Imet Chris Torch, artistic director of the production unit Intercult and the inventor and driving wheel for LANDSCAPE X, in a conversation with the leading Macedonian playwright Goran Stefanovski, responsible for LANDSCAPE X: euralien. The event takes place in the former National Archives Building (Gamla Riksarkivet) in June/July 1998.
In Western Europe we often see the theatre as a dinosaur, if not dead and exterminated from the daily debate, at least a very slow and, at best, reflective art form. But in Eastern Europe it has recently shown another direction: total contact, in dialogue with (and within...) the society. Sometimes even powerful.
Even if LANDSCAPE X has mainly invited theatre artists and activists, our discussion didn't center primarily around theatre. Instead - we sat down at the Intercult office on the southside of Stockholm, and talked about the project itself, how it has developed and the main ideas behind this large-scale, politically aware cultural project, crossing more borders than one even knew existed.
Henric Tiselius: Tell us about the background to LANDSCAPE X: euralien. How did you two meet and how did you get personally involved in the project?
Chris Torch: We came in contact with each other in 1992, during preparation for the theatre project called Sarajevo - Tales of a City. Goran agreed to write the play and then we lived through a series of intense experiences, some positive and some not so positive. Later on we maintained connection and then I commissioned Goran to write Bacchanalia. Another intercultural work.
Euralien was first suggested at an advisory board meeting where we talked about LANDSCAPE X before it was formed in the way it is now. Goran's first flash was a amusement park; a kind of Disneyland of nationalist kitsch...
Goran Stefanovski: During twenty years in Ex-Yugoslavia I was a luxurious playwright. I worked with very magic theatre resources, on very expensive productions. We somehow believed that we had reached the end of history and touched utopia, There was a certain tragic blindness in it all. When Yugoslavia collapsed that tragic mistake was obvious. The only question left was: where did it go wrong and what to do now? That was when I met Chris. He comes from a radical, "poor" theatrical tradition that's never forgotten its intellectual and political responsibility. So he was a good catalyst. He channels artistic energy. Intercult is really a channel, an antenna that detects those energies and turns them into action. Intercult sees the theatricality of politics and the politics of theatre - and it's not only political action. It's also the whole issue of multicultural identities. The lack of understanding of these identities is - I believe - the real reason for the collapse of Yugoslavia and the whole Eastern European block.
CT: The Sarajevo project was created in the midst of the war. It was like shooting at a moving target. Everyday you had a totally new situation. And we were trying to create a play that was humanistic, ethical, attractive and could explain the situation to Europeans. Working with artists who were still in the throes of going crazy.
GS: The fact that Chris is a catalyst can be very dangerous. He is not an outsider but he does come from the outside and looks at things outside - in. He asks some very simple questions. He came to Skopje, and he knew there was a Turkish Drama Theatre, an Albanian Drama Theatre and a Macedonian National Theatre there. He asked the simple question: "Have you ever collaborated together on a project?" This is a taboo question, a question nobody's asked before. And yet a question of ultimate importance.
CT: This opened up some sores and the sores are still there in some ways. The process is still going on. We actually landed on the hot space but we also lost some friendships.
GS: Chris is a moving theatrical activist. He is not into this idea of the artist who sits in his ivory tower and bullshits his way to fame and worship. Which is what many "national" artists do in their "national" cultures, particularly in the Balkans. So this man comes and sort of breaks the rules of the game. Puts a question mark over the whole way things work out there. And that creates tectonic movement.
CT: Goran is a Balkan animal deep inside, but his mind has been Europeanized or globalized so much that it is possible for him to see even as an outsider. He's been an interpreter for what I observe, and I'm an interpreter for what he knows. "Chris, something's going on here which you don't understand", he says to me. And occasionally he succeeds in calling me back and occasionally I run straight into the wall anyway.
