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.
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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, notonly 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.
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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.
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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 civi- lization 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.
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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. That’s why we didn’t want to use Janis Joplin or Jimi Hen- drix. We wanted only this romantic utopian movement. Then I gave the songs to the actors and for each song they invented miniature stories. Just like doing video clips on TV, we made theatre clips. We had a few hundred of them but as the director I made a selection and tried to edit them to create our story.
You talk about a utopia and romantic feelings. You were probably just born in the sixties.
Yes. That’s why we dedicated this performance to our parents. Those were out real roots. Whether or not we physically existed yet, we were in the air.
In the program of Schauspiel Köln, The Sound of Silence has a subtitle that refers to its being about a concert in 1968 in Riga that never took place. It is unmistakably poignant in thinking about it in that part of the world because the Russian tanks moved into Prague in August 1968. Not only were there the cataclysmic events of Vietnam, Paris ’68. Whether it was Europe, Asia, Latin America, or the U.S. 1968 was a dividing point. For some it was a youth revolution but in Eastern Europe it was very different. In fact, Sound of Silence ends with a suicide of a young girl.
This performance had very contradictory responses in some places. In France, they did not understand why we were avoiding politics. For them in Western Europe ’68 is a political statement. I remember one discussion in Berlin where there were some German professors invited who had devoted their lives to writing books about ’68, who were angry that we were ignoring politics. I have two answers. First, I deeply believe that in those times it was not about politics. Students in the West were fighting for Marx and students in Prague and Warsaw were fighting against Marx. Politics was just an excuse.
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2010.32.1.23 by guest on 24 September 2021 Top: Sonia. Bottom: Long Life. Photo: Gints Malderis. Courtesy New Riga Theatre.
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2010.32.1.23 by guest on 24 September 2021 The real roots of this movement were much deeper. It was a global scale movement. It was not just about rock-and-roll and jeans. Every country—whether in Europe, America, the Soviet Union, Asia, Latin America—had a different way of expression. I believe that this movement could be compared to the last day of summer when nature feels that tomorrow is starting the decay. This is the last night of the summer when all the flowers are blooming like crazy. I think that human beings somehow felt that this was the last night of this dream about collective utopia.
My second answer is that of course we dedicated this performance to those few hippies we had in Riga in the sixties that were shown in the photos in the performance. They told me that for local KGB, they were much more irritating than political dissidents because if somebody was completely ignoring the KGB it was more dangerous than those who were fighting against the Soviet regime.
I was not familiar with that aspect of Riga’s history that was exposed in the documen- tary photos of hippies, young lovers in the city, and graffiti that you used to create an atmosphere for the performance. It was a very compelling use of photography when the audience walked through a corridor lined with photos before entering the theatre, and the photos again appearing in vertical panels in front of the stage space. On the basis of your work that I have seen in Poland and Germany it seems to me that it deals very often with ordinary people in a form of documentary.
Chekhov’s plays are very documentary as well. He was a doctor and everyday he was listening to people so we can be quite sure that most of those texts are documentary.
Ibsen also took a lot of his stories from the newspaper. Of course texts are social texts but I feel yours are more of a documentary form because of the use of photographs and slides in this production. And I am thinking also of Latvian Stories, based on interviews with a variety of people in Latvian society. We talked earlier about violence and politics in theatre, but there is also another trend in European theatre that focuses on ordinary people in a non-political way, like Theatre du Soleil’s recent Les Éphémères.
As soon as theatre becomes political, it becomes too didactic. If you are doing such stories about real people you don’t have to think about politics. They will exist anyway.
That’s evident in the images you chose; for example, the way you would use the green glass bottles and jars in The Sound of Silence. A character would press one of these objects against an ear and suddenly hear a Simon and Garfunkel song. That seemed to evoke the world of imagination. In another scene one of the characters is trying to find the outside world by playing with the antenna on an old radio.
This is the difference between our work and journals. If we are using these materials from the street we are selecting those things that are able to become poetical images. We transform this world through poetic images.
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2010.32.1.23 by guest on 24 September 2021 Last year in Cologne, I made a performance with German actors [Cologne Stories] that was based on real stories. I will give you an example. One actress had a strange obsession. Every morning she was testing pillows—taking a pillow from the store, testing it, and bringing it back. So in this work we tell a story about a lonely woman who has no family, no children, who has an obsession about finding the right pil- low. Suddenly it becomes a powerful metaphor for her loneliness. This pillow is her lover, her baby. A real fact becomes poetical.
It’s obvious that storytelling is a part of your theatre. Today people are very interested in other people’s stories. Don’t we need emotion and intimacy in theatre? We’re really missing that in society and in theatre.
Now I am doing Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories. We know this writer was quite lazy to invent something himself as well. He was just writing down what people were talking about. In his case, we can talk about real stories as well. This year I plan two works of Singer, one in Cologne and one at the Munich Kammerspiele. He is a real master of how to combine those two realities: the real world and the world of spirits.
