After the Conference is over, the organizers are thankful and the participants – we hope – are happy, we invite everyone who was there and who wasn’t to take a look at the video of the Conference.
Also, we invite you to read an interview by Sigita Ivaškaitė with Patrice Pavis. The Lithuanian version is also available.
Photos by Dmitrij Matvejev
We know and appreciate you as a theatre theorist, but it would be interesting to know your opinion about practice: how would you describe contemporary European theatre?
There are so many different orientations and contexts in European theatre that I am not sure it is possible to summarize them. Take for example: political theatre, or the staging of previous texts (contemporary or classic); or, in England, the idea of immersive theatre. Here the spectator is immersed in an environment such as an old factories and the actors are dispersed accross this space. They try to address the spectator individually rather than as a whole. The spectator somehow decides on their own journey within the performance. Having the spectator enjoy a new experience is the main aim of this kind of theatre.
During my visit we talked about media, and specifically video on stage, with students. This is also a trend, not a new one, but very current and important, where all kinds of audiovisual means are used with both live recording and prerecorded material on stage. There are so many uses of these technologies that each time you have to explain what exactly you mean. So, I think that generalizing about “the” European theatre experience would be fairly meaningless.
Do you think that, with these technologies and the changing form of performances, dramaturgy is becoming less important or even rare in the form by which we know it?
Do you mean performances without text?
That is one example, but more importantly with performances where the dramaturgy is not as we have been used to perceive it. For example in Lithuania Hans – Thies Lehmann’s book “Postdramatic theatre” was published only last year. So discussions about this kind of (non) existing dramaturgy and its theory are still very fresh.
Well, Lehmann’s book is not really a theory. It is an assemblage, a collage of different philosophies and concepts. The theory is that there is no longer a general theory. I would say that these ideas have already had their peak in the West, for example in Germany. In France, they were never very big.
Somehow this idea of renouncing completely the idea of mise en scène, already had its time in the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and in 90’s. Arriving after the Soviet occupation in Lithuania gains a new perspective, especially so after the year 2008, when the economic crisis struck. After all this there is a need to have a dramaturge who could research the situation and suggest new dramatic or performance forms to explain what is going on. So this is a new way of working, looking for alternative ways to work. In a way, it is a continuation of the postdramatic; if you like, it could be called “postpostdramatic”.
Postdramatic is a catch-word, that nobody has defined, not even Lehmann himself. I was at a conference in Belgrade with Lehmann in 2009, 10 years after his book was published, where there was discussion about the term and its usefulness today. Some people, including me, were a little skeptical about the use of the term today—and that was then!
So, when we are talking about the dramaturge’s work today, do we need to split it into playwrights and production dramaturges?
It’s not really a split, because they were never together. From the end of the 19th century, dramaturges (by which I mean literary advisers like Hauptmann or Brecht, at least at the start of their careers) were working with other directors, were staging productions which offered new readings of classical plays. This has, in fact, lasted until today. Maybe this term even coincides with the postdramatic, where the dramaturge is no longer asked or no longer able to tell what direction should be taken. In some countries, for example in Germany, there are “production dramaturges”, but in fact they do more and more publicity work, or preparations for educational work with schools. So the notion of dramaturge is no longer what Brecht would have understood.
Again, the dramaturge might make a come back. If we agree that theatre must reflect social reality and that playwrights and directors must really analyze that reality, then somehow the use of a dramaturge becomes relevant again and the he becomes again and he or she becomes again a part of the creative team.
There is also an important new trend: the notion of devised theatre. This theatre is an attempt to reuse the work of the dramaturges work with directors and to remix the different categories of all those involved in theatre-making, tasks and functions of all involved in theatre-making. The dramaturge as a counselor and a thinker in that sense has still a role to play, but not the same role as in the Schaubühne of the 60’s or 70’s, when the dramaturge’s research was historical and he or she worked directly with the director. That is rare and maybe even no longer exists now.
In this kind of theatre model, do you think that directors and actors roles are changing? Who becomes the main creator?
It depends where and in what institution. You can’t generalize. It is not a question of deciding who has the power, the question of knowing whether the director should be the ‘King’ that gives the orders. This is not the issue in devised theatre or even in many other rehearsal methods that go by that name. The actor is also part of the staging, he or she is connected with the director who can use an actor on stage to analyze how the performance, or the scene, is going. This is still a dramaturgical task. I think it is an interesting and new development, where such categories are not clearly distinguished.
I know that in many contexts the theatre is still very hierarchical: the director decides everything from beginning to end. But here, for example in E. Nekrošius’ or O. Koršunovas’ work, I imagine that there is already some kind of discussion with the actors.
In your own theatre context how and where does the Lithuanian theatre appear?
It is not completely new to me, so I’m not totally surprised and I don’t see specific and recurrent features. I don’t think that it has created a clear identity. It might have been so in Soviet years and a couple of years after independence. I would have a hard time giving you (as everyone would, I imagine) some concrete notion of what Lithuanian theatre might be.
I do hear that the theatre here is “metaphorical”, because of the soviet period, when the artist had somehow to find a way to say things that would be understood but not banned by the authorities. But I’m not convinced that the theatre here is metaphorical. I do understand the local circumstances and the intentions, but isn’t theatre always metaphorical? Whatever you’re showing on stage, you are not saying it directly, and you have to wait until the spectator understands it. So, I guess, that the question of metaphorization is worth a debate.
I do understand that for a country with this historical background you need to have an identity which can be embodied in the theatre. But the way theatre functions today, in these times of exchange and globalization, is different. Your directors are working abroad, they are aware of the trends and they have to position themselves in a bigger picture. So saying this artist or that production is more Lithuanian than the others does not make much sense.
What are your impressions from the International Young Theatre Critics’ Conference?
The topic “REC: on stage” was really interesting. And this generation of students speaks good English and has a common language. They were all interested by media on stage. They chose good examples and did relevant case studies.
I’m not sure that we still have to wonder if media should be allowed on stage. We don’t have to decide if it is good or not, but to examine why and how these media are used on stage. But in some of the presentations, one could feel the presence of this normative position somehow.
For me the most interesting papers were those where the function of the video was described and analyzed dramaturgically, and not only the way it was used. So I think it was an interesting overview, but there was no time to properly discuss this, so that the students didn’t come to any conclusions of their own. This is a shame, because there was so much rich material. However, students had no time to share and compare their views. Intellectual discussions are needed even if they are really difficult just after the event, when you have to think immediately. This is always a good thing to do.
What do you think and feel theatre science, theatre critics need today?
Theory needs to think and to know more about history, sociology, semiotics, etc., about the way to use all of the different approaches to performance. In the last decades, theory has often been rejected, because it obviously takes a lot of time to absorb and to make use of the variety of theories that appeared in the last 50 years or so.
This rejection of theory is a problem for me. In many countries, over the last 20 or 30 years, this rejection of theoretical thinking was somehow encouraged by the postdramatic, postmodern thinking, which looks theoretical, but actually isn’t. So theory has vanished as a tool kit. The dominant discourse of and on the postdramatic consisted in solving the problem locally, saying something clever, but not using the sociology or the anthropology of theatre, or even philosophy. So a lot of things have still to be done.
What have you been doing recently?
I have worked a lot in this theoretical field and I have just published a Dictionary of contemporary theatre performance. And for me it was very difficult to put all these notions together and to explain how we could use them. All the notions are blurred and used in a very loose way, not scientifically.
I see theatre theory as an attempt to systemize things, without being very categorical. And that is what I was trying to do. Now I will try to do something else that can also be important. What? We’ll see!
International Conference for Young Theatre Critics 