Among theatre people in general and
festival administrators in particular, most of the discussion is about the
audience: Where is the audience? What is wrong with the audience? Etc. To have
an audience, of course, it presupposes a (given) world out there to address. To
reach out to a bigger audience means to embrace bigger chunks of the real. And
the question is: how does one go about locating the real? What is really real
and what is really an othere? Who is an othere? We look around and the only
thing we see is uncertainties and shifting performative subjectivities.
The old but never dated motto of the
Elizabethan bard "all the world is a stage" and its hi-tech version
all the world is a procession of simulacra have made the stage/world dialectic
all the more perplexed and perplexing. I do understand the anxiety of festival
administrators at the box office, yet to handle festival politics one has to
handle identity crisis as well. Simply put: the issue is not just economics: it
is also ontological and ideological. As Blau beautifully makes the point, an
all pervasive post-Derridean dissemination of anti-essentialism reifies the
statement with which we start, about the reality of the world and the reality
of our audiences (Blau 2004: 253).
Recent postmodern decenterings have
turned everything upon its head, merging the real with the hyper-real, the left
with the right, the viewer with the viewed, shadowing each other always. We
have mixing and ghosting of all kinds. A new world seems to be in the process
of emerging and the problem is that it does not stay put long enough to
understand and eventually act. It constantly acquires the qualities of phantoms
of the brain. Seeming, seeming, Blau says; the impelling substance in most of
Shakespeare's plays, the ghosting extensions of life experienced by Hamlet and
Macbeth (2004: 255), is now casting its shadow upon our lives. The target is
spilled upon the ground. Who can really tell the dancer from the dance?
In the old days, things had a
clearer, I am not saying better, focus. The question of Schiller, What can a
good stable theatre actually achieve?, had a tight hold on the Enlightenment
principles of moral education: the State as a moral institution and the theatre
house as a national assembly. In the years that followed most festivals were
used as a showcase of what a country really wanted or dreamt about; that is,
as part of her imaginary that contributed to the national narrative. In which
case the festivals operated as sites of struggle, as a platform where players
and audience could enact conceptions of identity and community. The hosting
country became both the subject and the consequence of artistic and cultural
negotiation (also Klaic 2008: 217-27 and Wilmer 2008: 9-19). Not any longer.
The problem of contemporary theatre
(or theatre festival) is that it does not know where it stands vis-a-vis the
new world order; it does not know what its deeper social role is. Of course, I
do not have the illusion that theatre (or any festival for that matter) can
change the world. The pulse of all nations is now registered in its TV
iconography, its reality shows, its talent shows and its freak shows. The unity
of people comes much faster and easier through the new electronic media than
through watching a two-hour live performance (also Klaic 2008: 226-27). Who
really cares about theatre practice and theatre attendance today?
Despite all odds, I strongly feel that
there is still some room left for Dionysus as a bastard art to step in and make
an impression, bring back some balance and effectively criticize the faults,
shortcomings, and anxieties of our era. Theatre festivals, when they have a
clear vision and are seriously connected, can help expand a bit the
geographical, aesthetic and intellectual boundaries of practitioners and
viewers alike; in other words, they can operate as perspective bringers. And I
guess this is one of the major problems of many theatre festivals in their
relationship with the real world out there: they lack a clear perspective. They
either pretend being popular while they cater mostly to national elites and/or
hordes of tourists who are trying to get a taste of the cultural life of the place
they visit before they fly back home to tell their friends colorful stories
about local people, or they cater to the masses providing low-quality
entertainment, like shopping malls cloned by dozens every year. It is no
accident that every city, every small town is setting up its own festival
showcase, to the point that festivals lose their meaning and social purpose.
Greece, for example, a country of
less than eleven million people, has 26 (small and mid size) summer festivals,
most of them sponsored by local municipalities and manipulated (indirectly or
otherwise) by local politicians and other interested parties. Of course there
are theatre people on their boards, but who really listens to them? I know that
from within, since I happen to be on two festival boards organized and
sponsored by the Municipality of the city of Thessaloniki.
