that are very small. I stayed for a while in Germany and New York and... after five minutes these societies were so tiny. You know they all talked about each other. They stare at each others’ faces and talk and they think that they are talking about the world. (Laughter.) One thing you have to do is to step out of these circles, keep out of the intrigues that are always about somebody else taking my money or that the “state theatre is stupid”... which it is very often, but, you know... just stick to the work!

ERIK: Speaking of money and tradition - I think there is a connection. I think money is always conservative. In a way this creates an inherent question or problem in theatre in respect of tradition: when free groups start they don’t have money and then they are very easily untraditional. Being free is also about being free of tradition. And this should not be true. In Finland there is this big tradition of non-tradition - that we don’t know anything about tradition. Especially young theatre makers think they can’t get anything out of tradition. Speaking about theatre, it is from its starting point a very traditional art... the long memory of a mankind with old stories that have been living for centuries... and what you see on stage is a new version of these stories.

ANTTI: I totally agree but isn’t it so that if you have no knowledge of tradition... It’s like when I went to this writing course and there was this older fellow who had been writing poems and he took them out and they were these rhyming poems... as if a child had written them. He was very proud that it was his original work. He thought, because he had no knowledge of the tradition, that they were really something very special and very original. So - when you have no knowledge of the tradition you tend to do something that has been done very many times before - and - you also see it as something very original.

TOBIAS: In Switzerland in the 60’s and 70’s the traditional big houses were very strong and they played only Goethe and Schiller and so on - it wasn’t very interesting for young people like me. So people opened new theatres, there were like ten at a time, and they were really against these houses. They had no money but did many great things. The point is that some kind of suppression is going on. It went on in history: we had a lot of troops from Germany five hundred years ago that came to educate the Swiss. They were on the market places. And then it became political and the Swiss wanted to prohibit it. Just last year the Swiss foreign agency, they didn’t give a Swiss troupe that had a critical play about money from France and oil - and they wanted to go to Burkina Faso and they needed something like 40,000 euros to go there and present it there. The lady who is the head of that government said “no, you are not going”. It was a political act, an act of suppression. The theatre in Switzerland is put in this left basket and the money given to us is reduced. It’s really a kind of suppression we experience today. For me this situation is also a chance to do something against it, to say “hey, we are here and we have something to say!”   

JOEL: Now that I have listened to you I just wanted to say that... It’s not a question of tradition and modernism. It’s a question of conservatism and modernism - because you can say you are a modern theatre person and still you are working within the tradition of your own country. When we are talking about Russia we are of course in the tradition but the question is whether we do it in a modern way or not. In Moscow I don’t know any independent groups that have had any money in the beginning! But in some years they get some money from somewhere. And then they get status! And then they start defending their status.

JASEN: We are mixing up things all the time. On the other hand we are talking about the tradition in an aesthetical way and then in an organisational way. And then we are mixing Slovenia and Croatia... I see Slovenia as a role model. When we were in the war in the 1990, they split the opera and ballet from the drama theatre in Slovenia and gave it a new building. And now the National Theatre in Slovenia is a very good theatre. It is traditional in an organisational way, but aesthetically it can be very modern! I see Slovenia and Lithuania and Poland and Russia as the most interesting countries in Europe - aesthetically. So I wouldn’t mix Slovenia and Croatia. And another thing we mix is that it’s different talking about the tradition from the point of view of a free European country. You don’t have to prove you are different because you have your own language and your own culture. So it’s different in Croatia. In India it’s similar in some ways. We had to prove in Croatia in the 90’s, that we were a different country. In Slovenia they didn’t have that problem. They didn’t have this big Serbian minority. In Slovenia the war in the 1990’s lasted 5 days, in Croatia it lasted 5 years. As Satish said, when you fight for your right for... whatever it is called, the nation, or independence or right to be gay or female or whatever, then you can use this tradition in another way and it has another meaning.

JOHANNA: We here in Finland understand that struggle completely. It’s just perhaps so that here we went through it so long ago that we have perhaps forgotten a lot about how it is.

JASEN: Yes. So it’s easy when you live in these countries like Germany to say “don’t talk about the tradition, it’s ours, we know who we are!” It’s another thing in Croatia or in India. The third thing we mix up is something but I cannot remember it anymore...

(Laughter.)

DAS BECKVAERK: I don’t think that money is always conservative. The only thing where the market is conservative is in that it wants to maintain its own structure, its own model of working...

ERIK: I don’t speak about the market, I speak about money. Actually, what I meant were subsidiaries, the money that comes through the state...

DAS BECKVAERK: Yes. The state is a lot more conservative than the market.