GS: My wife is English, and she came to Skopje in 1974. We had two children, a home and we were very happy. But in 1992 - when the war started - she decided to move back to England. So we started a new chapter in life. I didn't leave my work at the university in Skopje. I started commuting and living on planes. A maddening way of life. And as if that wasn't enough - I now have a third angle of the triangle: Chris and Sweden. I have tried to embrace this life of contradiction and live with it. And in this respect the work in Sweden has given me a possibility to accept this new situation. Not as a catastrophe but as a possibility for change.
HT: Tell us about the development of Euralien.
CT: The key breakthrough for the whole idea came when we got access to the former National Archives Building. The development of the concept could then start: the wedding between Goran's idea of this labyrinth of nationalist kitsch and my idea to invite representatives of the most dynamic work from primarily the Balkans and the Baltic region. From the beginning we talked about trying to reflect all of Eastern and Central Europe, but we focused soon on the Balkan and Baltic regions. These nations have populations more or less the same size, they experience themselves as having been occupied, they are post-communist. They share dreams of entering the European community, and they have the same kind of strength and bitterness behind them. All of the Baltic and Balkan countries have strong minority groups to deal with, and multicultural identities. So - here are all these people I met and was trying to understand with my research. How could we fit them into Goran's concept? Goran is a playwright able to see the challenge in the limitations that I give him as a producer: it must be with this number of people, with these languages in the performance, it must use different kinds of artists, etc., etc. This does not threaten his integrity, he uses it as a diving board to go further. He both incorporates and at the same time places some heavy demands himself. I haven't had one artist question the script. You have people involved from nine different countries and none of them has said to me "well, that is not my perspective, this is not what I want to do."
HT: Tell me about your ideas behind the script?
GS: In the last years I have lost the ease to travel. Which faced me with the question of who I am. As a young man I had a passport that allowed me access to the whole of Europe. Then that was taken away from me. The Berlin Wall came down, but then the Schengen Wall went up. A huge number of people became members of " the other Europe". There has always been another Europe but it has not been so clearly defined. Now there are eight million people databased in Brussels, who tried during the last few years to illegally enter Europe. Today there is a whole invisible nation made up of true "euraliens".
HT: Should Euralien then be seen as a heavy political statement?
GS: No! The situation is sweet and sour at the same time, like the Chinese sauce. It's sad and very funny. It's tragi-comic. Like Charlie Chaplin's films. Charlie Chaplin is the ultimate refuge. He finds himself in Alaska in the goldrush wearing summer clothes! As a Euralien spectator, you will - for a few hours - be placed in the shoes of a refugee, of a "Euro" alien. Not so that you feel guilty! And not because we have any romantic illusions about the "aliens" themselves either. But just so that you for a moment feel from the inside someone else's reality. We're turning things inside out. In one room for instance the "reality" is a civil war in Sweden that has split Stockholm apart. A woman cannot cross the street to go home. There is a Bosnian UN observer. Bosnia is a developed welfare, social-democratic society...
CT: That scene is directed by Bibi Andersson and performed by a Swedish actress and two Bosnian actors. This is an good example how we work as producers. We put together actors with a playwright and a director, introduce people to one another and observe how the combination works and when it starts to flow. The framework that I defined was a very eclectic gathering of artists from different places. Also from different fields, not only theatre but also dance and visual arts. Each of these people has the free space to do what they want and still everything should somehow work together. A gathering of all these "euraliens" in collaboration with Swedish artists. I wanted to go beyond the ordinary guest performance. We have, for example, initiated a collaboration between Swedish immigrant actors and Bulgarian professionals under the leadership of a Bulgarian director, in a scene written by a Macedonian playwright. Hopefully everyone can go home with something new, a slight mutation on their mental body should occur. And something will be left behind, so the Swedish presence is certainly not just as observers.
GS: One thing that interests me about the Swedish people is that they have a very developed empathy for other people. They have the heart and ears for other people's stories and troubles. Which is in a way different from people in the Balkans. In the Balkans people are stuck in such a horrible historical acceleration that they are numbed. In order to survive you have to stop feeling. Feeling is a luxury you can do without.