Back to the community
Schiller's statement about theatre
as a moral responsibility may sound like a swear word today; yet I feel that
theatre still has obligations to its people, a social duty to perform, and I do
not care what word one attaches to this duty (moral or anything else) (also,
Straub 2007: 35). Contemporary times
may not be very supportive, yet
theatre festivals should fight back against all the pressures from politicians,
market gurus, and sponsors that want them to be mere entertainment venues for
tourists or for local elites. This is very difficult but it must be attempted.
Theatre festivals should constantly try to excavate with one goal in mind: to
discover new artistic channels in order to provide food for thought to the
community. It is their duty to convince a good number of people that a theatre
festival is not a cultural event intended for and attended by those who seek
culture or sensationalism. Theatre festivals cannot compete with television or
other technologically advanced media, but at least they can offer people a
different experience, an experience they cannot have elsewhere. Which means
that festivals must try and cultivate a sense of common affiliation on the
grounds of something unique; that is, operate as a thread in the dream coat of
alternative society.
Theatre has gone a long way
celebrating individualism and realism. We seem to forget that theatre is a
collective experience that transcends average days and individuals; it has
always been like that. Now it is time to revisit its roots when people got
around a campfire to tell stories of what it means to be part of a community
(Levitow 2002: 27). Now that the alienating electronic media work towards a new
”posthuman” world, theatre has to project its communal spirit, to celebrate the
“dynamism, energy and sound of life” and to truly show us what it means to be
human again and alive (Levitow 2002: 27). We may have forgotten all this, but we
can still learn the vocabulary from scratch; learn to appreciate things, learn
exactly what Emily finds out in Thornton Wilder's Our Town when
she looks at the living from above: that people live a life without really
understanding it.
Roberta Levitow is right: what we
need is not theatre festivals that are simply avant-garde in style but theatre
festivals that are avant-garde of truth (2002: 29). Only then can theatre
festivals be a productive human adventure and not a mere commercial or
narcissistic showcase. Only then can festivals convince those who are not
directly involved that they can come and live an intense and unexpected
experience. Only then can festivals show people how to be free and what it
means to be free. Even difficult projects can be people oriented. Creative and
popular at the same time. It all depends on those who sit behind the helm. How
committed they are to look for the real behind the illusory. That is the only
way to figure out what audiences theatre needs and where to find them.
The Greek Paradigm
Kruger argues in her book on
national theatres, that the literal place of performance or exhibition “plays a
role in the cultural recognition of theatre or art” (1992: 12, also Reinelt
2001: 385). And I have no better example to support this statement than Athens
festival, now called Hellenic Festival.
For many decades Greece's biggest
festival was held in places already loaded with significations, places that
attracted a particular caste of people, usually middle and upper middle class,
educated, conservative, people whose ideas about the accepted and the
unaccepted, about right and wrong in the productions of classical theatre
inevitably had an effect on the range of issues addressed, the kind of material
produced and which audience it develops. For them the obligation of a national
festival realized at the ancient site of Epidaurus is to claim the unifying
force of language and culture; an attitude that explains why every summer these
people react so loudly with boos and hisses against anything they think
disrupts the essentialist unity and the aesthetics and ideology concerning the
interpretation of classical drama they have in their mind. Their claim is that
a festival of this nature and orientation should be a meeting point of outstanding
works and not ground for unchecked experimentation and amateurism. Experiment
anywhere you like, why here? has been their counterargument for years.
I will not pick up the issue here
because it will lead us astray. What I would like to point out in relation to
the topic of this symposium is that although Athens, a city of about 3,5
million people, has a very colorful and exciting theatre season, with an
average of 500 productions per year (distributed among 200 professional
companies), it has faced over the years many problems setting up an equally
vital and promising summer festival. It is only in the last three years that
there has been a radical change in the ideology of its major festival, thanks
to the new artistic director Yiorgos Loukos, who has tried from the beginning
to introduce less rigid patterns with the hope to make the Hellenic Festival
more hospitable to the new, the polyvocal and the unexpected and thus more
attractive to people, local and foreign.