SATISH: Another thing about conservatism and modernism... When you look at India, the complexity of the traditions and the culture cannot be understood without understanding the role of religion. The religious fabric is so complex because of the Muslim invasion of 700 years. The second largest Muslim population in the world stays in India. More Muslim people stay in India than in Pakistan. And the whole structure... the whole cultural fabric is so secular. I give you two little examples. The red dot here in the forehead of an Indian woman is a very, very Hindu thing, a Hindu ritual - but: the traders who trade these dots are Muslims! Other example: insence sticks - used by the Hindu people, but - most of the manufacturers of these sticks are Muslims. The Hindus study classical music that is very close to their rituals - but the music is preserved by Muslim scholars. Ravi Shankar’s guru was a Muslim. Another example: Bollywood films. Most of the heroes are Muslims and most of the women, the heroines are Hindus. But when people look at them on the screen they don’t care if she or he is Muslim or not. So - popular culture plays a very important role in implementing the secular fabric in a very subtle way.

ERIK: Speaking of the Finnish culture and the “Finnish tradition” - it’s to a certain point an artefact made for political reasons in the second half of the 19th century. There was this old Finnish culture with Kalevala and it was consciously used by some politicians and some philosophers to create the so-called Finnish culture - mainly to gain independence from Russia. And now, what I think is really crazy, only a very few people are in touch with the original Finnish culture. Not really many people know Kalevala, for example. In a way there is this old Finnish culture of neglecting or forgetting your own roots. And that goes on to the 13th century when we were invaded by this Catholic thing. If you wanted to be somebody in the history you had to forget about your own religion and become a part of the ruling class.

DAS BECKVAERK: Perhaps a big difference between the young Western art and theatre scene and Indian and maybe also Croatian is that we in the West don’t... many do have a strong knowledge about the tradition but it’s not for example the Danish tradition but more the modernistic tradition - or they work with traditions from India or from Africa. I think most of the good artists relate their works to traditions but it’s not their tradition. It’s global tradition sampling.

KRISTIAN: I speak now of some inner politics of the Finnish theatre. I disagree a little with Erik. I think we do have a tradition in the Finnish theatre – and that tradition is language – Finnish language and Finnish playwriting. If we look at our history starting from Aleksis Kivi - the man who invented the Finnish language in a way - there have been many playwrights that have been very good, also in aesthetical ways, in the way they write their plays. And at the moment the tradition is going on. We invent the stage by writing. And it has also been the leading star of our theatre education for the last 20 years. And writers are also directing their own plays. That is a very strong tradition in Finland. Actors are making their own plays. Some other countries like Lithuania have this very strong tradition of directors - and other countries some other tradition. That’s something we have not recognised.

ERIK: But, but - in teaching writing you tend to take models from abroad. From films... no young writers really know what great stories there are in the Finnish story-telling tradition! They simply don’t know. For me, teaching at the Academy, it’s strange that we don’t use the Kalevala more. They really are our own stories in a different way from those American films. Nobody in Finland knows for example that there is this world-wide classification of stories around the world. The so-called Aarne Thompson Classification. How many of us know that this Aarne-guy is a Finn?

ANTTI: Never heard.

TOBIAS: Something that hit me when I met Heikki in India was that you direct your own plays and now here I’ve heard about several more who do both - write and direct their own plays - and that is very interesting to me because in Switzerland I don’t know any writers who are also directors. For me as a writer it is important that I have this thing I want to say. I don’t really think about the tradition. Of course it is there, of course I have to be in some kind of a tradition - otherwise I would not be understood. So, I like the idea that you are so convinced about your idea that you also put it on stage.

ERIK: I see a very interesting point in the tradition here. You often speak of the playwright coming from this traditional literature. But in Finland, in the Finnish tradition, the playwright is not an author, a literary person, but a stage artist. He writes for the stage.

JASEN: I’d like to know something. How many professional writers do you have in Finland? I mean people that make their living that way? Not journalists.

ANTTI: Maybe a few hundred.

JASEN: Few hundred people!?

ANTTI: Yes. If you include people who write prose, drama, for radio...

JASEN: We have one person in Croatia! We are a small language. We have just 4,5 million people but still there are something like 20 million people who can understand Slovenian...

JOHANNA: 4,5 million?

ANTTI: We have 5 million.

JASEN: Talking about Kalevala... It is of course a tradition. But it doesn’t have to be conservative. It’s a question of how you produce it. How you interpret it in theatre. For example when we hear about Shakespeare we don’t think about tradition! I don’t thinks so. What I don’t like is... in Croatia in 1990’s I wrote a lot about it... there were new playwrights on every stage in Europe - but in Croatia there was this play from the 18th century! We entered the decade with that. And we left the decade with another play from the 18th century. So it was like there was nothing in between. And the way they were produced was really traditional and old-fashioned. So... why not taking things from the tradition? Some years ago I saw this Icelandic thing, a really old story that was really great, and modern.

HEIKKI:  We all have also seen awful interpretations of tradition put on stage. Like I saw in India... there was a co-operation between India and Japan and Pakistan and they said it was based on an old Indian tradition and... It was awful! They thought they were tradition breakers... They were dealing with myths in a way... They pretended that the myths themselves are so important that when they find a way to put them on stage “differently” it is something important. I couldn’t find any relation to the normal society or life or anything...

