As we are gearing up for our research project, I have become more and more fascinated by the concept of theatre as a place for telling stories, and especially how to do that in a postdramatic context. Postdramatic in a radical sense means to throw away the story, let go of a character and dramatic situation in order for a genuine, immediate communication to exist between the art work and its recipients. In an age where more and more people have access to share and distribute their own stories, why would we bother with performing the classics, like Chekhov?
Almost performance art in itself, I was looking at YouTube clips of audition monologues of Chekhov characters. I came across this one:
Whether the actor is doing a good or bad job at this monologue of Konstantin in The Seagull is irrelevant, more interesting is that a classic monologue of Chekhov finds its way on the electronic highway of the Internet and a distribution channel like YouTube, very much a feature of our time. And other questions that pop in my mind: Why would one speak a text which is not created by the speaker, but merely memorized by him? And how is it a convention which insists that a written text can contain a hidden character, and that the speaking of the text can create dramatic situations? From the perspective of postdramatic theatre, this convention is considered an embarrassing pretence, and an obvious manipulation of the audience.
To invite audiences into a an arena where we create other worlds at the best of our abilities whilst 'hiding' behind the mask and facade of a character and story, keeps circling in my mind. Theatre should be a place where both performers and spectators are activated, and where the audience has a place to create their own dramaturgy, to work as co-authors of the work and where a collective community is figuring something out in the here and now. But how to do that? And with a canonical play like Three Sisters?
The companies Dood Paard and Gob Squad are researching these territories in their own ways.
Dood Paard, from Holland and operating as an actors collective, is adapting and restaging classics in a way I find utterly engaging and challenging. They tear these stories up, deconstruct them, clash them with pop culture and perform them in a simplicity and purity that has an intelligent audience hooked. The actors do not act, they perform. Their shows and especially MedEia are stripped away from every cliche of performance or melodrama, yet are wonderfully theatrical. According to Dood Paard, an audience should always feel the presence of the actor rather than the character; by which I mean the WORKING actor, the professional. I find this notion so much more helpful than thinking that we need to be ourselves on stage. What does that mean? Be ourselves? A company has a job to do in the theatre, whether is as an operator, designer, director, stage manager or an actor. Why should the actor ignore this context in order to be truthful?
Therefore Dood Paard is constantly relating to the actual presence of an audience, constantly navigating and fuelling the space between. Always trying to have eye contact and create a relationship. An audience of Dood Paard never stays anonymous. Text might be a limited way of expressing things in our visual world, but this company loves language and knows how to perform this in a way where you feel their responsibility and purpose on stage.
Gob Squad is a collective from Berlin that have created performance experiences rather than 'plays' for their audiences. Gob Squad performers always try to work from their own material. Seeking their own relationship to phenomena in an urban landscape, they have created work in a hotel, on the street, trainstations, the theatre, etc. They use their own names on stage and make themselves visible within a structure of tasks, restrictions and games, in which they are finding ways of interacting with an audience. The first time I met Gob Squad was in the Volksbuehne of Berlin with their mindblowing performance of KITCHEN, in which they collaborated with the audience to relive and recreate the 1960s arts scene of Any Warhol in New York.
Yesterday I went to their show ARE YOU WITH US at Hau Theatre in Berlin. After 15 years of working together, the collective wanted to stage a live therapy session with themselves on stage. This provocation could be done in a very indulgent way, even more considering the four hours length of the show. Billed as a duration performance however, the audience witnessed the performers dress up for different sections whithin their therapy extravaganza. Dressed up as stewards, hippies, bogans, drag queens, young urban professionals, they searched within these staged compositions for individual truth around topics as dreams, relationships, hopes and integrity. I especially appreciated how though being overly theatrical in their costuming and performance set, they were able to contrast this with very personal, honest expressions and opinions. And as they questioned themselves and challenged their own sensibilities as artists, collaborators and human beings, we did the same in the audience. Using this clever playground, I was part of a whole young audience who engaged themselves with something that I would call reality theatre. As an audience member, you were given permission and allowance to lie down on pillows and watch, get out of the theatre to have a smoke, get some drinks and go to the toilet. This theatre or better an event could not been found on television or cinema, and operated as an open structure which did not imprison but liberate.
Back to Chekhov. I am convinced of the universal power of his plays and the relevance to be found in our current, contemporary world. But there is an interesting paradox here. Chekhov was born in 1860 and wrote his masterpieces around 1900 and situated them in provincial Russia. We are a collective consisting out of Dutch, German and New Zealand practicioners, born in the 1980s and 1990s and are investigating the urban landscape of Berlin through a Chekhovian lense. How to expose our world and our questions with a text that was written more than 100 years ago? How to turn that into an event and an experience for the company AND the audience to work something out in the present moment? How to care for and respect a text, but at the same time rework it for its potential to shine in a postdramatic context?
Director Robert Wilson seems to have found his answer in a combination of silent film and radio play. I leave you with his quote and one of the German performers Runa Schaefer speaking texts of Three Sisters at a Berlin trainstation. Keep you posted.
“If you take a silent movie, you can only see the text, but you can still think about how it sounds. There is much space for the listener because we can hear the sound of text in our imagination. If we take a radio play, the boundaries of the images are limitless because we can imagine whatever we want. There’s a voice in both and there’s an image in both: one is external, one is internal. In a sense what I am doing is like trying to take the radio drama and the silent film, and place the radio’s voice over the visual image.”
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