Loukos and his administration saw
that the limited appeal of the Festival mostly derived from the fact that it
was in reality divorced from the community in which it played. It operated as
if it had no social responsibility or better as if its sole responsibility was
to prove again and again the grandeur of the classics through productions that
were mostly re-staging of the same old recipe. I am not saying that there
weren't landmark productions all these decades. Of course, there were quality
productions that garnered critical and (inter)national acclaim, establishing
the Festival's legacy as the leader in the field of classical drama. The
problem is that the Festival failed to keep up with the changes taking place
inside the theatre itself and in the world in general. The end result was the gradual
alienation of the young from its activities. There was very little for them to
see and appreciate. The Festival instead of maturing with the passing of time
got older and thus less inviting.
So, the first thing the new
administration did was to exploit the Festival's potential to invigorate a
re-examination of national identity in relation to the global context without
creating a new
chauvinism. Loukos' first move was
to reshuffle the roster of participants. The decision of the administration was
clear enough: no one would have access to the Festival unless s/he had
something original and fresh to propose. This bold move inevitably left out
many artists and ensembles that for many years showed up at Epidaurus or Herode
Atticus irrespective of the quality of their current work.
The administration also looked early
on into the matter of space. The general belief was that the Festival should
not be restricted to two or three known places and that geographical diaspora
would help it embrace more people, enrich its diversity and help revitalize the
economy of different areas. So Loukos went on and opened two new theatre venues
(with two stages each) in Athens' industrial area. This change had, as a
result, a radical shift in the aesthetics of the productions hosted there, but
more importantly a radical change in the make up of the audience. The old
spectators, of course, continue to attend performances of classical plays at
Epidaurus (in Peloponese) and in the Roman theatre of Herode Atticus in down
town Athens, but new and much younger spectators are showing up in the new
venues which have by now become popular sites of experimentation and get
togetherness. For the first time, the Greek Festival has won dedicated fans who
plan their summer vacations in accordance with the Festival summer schedule.
To further increase the public
appeal of the Festival, the administration has kept ticket prices low enough so
that they are accessible to all. Given the impressive and pressing popularity
of the new stages, it has also reduced the number of those who could have free
admission (about 20% of those attending the performances), in order to increase
the availability of seats and thus improve the Festival's income margins. The
change of policy worked unexpectedly well. The press welcomed the changes, and
so did the general public.
To reinforce the links with and
among people, the new administration took advantage of recent technology to
sell its product to larger segments of the population, local and international,
young and old. It changed the booking system which now operates electronically,
thus giving people, wherever they are, the chance to book their tickets in
advance by charging their credit card. It has also reduced the duration of the
Festival from a five-month marathon to a two-month productive adventure, thus
giving it more density, more dynamism, and a better focus.
Another audience-oriented innovation
introduced has to do with the marketing of the scheduled events. Prior to the
Greek premiere of a foreign production the Hellenic Festival covers the
traveling expenses of journalists (or critics) to attend the scheduled
performance abroad, with the
agreement that when they come back
they cover the event with reviews, interviews and other material that would
help promote the production back home. Thus far, this tactic has paid off.
Given the changing norms and
demographics of Greek reality, one of the Festival's main goals has been, from
the very beginning, to address issues on multiculturalism (immigrants make up
10% of the local population). Last summer the Festival hosted a cycle of seven
plays under the thematic umbrella “The Foreigner” Two of the events were co-
productions (a Greek-Turkish production of The Persians and a
Greek-Dutch of The Suppliants).
Workshops (free of charge) have
become an essential part of the Festival's promotion tactics. Now in their
third season, workshops provide a solid intercultural platform for
practitioners to meet and work together with established local and foreign
artists, like Vasiliev, Langhoff, and Grauzinis who are also given a chance to
direct one of the major productions of the Festival. The aim of the new
administration is to get people, particularly younger people involved not only
through workshops but also by providing access to rehearsals, by running
educational programmes, by hosting plays that appeal mostly to their age group
(raw and violent) and by having lower and thus more attractive ticket prices.