SATISH: That is true. Because the thing is that you cannot merge cultures synthetically. It has to be done organically. You have to study for example the grammar of Indian music to be able to incorporate it in your work in an organic way.

DAS BACKVAERK: So art can’t be non-organic and good?

SATISH: It has to be merged with your own team. You may take up something form India and, but...

JOHANNA: So you disagree?

DAS BECKVAERK: Yes, I’m not sure if the thing has to be organic...

SATISH: For example Peter Brook did Mahabharata. When it was produced the Indians saw Shakespeare in it. There was a lot of criticism in India about this piece. They saw that Brook was inventing Shakespeare in Mahabharata.

JUKKA: Is that wrong?

DAS BECKVAERK: Yes. Is that wrong?

SATISH: It depends on how you work. If you just synthetically mix like in this one that Heikki was referring to... You get an enormous sum of money to do this multi-cultural thing and...

DAS BECKVAERK: (Laughing) Yes, yes...

SATISH: And the same thing is happening with the EU now.  Many theatre makers from Europe are making India a scapegoat. They come to India, utilise Indian actors... I don’t say it is wrong. I say you have to study properly.

DAS BECKVAERK: Yes. Of course...

SATIS: For example when you merge traditional dance with modern tradition there has to be some kind of a link there.

ERIK: It’s interesting to listen to this because... one main aim and point of theatre is really to test the limits and try what is possible and what is not. And that has to do with the tradition. When we see a performance we test if it is our thing or if it is not... I can see this Mahabharata situation very clearly in this colonial context. Indian people, as an audience, are looking at the show and thinking about their identity...

DAS BECKVAERK: In any case it is also always important to step out of yourself to test, you know... what my reaction is now. This is the modernistic way of seeing art and I also feel a part of that. You have to stage utopias to see if this is possible, if this is a way that world can go on living - and so may Brook’s Mahabharata be a try-out to see if this is a way to take both me and Mahabharata further.

JASEN: This is interesting, this discussion about the tradition and modernism, because we, until very recently, lived in very different cultures. There was no communication, before internet and all these planes. What is traditional in one culture can be extremely modern in the other. Like in the play we saw in India three years ago... This happened to Kahtakali in the 60’s. Suddenly European countries found about all these different Indian traditions. It was 500 years old there and it was brand new here. Modern.

HEIKKI: If you think that tradition belongs to popular culture or there where the money is and not to the artistic theatre... In theatre schools we learn about all these great people who became famous breaking traditions. Then we try to do it, we may find some friends and put up a group. And it’s a very good thing. The problem is... there’s always this indifference between popular theatre and artistic theatre. It’s not a good thing. You know, when we graduated, we didn’t want to go to city theatres. Now I think of it very differently. I really want the young people to come to city theatres and do their own work there. This indifference... I myself want to do popular theatre. I think it may harm me to say this but I want to do popular theatre - with artistic values. Maybe you are right that money is conservative and it’s not possible to make real artistic, good, tradition-breaking theatre in those city theatres but I really want to question this...

ERIK: Yes, well... Money is on the side of the power. Speaking of the Finnish National Theatre… a hundred years ago there were some young people who had a mission to do this theatre. They didn’t have much money, I’m sure. The two small sisters and brothers - Bärgboms - who started this theatre. They had a mission and they started it and it became established and it got the status of the Finnish National Theatre. And now they represent... generally speaking, the conservative side, the establishment. And the same has happened with our Q Theatre. It has become a very established theatre. And originally there was Heikki and these two small brothers. And now you just have to fight to be able to step out of it, to see the tradition you come from.

JUKKA: I saw yesterday Nielsen’s performance where he had, on the stage, this paper from the Danish Government... A certificate that gave him 75,000 euros to do this performance. And that paper was there as a part of the performance. “They gave it to me!” He showed us the paper and I think it was a nice picture of how money has the power and power has the money.

JOHANNA: Kristian?

KRISTIAN: Yes. Well. A few things. I was, like Heikki, a leader of a city theatre in north of Finland and before that I had this small group in Helsinki. I have experienced both sides. If you say that money is conservative, we also have to remember that the “poor artist’s hate” is also conservative. It’s also very safe to be a poor artist with three or four friends, whining about everything: about the government not giving money, having no audience...

HEIKKI: I’m also bored with that.

KRISTIAN: So it’s... in my experience, having spent four years running a municipal theatre... in Finland it is possible to go inside the structures and make some changes there. Really start to change these official houses. But it’s a hard job and you have to be the leader of the house to do that, and that’s not enough. You also have to get some other new people in. One woman or man can’t do the job; you need other artists with you, and maybe also a technical group that wants to find new ways of doing things inside these structures.