The idea of being so attentive in everyday life and transforming that in fictionisa technique of some of the beloved writers in the world repertoire. There is a tendency in contemporary theatre toward storytelling.
Intimacy, I think, is the future of theatre. For entertainment you can find a better place to go than theatre. Theatre will be an exclusive place for giving this feeling of intimacy.
What are the issues that concern you now in terms of making theatre? What do you feel is important for you to do?
I’ve always said that my obsession is memories, the past. All my theatre works are based on memory. They have one common idea: that the past was better.
Are you nostalgic?
Yes. Yes.
Are you nostalgic for the old communist world?
I was born in 1965. So I had the opportunity for half my life to live in a com- munist society and to participate in this interesting experiment. I am nostalgic not because of communism, but because it was my childhood, my youth. It was cer- tainly the most inhuman invention. At the moment I’m reading Shalamov [Varlam Shalamov, 1907–1982, author of the Russian classic Kolyma Tales.—eds.]. Everyone knows Solzhenitsyn because of facts that he revealed to the world, but Shalamov is the best Russian writer. He himself spent twenty or thirty years in Stalin’s camps.
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2010.32.1.23 by guest on 24 September 2021 The Sound of Silence. Photos: Gints Malderis. Courtesy New Riga Theatre.
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2010.32.1.23 by guest on 24 September 2021 He is considered the most knowledgeable writer who has shown what happened there. Solzhenitsyn was a master of facts. Shalamov had real knowledge. He was an insider.
So when those people who survived Auschwitz said they have no illusions, I think after reading Shalamov the impression is even stronger. The reason is because in the Nazi concentration camps everything happened quite fast, and in the Soviet gulag the process lasted from the twenties to the sixties—forty years. So it was such a world where some people spent all of or the longest part of their lives in this system. I learned many new things about human beings after reading him so I have no illusions, not at all, about this system. But certainly I have nostalgia for the so-called “good old Europe.” The performances which I am making are not so much dedicated to the Soviet past. They are more dedicated to the values of old Europeans in modern times, when people were spending a lot of time sitting and talking with each other, writing letters, doing things with their own hands. A different tempo. Deeper.
One of the things we can observe is that much of contemporary culture is celebrating the speed and fragmentation brought about by the media, and the mediatization of the individual. Your theatre is moving in the opposite direction in its more conservative, restorative way by focusing on the actor, and on a certain tenderness and loveliness. Much of the world is moving away from those qualities.
We are resisting this. We feel ourselves like guerilla warriors.
How do you work with actors to generate the emotional qualities of your work?
As an actor, you don’t treat your character like something abstract. You have to have the right attitude. You have to find somebody in real life who is similar to a character. You try to find this person and look in his eyes and treat him with precision and attention. You have to be honest. Honesty and precision are very powerful weapons. From Grotowski, who has an anniversary this year, I took very good advice about precision. Precision is a very fascinating force everywhere—in theatre as well. If you are precise you will have results.
In terms of your education in theatre did you draw from the Russian or Polish tradition? Is there a strong Latvian theatre tradition? What do you count as your roots?
My teacher studied in Moscow with Efros. Efros’s teacher was Knebel [Maria Osipovna Knebel, 1898–1985]. Knebel was Stanislavsky’s assistant. So this heritage is coming from the Russian tradition.
Do you think Stanislavsky has been misunderstood in the West?
Do you mean with Lee Strasberg? No, I wouldn’t say he was misunderstood, but Lee Strasberg used only one very narrow point. Of course, you can’t use everything in the writings.
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2010.32.1.23 by guest on 24 September 2021 What methods do you drawn on? Was it the later Stanislavsky?
It’s a method which in modern times in Russian theatre was kept by Tostanogov [Georgy Tovstonogov, 1915–1989] in Leningrad and the Lev Dodin theatre school. It’s called “method of physical action.” It is quite different from what Stanislavsky wrote earlier, but he himself was big not only in size but in his artistic vision. His heritage could be and should be interpreted as widely as possible. There’s not only one Stanislavsky and the other [interpretations] wrong. He should be considered a source of inspiration, like Artaud. It’s hard to define them.
Speaking of acting, I wonder if I agree with what you said earlier about Castellucci and Marthaler not caring so much about the actor. Marthaler’s work is so inventive in the use of the actor. And also Castellucci is so interested in certain qualities of the perform- ers. Many people say that Wilson doesn’t care about actors though he works with the best actors in Germany and other parts of the world. Maybe the way we think of actors’ theatre or directors’ theatre on the contemporary scene is too rigid.
Let me tell you one thing. Often in theatre it happens that some actor gets ill or pregnant and should be replaced. In those cases when actors can be replaced in two days or two rehearsals, then we cannot talk about serious actors’ theatre. Nobody will pay attention to this substitution which happened in two days. I’m very sorry but I don’t think that in the case of Wilson or Castellucci we can talk about actors’ theatre.
I agree theirs is not an actors’ theatre—I’m simply saying that they are very interested in performers.