Also, special attention is paid to the disabled as well as to drug addicts who
are in rehabilitation centers. The goal is to get them to stay together, to
know each other, work together, discuss, in short, create a theatre community.
The idea of a well-organized
apprenticeship/internship program although discussed is not realized yet. If it
ever gets off the ground it would surely offer more opportunities to young
artists and administrators and at the same time allow the Festival to operate
with lower production and administration costs (something successfully tested
by the International Film Festival in Thessaloniki). Furthermore, the presence
of young theatre people can make things happen and grow. Getting them involved
it can eventually help turn the Festival into a place to exchange ideas and
confront issues. After all, what counts for a contemporary festival is its
ability to represent the diversity of the present and draw on that energy,
strength, and ideas. And where else can a Festival find a better source of
inspiration than among the young people?
Sponsors and Patrons
We all know that in a consumer
society art is always already commodified. Which means that any production is
linked to modes of consumption (Reinelt 2002: 384-86). Of course, we are not
bearing gifts to Athens with this statement. Theatre has always been like that:
inextricably linked to the
wider culture. The thing is to find
the best way to turn festivals into creative and deconstructive cells of the
real and not into shopping malls, as mentioned earlier, that last for five or
six or ten days and then disappear from view or erased from memory. Of course,
this is more easily said than done.
In a neoconservative era like ours,
with politicians dismantling the foundations of the welfare state, the old left
out of sight and the arts-funding dried to a trickle, it gets all the more
difficult to operate as a productive, let alone transnational zone of mixture
and cultural creativity without relying on corporate money. The fear of many is
that as long as corporate money has a strong say in any festival, the future is
bleak. In the US, for example, many companies and festivals are tailoring their
program to suit separate sponsors. Corporate support often fails to come back
and theatres are left flat.
As far as I know, the Hellenic
Festival has not tried to this day to co-produce anything with corporations.
Its administration seems to be more comfortable, in a way "safer",
with the State than with the corporate money. They do not believe that
corporate money will help them attain greater financial stability. On the
contrary, they feel that once festivals are determined by the corporate logic
of the market, they will never be the creative site they want them to be.
Decisions will be
mediated by the demands of the
marketplace (or the funding foundation) and the product will inevitably be
compromising, if not slick and superficial. Their claim is that the job of a
good theatre festival is to operate as an alternative to globalizing media and
economics. It should explore relationships between peoples and cultures and not
relationships of interests and power. Which means, it should remain on the side
of the unexpected. And to be able to do so it must find financial solutions to
liberate and not imprison creativity. By giving itself away either to the
patrons of high art or big corporate money or local politics it only leads to a
dead end.
I understand the reasons why the
Greek administrators hesitate to embrace the logic of postmodern (corporate)
economics, yet I would agree with Matthew Maguire, the American playwright, who
says that all money may be tainted, but not all money is the same. There is
money more tainted than others. And theatre festivals, to stay in the game, can
accept donations at least from progressive corporations and not from harmful
corporation such as tobacco industry that can buy silence with grants, in the
sense that ''having accepted the money, many artists who might otherwise speak
out against the criminal effects of the company's product on the national
health are silent”.”(Maguire 2002: 199). It happens all the time. A good
example is Humana Festival that has never produced a play that is critical of
health maintenance organizations. Despite Jon Jory's claim that he was
fortunate not having ever received a good play criticizing American health
system, which as we know is far from being perfect, it is easy to speculate
that Jory, his assistants, and advisors did not
want to anger the Humana
Corporation. At the same time, however, we have to note that without the Humana
Foundation committed support, the future of the Festival at Louisville would
have remained uncertain, to say the least, and the board's play selections
might have been heavily influenced by popular taste (as opposed to other
options, more daring). A real Catch 22.