HT: For me its hard to see that Swedish people should be very engaged in what you can call the post-war situation in the Balkans.
GS: There are many Swedish UN soldiers walking the streets of Skopje!. And I know a great number of people here, many of them dear friends, with amazing civil and human courage and sensitivity.
CT: Everybody seems to be so concerned that Swedes have lost their national roots and their national identity and that this loss creates dangerous conditions for increased racism and national chauvinism. But I believe that the perception of the Swedish personality is internationalist. Most people in Sweden feel empathy even if they do not read daily newspapers and manifest it with political demonstrations. I think we are confused, just like most Europeans are confused, over what's happened. Of course, the Swedish refugee policy has become much more restrictive. But very few people question for example the reception of so many Bosnians during the war. And no serious politician today suggests the immediate deportation of Kosova-Albanians.
GS: I believe that what Chris calls "a crisis in the Swedish national identity" could be seen as a solution rather than as a problem in the 21t century. Everyone's cultural identity is a composite, a mongrel, a mixture. Identity is a flux. It is not something you automatically have, it's something you have to fight for, create, work on and make your own. Like being human. Identity is one's constant process of negotiation with oneself and the world. Identity is not something that can be genetically traced and distilled and cleansed. Nationality is a part of identity, but it should be in balance with the other properties: parenthood, citizenship, sexuality, profession. It's dangerous when the search for identity goes through the process of "negative identification", i.e. "I am not them". Identity is a story of who we are. This story is all too often socially and politically instrumentalized.
CT: And then nationalism becomes an ideology. It goes beyond patriotic pride into chauvinism and hatred of the Other.
GS: Of course nobody has any problems with national pride. I get very happy when Macedonia scores 2-0 against the other football team, but I would like to leave it at that. As far as sports and culture are concerned: let's fight. But at the same time I'd love to live in a liberal state, which teaches me tolerance and recognition of the Other. Not sacred cleanliness.
CT: Everyone involved has accepted the story Goran has written, but everyone also has their own story - theatrically, politically, around these overlapping circles of different identities. No one has exactly the same story. And then the audience makes their own story, when they have gone through all the 13 rooms - nobody in the audience sees the performance in the same order.
GS: It's a strategy that reminds you of Borges. There should be a random magic quality about it. There should be the Kafkaesque shadows there too. All this is already between the walls of Riksarkivet. A place where for 100 years the Swedish "identity" was kept. And where now there is an empty center. We want to fill this center with theatrical gravity!
CT: This is one of the ways that Stockholm '98 as a project has been essential to the dramaturgy for the entire project. LANDSCAPE X could not have been done without the framework of Stockholm '98. We could never have thought in terms of a year with a dramaturgy like this. And the National Archives! I didn't even know that it existed until the leadership at Stockholm '98 suggested that we should have a look.
HT: So the National Archives became the obvious place to bury nationalism?
GS: Nicely put!
CT: So in the middle of July when we finished performing in the National Archives, we lock the door and we leave national chauvinism in there. And the aliens go out there with a lot of stories to tell, just like opening up the Stasi archives.
HT: But do you reach the audience that needs a vaccine against this chauvinism?
CT: There are two answers to that. One answer is: no we won't. We can't expect that theatre or artistic work has any possibility of doing that. I am a great believer in the power of art, but I think the power of art lies in strengthening those of us who are moving in that direction, a commitment to humanism. But the skinhead needs a more miraculous inoculation in order to transform himself. Another answer is: we are reaching out, as best we can, as far as the resources permit us. We hopefully reach some immigrants here in Sweden, who maybe due to alienation from the Swedish society are starting to develop some attitudes about themselves and about the "other". And we also believe that the performance will speak to a younger audience because it is interactive, it is exiting, it is filled with a lot of different visions...
GS: And it is humorous...
CT: It is not a passive experience. It demands something from the audience, physically as well.
