The Poetry of Things Past

THE POETRY OF THINGS PAST Alvis Hermanis in conversation with Bonnie Marranca ne of the celebrated European directors of his generation, Alvis Hermanis has been the artistic director of the New Riga Theatre in Latvia for twelve years. Trained as an actor who worked in theatre and film before he turned Oto directing classics and contemporary plays and adaptations of fiction more than two decades ago, in 2007 he received the European Prize for New Theatrical Realities in Thessaloniki. In recent years he has directed several new works with his company, including Sonia (after a short story by Tatyana Tolstaya), Long Life, Latvian Stories, Story about Kaspar Hauser, In the Burning Darkness by Antonio Buero Vallejo, Fathers, and The Government Inspector, for which he received the Young Directors Award in Salzburg in 2003. At a time when European theatre is characterized by the dominance of the director, Hermanis is devoted to the actor, and instead of high- concept stagings of the world repertoire, he often draws on the stories of ordinary people. The New Theatre of Riga has performed at major theatres and festivals in Europe, Russia, Asia, Latin America, and Canada—in Berlin, St. Petersburg, Singa- pore, Santiago, Avignon, Helsinki, Madrid, Lisbon, Brussels, Zurich, Montreal, Edinburgh—and in November 2009 Hermanis will stage two Isaac Bashevis Singer stories for the Munich Kammerspiele, and then adapt a Jaroslav Iwaskiewicz novel for Italian actors. For the Vienna Burgtheater, he is planning a production of August: Osage County, which received the Pulitzer Prize last year. I interviewed Hermanis in Cologne during the run at Halle Kalk (Schauspielhaus Köln) of The Sound of Silence, a three-and-a-quarter hour piece co-produced by the Berliner Festspiele, and based solely on the physical action of the actors and the recorded songs of Simon and Garfunkel. Our conversation took place on March 23, 2009. PAJ recently published your essay against the trend toward violence in the contemporary theatre [“Speaking About Violence,” in PAJ 90. 2008—eds.] after we met for the first time in New York. Here we are a year later in Cologne. Do you have any further thoughts on this issue? My statement makes sense only in the European context. As I understand it, Ameri- can theatre is non-violent, very friendly, and nice. © 2009 Alvis Hermanis PAJ 94 (2010), pp. 23–35. 23 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2010.32.1.23 by guest on 24 September 2021 User-friendly. Do you think this trend in violence still exists in theatre after Sarah Kane or in the treatment of the Greek classics, as in German theatre, for example? I’m using the word “violence” not necessarily in a primitive way. Actors beating each other are using artificial blood. It can also mean how they treat not only literature but life itself—what is called “deconstructing.” The age of deconstruction, it started with Paul Cezanne, and still has not reached an end. It has something to do with white civilization itself, which has a sado-masochistic obsession with self-deconstruction. Do you mean the post-Freudian world in terms of understanding and analyzing the self? It has to do with something much deeper, maybe even biological roots. Isn’t that the basis of modern drama? What we are doing is modern drama as well. But we are trying to treat our characters with understanding, with tenderness. It’s true. There is a great amount of tenderness in your characters and in the treatment of actors. What I was getting at is, isn’t the basis of our understanding of drama in trying to analyze conflict and the interior life of a character? It seems to me that you’re saying you are not really interested in this kind of character analysis on stage. Maybe in the European tradition, art and theatre have always been the means to transform society. It was one of the main functions of theatre—how to invite people to revolution. That’s maybe where this aggressive and violent energy comes from. Nowadays it’s hard to imagine, at least in Europe, that theatre could be an instru- ment in how to make another revolution. I think theatre has dramatically changed its function in European society. That’s an interesting way of thinking about your work because you are younger than most of the directors—like Peymann, Stein, and Tabori—who once thought of theatre in that political framework. Do you think that your theatre is a theatre for a post-revolutionary, post-communist society? Yes, it is a dramatic change if we compare theatre twenty, thirty, or forty years ago in Europe with theatre now. The difference would be as if we could compare Shake- speare’s theatre to Moliere’s. Shakespeare was more democratic. Moliere’s theatre was aristocratic. Theatre in the twentieth century had huge political power, not only in the East, with Efros or Lyubimov, but also in the West. This was a theatre that attracted crowds. It was a very strong weapon. Nowadays theatre is elitist. Educated and more prosperous people are going to theatre and consuming non-commercial arts. We can see also that supermarkets with biologic food are in fashion. So theatre nowadays is something like this ecological territory where people can just enjoy the intimacy of physical presence and sitting together. It’s a form of luxury. 24 PAJ 94 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2010.32.1.23 by guest on 24 September 2021 Left: Alvis Hermanis, artistic director of the New Riga Theatre, Latvia. Right: Latvian Stories. Bottom: Latvian Love. Photos: Gints Malderis. Courtesy New Riga Theatre. HERMANIS / The Poetry of Things Past 25 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2010.32.1.23 by guest on 24 September 2021 Are you saying it is just a form of entertainment? Not necessarily. Already there are so few reasons for human beings in modern civilization to leave their homes at night to go to theatre or to concerts. In Cologne all this week on the main stage of the theatre, there are public readings. People told me it was sold out. Why are people coming to attend public literature readings? They can buy those books and do it at home. Because they are enjoying this physical presence. This is what I mean by theatre as ecological. Where do you see your theatre in all of this? Sonya was based on the Tatyana Tolstaya story. Latvian Stories used interviews the actors had done with actual people. Long Life focused on the daily life of old people. How does your theatre fit into the post-communist contemporary world? This point on communism sounds confusing to me. For us, it is so long ago I hardly remember those times or how they can be connected with our work. Are you saying that you don’t relate to the fall of the Soviet Union twenty years ago as a starting point? Yes. It is not part of any processes in art. For the last seven years, I have worked not only in Riga but all over Europe. For a long time most of the European artists of my generation have not been paying attention to borders or to the meaning of this word. How do you see your theatre in relation to others of your generation? Many artists have moved into media or closer to visual art. Yet, your theatre remains based on the actor. I’m still very old-fashioned. I believe theatre is all about acting. Though I deeply respect artists like Castellucci or Rimini Protokoll or Marthaler, they were never focused on the actor but visual art or intellectual musicals. It was not about the dramatic actor, the professional actor. I insist that in the long term, the theatre is only about how to use the professional actor. Do you have a core of people you work with? What is your form of training and way of working? One thing is my own theatre at home and another is the performances I do in other countries where I use local actors. The New Riga Theatre is a repertory theatre company, state-subsidized. We have our own building. We have been together for twelve years and plan to spend the rest of our lives together. This is the privilege of our theatre system. So, we are going every morning to a job. How many actors are in the company? Twenty-three. 26 PAJ 94 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2010.32.1.23 by guest on 24 September 2021 I think you used about fourteen or so in The Sound of Silence, which I came to Cologne to see. Looking at the work it seems that there was a lot of improvisation. What part do the actors have in creating this kind of work? Everybody says that theatre is a collective form of art but in our case we really mean it, not just because we are inventing our own stories together, but sharing the copyright, too. Yes? That is very interesting especially today when there is concern over who owns a work. Is that true for The Sound of Silence and most of your work? Yes. How did you create a piece like Sound of Silence, which had over twenty scenes. Very simple. I chose twenty songs from the Gold collection of Simon and Garfunkel songs from the sixties because for me it was very important to accent this romantic, poetic side of revolution.

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