As Reinelt very well points out,
“Now is the time for theatre, in general, to redress the balance, fight for
artistic virtue and value and reflect upon the faults of society” (Reinelt
2001: 234). Collaborations and/or co-productions through corporate money might
not be a panacea, yet they can, once in a while, help festival activities to
stay alive for longer periods of time and thus give the opportunity for more
people (and of course artists) to see. When a festival production plays for a
limited time those interested hardly have the time to find out what is
happening, let alone reflect on what is going on. Also these collaborative
ventures can open up new economic horizons since they help the companies (or
festivals) find support from foreign sources as well. In this way, the products
of a festival are internationalized and become the property of a larger
community of consumers. After all, one of the main jobs of a festival is to
help its productions travel as much as possible, isn't it?
Commissioning plays
One idea not realized yet but
frequently discussed on the board of the Hellenic Festival is the commissioning
of plays. That would indeed be very useful in more ways than one. My feeling is
that theatre festivals are in need of a new dramaturgy that would help develop
new forms of theatrical representation in a position to open up the experience
of transnational viewing. They are in need of dramas compatible with
multi-lingual, multi-religious, multi-ethnic and hi-tech audiences. I know of
very few plays that do address successfully the vision of a new Europe and its
peoples. Most plays when they are not simple-minded and market-oriented, are
convenient representations of human life. We hardly ponder over their meaning
beyond the moment we watch them. And it is not only the writers to blame.
With production expenses going up,
producers have become more careful. They do not take risks easily. Spectators
are also hesitant. With tickets prices climbing high all the time, not many are
willing to take risks either. On their part, they demand consistency in
cultural representation. And producers know that and act accordingly, and of
course, authors know that and act accordingly as well. For reasons of
marketability, they focus on the cliches and globally recognizable culture. To
sell their work they write low budget plays that rarely involve more than three
or four characters. There are no deuteragonists or minor characters anymore.
There are no secondary or minor plots supported by smaller roles. Theatre is
losing its multi-layered physiognomy. Few plays that are
produced today really reflect the
perplexities of the new world order or the demands of the new audiences.
Commissioning might solve the problem, or partly.
We all know that commissioning is a
complicated, risky and at times consuming matter. It can be plagued by personal
preferences and tastes, biases and individual concerns. Yet it is worth the
trouble. A big festival can commission five or six plays per year in order to
choose one or two. This policy can help a festival develop and nurture an
ongoing and long term relationship with several playwrights, local and
international, and at the same time it can help redirect contemporary writing
and increase its marketability and international exposure. I have once again the
Humana Festival example in my mind that nurtured and developed playwrights over
a long period of time, helping the theatre's reputation as a leading supporter
of new play development. Once a festival proves to be a loyal supporter of new
writing, playwrights will always give their work for the “first look”.
In short: theatre festivals do not
have to be solely product-oriented. They can also be process-oriented. And my
feeling is that the Hellenic Festival is still in need of mechanisms for the
development of new works, not just presentation of completed works. After three
years of successful turns, the Hellenic Festival looks more confident to go
forward into more daring and at the same time popular territory and form which,
in turn, will bring more attention and recognition. It remains to be seen where
the festival will go given the increased competition, higher budgets, bigger
expectations, changing demands and trends of professional theatre and the new
demography.
A good sign is the recent Prospero
agreement that brought together six major European companies --Theatre de la
Place (Belgium), Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione (Italy), Schaubuehne
(Germany), Centro Cultural de Belem (Portugal), Tukkivan Teatreityo Kestos
(Fineland), Opera de Rheine (France). Also the decision of four major
Mediterranean national festivals to collaborate (the Hellenic Festival,
Avignon, Istanbul, and Barcelona) and the decision (2006) of Southeast European
countries to set up their own festival are good indications. These links will
hopefully reinforce cultural dialogue, increase potential transnational
viewers, help realize annual productions and tours, support new directors with
seminars and collaboration with one or more of the participating parties and
help establish a European research and training center for new actors. In
short, all these intercultural decisions can further help the connection with
other cultures and eventually mobilize and engage the senses and provoke
feelings of recognition, in the service of a more progressive image of a new
world. As Reinelt argues, this collaborative piecing together of new linkages
may tempt more people and more diverse groups to enter the field and turn
theatre from a marginal art that it is today into a more powerful platform of interrogation
and intervention in the struggle to invent a New Europe or a New World (2001:
386-87).
