FESTIVAL DIARY 1.
During the past two editions of the
INTERFERENCES Theatre Festival we saw a series of meditative performances (dance and nonverbal ones) where noises from the outside world were deliberately silenced. Man was placed in the abstract field of its private consciousness. This year selection reinvents the text based theatre, classical authors, it looks for the old theatre instruments as conflict, dialogue, border situations, it lets the life outside the theatre to enter on stage.
The theme this year is
The Stranger’s Odyssey.Besides being very up to date, this theme is a very theatrical one, actually it’s the eternal theme of theatre. A character begins to feel out of place (like cut off from the world), and this is the beginning of the drama.
European migrant crisis challenged the very foundations of our culture, our spiritual limits. It revealed our instinctive fear of the unknown, our instinctive hostility. We are ready to see a threat rather than a new opportunity. Art is here to regulate this internal crisis, this loss of moral equilibrium. Theatre is here to warn us when we start losing our human face. Theatre informs us, by its traditional methods where the limit is between human and inhuman, between culture and barbarism.
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
(C.P. Cavafy, Waiting for the Barbarians)
Faust’s despair in
Tomaž Pandur performance (
Slovenian National Drama Theatre) sounds very familiar to contemporary spectator: "All we know is pointless. My heart is dead." Faust tells us that he dreams of a magic cloak that could take him in foreign lands. He wants to be… a foreigner.
Pandur’s performance has a delicate graphic vision that corresponds perfectly with the light, natural voice of Faust (
Igor Samobor) (no verse recitation and old-fashioned rhymes). The group of skeptics and nihilists (with their witty comments) are added to shorten not only the text of
Goethe, but the distance between stage and audience.
Faust, as a desperate humanist attempts for the last time to connect with the outside world and to create utopian models of universal happiness. By this aspect the Slovenian “Faust” entered naturally in dialogue with the next performance of the first festival day – “
This Beach” (written and directed by
Feidim Cannon and
Gary Keegan,
Brokentalkers, Ireland). Here the characters test the opposite utopia option - is it possible to find happiness in a restricted, beautiful and peaceful private paradise by cutting every connection to the outside world? OK, that may be possible, but is it human?
"
This Beach" begins with the observation that “humans are social beings”. The characters are exaggerated allegories of various behavioral patterns of the modern man, they chaotically mix liberal views with pure selfishness and cynicism. When the sea discards 'a stranger' (migrant) on their private beach nobody wants to hear what the stranger asks or needs, they all project their own prejudices and desires on him.
While the performance of Pandur is more philosophically positioned, the Irish performance speaks directly, quite plainly about contemporary crisis of humanity. I expect with interest to see the continuation of this dialogue about the Stranger, Utopia and human situation in ”
Elektra”, “
The Lower Depths” or “
Nathan the Wise”.
Aglika Stefanova-Oltean