GS: Europe has been through long and numerous maelstroms of nationalistic frenzy. Nationalism and chauvinism are potencies that we all carry in us. We all have infinite energies for good and evil. Politicians often manipulate and instrumentalize these potencies for their own ends. One of the ways of doing this is through the use of "hate speech". This speech demonizes "the Other" and prepares the ground for more cruel battles. All human beings are subject to these mechanisms. As enlightened human beings we must learn how to put a brake on them.
HT: What do you think the audience will expect before they reach the National Archives? A big happening or a dark statement of the situation?
GS: I think that the main genre of the 20th century is tragic farce. From Tjechov to Beckett, Charlie Chaplin to Ionesco. This is the language that also is the nerve of the project - if we get it right. There is a lot of dark humor. There is a political reality behind it all, but we will not force these things onto the audience.
HT: What have you told the artists?
GS: Every artist has a room. It is like a play with fourteen scenes. The scenes are very different from each other, in content, in form, in the language which they use. So the artists will work with their own depths, their own rooms, but the connection between them touches the topic which we are setting. So in this respect the rooms are totally different in feel, in texture, and the more different the better. We have to balance form and content. We have a collaborative directorship really. And it's extremely challenging and extremely exiting.
HT: How have you chosen the artists?
CT: Two things were absolutely essential to the choices we made. The first was if an artist was willing to enter into something where he/she would not have full control. It doesn't work with a director who wants to control the entire situation. So we had to feel a sense of curiosity about the other. Secondly, we were looking for dynamic artists, those who have responded to the changing times in their countries with inspiration to new work, as opposed to those who suddenly became frightened or pacified or overwhelmed. There were many great, disciplined directors in Eastern and Central Europe who - when the changes came - did not know what their function was any longer. They didn't know what to do with their lives. They couldn't use their visions or even the resources of the theatres that they used to have access to. Others saw it as an excellent challenge, they were exited about it. They never believed that that luxury was going to carry on. Instead they started to look for new ways of working.
GS: We are dealing with very, very high quality directors, artists and actors.
CT: I was also looking for diversity, not letting it focus too much. I think we succeeded in that. We had this weekend in February where we all met. It was really inspiring to watch the slightly suspicious arrival of these people. "Okay, now you invited us so what do you expect us to do?" But when they entered the building they became curious and they started to talk. By the time the weekend was over we were really a sensational community. And a kind of healthy competition had already started: "Aha, so you're doing that - well let me see what I can come up with."
GS: There will be a great possibility for artists to live together in Stockholm for the three weeks. I am sure that what will happen will be a spectacular example of cross-fertilization.
HT: Have the possibilities for artists to co-operate internationally, in the cultural arena, grown after - and maybe even because of - the Balkan war?
CT: It is hard to say. But at least one aim of this project is to increase the cooperation "east-east" as opposed to the "east-west" direction. In the post-communist countries the reality became "suddenly we can go to the west" so everything was going in that direction. Few explored the regional qualities that they had in common. This is something generally true about cultural exchange in the world. Africans know more about Europe than they do about each other for example. You don't go from South Africa to Gambia on tour, you go to London. We want to create a temporary community of artists, both from Sweden and from other countries, who during a period of three weeks not only have the performance in common. We hope that it also leads to relationships between the artists, across borders, both mental and geographical.
GS: Within the five years since Chris and I met, I've been invited to a series of seminars and panels, here and in other places. I found myself becoming a part of a whole network of people who work for the same goals. All of a sudden you just bump into the same people, very, very good people. This became an important part of me. Not only politically. The political agenda is not the be all and end all. Human life is larger than that. We've talked too much about nationalism here. That is not the whole story. It is only one face of human alienation, of which there are many faces. And alienation is really at the center of our story! Homelessness is a universal problem. I am speaking in philosophical terms now What is our human home? Where is and what is our home at the end of the 20th century. Is our home where our TV set is? Or is there a more sublime "Ithaca" worth traveling to?