Of course how they are using actors’ bodies was a revolution. For example, many people don’t understand how Angela Winkler, who is one of the highest quality dramatic actors, agrees to work with Wilson.
Yet, she is marvelous in Wilson’s production of Threepenny Opera. That is the amazing thing about German actors. They can be in Wilson one day, Kleist or Shakespeare the next day, and be equally extraordinary. If I may say so, many directors are interested in the actor’s body but you seem to be interested in the actor’s soul. Your theatre is soulful, I would say, and I cannot think of another theatre that I would use that word to describe.
It is most precisely what the good old theatre formulated—that the quality of energy created in the audience will always be precisely the same quality of energy that will come from the stage. On the level of energy, it is impossible to cheat the audience. If you want to swim, you have to accept that you become wet. The actors should be very, very honest.
I don’t want to be misunderstood. I have the biggest admiration for Wilson and Castellucci. What I am talking about—I don’t know how it is in America—is that in the last years in Europe, when we have been to festivals or major gatherings, the actor becomes less and less important. It’s all about how to use video, how to use
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2010.32.1.23 by guest on 24 September 2021 dancers, but not the actor. When festival organizers are talking with me they are usually asking—have you seen this director’s work?; nobody ever asks—have you see some impressive actor’s work?
I’ve heard the argument as well that no one particularly cares about writers or dramatic literature either. I agree with you. The emphasis is always on the director, not on the actor.
Who knows? Maybe in some theatre in Bulgaria or in Venezuela the greatest actor of our time is now working. Nobody will ever find it out.
I think your theatre would be appreciated in New York as an actors’ theatre. Americans are very interested in actors and acting styles whereas European theatre is more a directors’ theatre. Have Simon and Garfunkel seen The Sound of Silence?
No—we are too shy to let them know.
The music brings back such a flavor of the sixties, not only the cultural politics but the dark side of American culture. In light of some of the issues around politics we have been talking about, your own views appear to be socially conservative.
I’m forty-three years old. Half of my life I’ve spent under the Soviets, half under capitalism. I have witnessed myself in the example of my country’s switch to another social system. It has nothing to do with changing people. There’s not the slightest proof that the political system is changing people. Politics are just superficial waves above the water.
Your ideals seem to be shaped by your younger years, in the sense that they are not indi- vidualistic. You prefer the group or the sense of community. I mean that in a positive sense. Your values are the values of community.
But they are closer to the ideals of the American theoretician Hakim Bey. His theory is that nowadays it is not possible anymore to change the whole world. But it is possible to change the little world around you, for example, whether my theatre or friends or family. You can improve the quality of your little world instead of fight- ing for revolution in Africa.
I think it’s important to understand what kind of values or ethics a theatre has. The spiritual, the ethical—is that important to you?
Yes, it is. I’m not talking like an old grandmother who doesn’t like loud music. I agree that on stage everything is possible. On stage you can do anything. There is no taboo. But at the end of the performance you have to clean it up. You have no right to give your private shit to the public. Leave it home. Theatre is not the place for it. There are artists who are mentally sick individuals who just want to share their shit with other people who are buying tickets for it.
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2010.32.1.23 by guest on 24 September 2021 It sounds as if you are referring to live art and other solo performance forms that focus on sickness and trauma and identity issues. I also don’t care for this kind of work that often seems exhibitionistic.
If you are touching such delicate, dangerous subjects then you have to find a way to clean this energy to let the audience go home with a light feeling.
When you are speaking about a certain kind of emotional energy in the actor, it is in a social sense rather than in Grotowski’s idea of the “holy actor.” Is that correct?
In our case, it is all about communication with the audience. Emotional energy is for me the ability of the actor to exchange real (not artificial or calculated, like in Hollywood) emotions with the audience. It is the highest level for the actor—to be emotionally naked, vulnerable, fragile. A safe actor is a dead actor. More and more I think Grotowski was perpetuating religious ideas. He was a religious person. I don’t think that he was a great director. He was a great genius of how an actor becomes a saint because he comes from a very orthodox Catholic Polish way of thinking that every being has the ability in his lifetime to become a saint. It was his way to think that you can become a saint only if you suffer enough. He was using theatre as his way to this religious path.
It may not always be religious, but a number of artists working today depict personal suffering, with some of the same impulses.
Then it’s a question of attitude toward the audience. Grotowski didn’t needan audience. The emotions of Grotowski’s actors were focused to God. They were com- municating directly with God, not with the audience. The emotions of our actors are focused towards the audience; spectators are partners.
Your theatre is able to bring together the deep connection to the audience with the sense of lightness you spoke of earlier. In The Sound of Silence, lightness seems to be linked to the realm of imagination and freedom. No matter the social conditions characters could imagine other realities.
I would prefer another word than imagination—poetry. This is how I see my job. Everything should be transported to this poetical level. I agree with Joseph Brodsky that poetry is the highest form of art. If you are trying to be poetical in theatre it is slightly changing the rules of the game.
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