In conclusion
Some say that MacDonald's is a
successful business because it is predictable and theatre is unsuccessful
because it is unpredictable. I do not think the argument holds. People love the
cliche of their everyday life, since they feel that they play on safe home
turf, yet these very same people are ready to travel far to experience the
uncommon and the unusual. The more surprise-proof people are the more open they
are to the unexpected. The less we know about something (sports, cultural
events etc) the more curious we are to find out. In the end, it is all a matter
of smart marketing.
To better their marketability
contemporary festivals should resemble huge workshops rather than isolated
artistic ventures patronized by fractions of the middle or upper middle class.
As long as festivals insist on flirting with the acceptance of a web of people
in and around theatre or of tourists in search of cultural excitement they will
never develop into popular sites of intervention and truly radical imaginings.
That means festivals should not only work closer together, creating a stronger
network with shared beliefs as to their social role in a postmodern and ever
changing environment, but they should also throw open the doors of possibility,
encourage boldness and stage the anxieties of people about their national and
cosmopolitan identity. Festivals should stir friction between the past and the
present. And they can do it as long as they operate as a serious responsible
enterprise.
Greeks appropriate the classics the
same way Irish appropriate Beckett and the French appropriate Moliere. I think
in all festivals that call themselves international there is a kind of
nationalist appropriation of the event. Personally I do not care how one calls
a festival as long as it asks questions, it is intellectual, it appeals to both
the senses and the intellect and somehow retrains audiences to get back to the
theatre. I agree with those who say that there is too much mobility to allow
the development of a solid citizenship. I agree that citizenship has acquired a
more abstract flavour (Klaic 2008: 222-27). Yet festivals to be effective at
all must produce plays of value to the individuals in their respective
societies. That is the only way to touch people and through people to persuade
the State to change its cultural policy. Without a sense of community we lose
the sense of what needs to be done.
So, back to our original aporia: who
is out there? People, of course. The issue is to what extent theatre festivals
(and their sponsors) are willing to question the very philosophy of their own
concepts –which will mean a radical shift of their focus and policy-- to reach
out for all these mixed (and perplexed) peoples?
References
Blau, Herbert. Thinking History,
History Thinking. Theatre Survey 45. 2 (2004): 253-61.
Haring-Smith, Tori. On the Death of
Theatre: a Call to Action.Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a
New Century. Ed. Maria M. Delgado and Caridad Svich. Manchester: Manchester
Univ Press, 2002. 97-102.
Klaic, Dragan. National Theatres
Undermined the Withering of the Nation-State. National Theatres in a
Changing Europe. Ed. S. E.Wilmer. London, Palgrave, 2008. 217-27.
Kruger, Loren. The National
Stage:Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America.
Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press 1992.
Levitow, Roberta. Some Words About
the Theatre Today.Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New
Century. Ed. Maria M. Delgado and Caridad Svich. Manchester: Manchester
Univ. Press 2002. 25-31.
Maguire, Matthew. Heat Bath. Theatre
in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New Century. Ed. Maria M. Delgado
and Caridad Svich. Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press 2002. 196-205.
Nickcevic, Sanja. British Brutalism,
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Reinelt, Janelle. Performing Europe:
Identity Formation for a “New” Europe. Theatre Journal 53. 3
(October 2001): 365-87.
Straub, Kathrin.
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Theatres and Nationalist Theatres. Ed. Katarina Ciric-Petrovic. Novi Sad:
Sterijino pozorje 2007. 33-39.
Wilmer, S. E. The Development of
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