"The Union of Unbearable Theatre" describes itself as an alternative working group, willing to do something absolutely new, non-traditional. "Unbearable - because the fact that the present situation in the field of theatre is unbearable not only in Latvia. We are not better, but we would like to break into this situation through our acts" - says Viesturs Kairiss, the leader of this independent theatre group.
New directing in Latvia is a heterogeneous conception. Young directors have different tempers, tastes and "religions" - from pretentiousness to simplification, from nihilism to positive statement. In the creation of this new theatre experts are looking for the parallels with the French anti-theatre stylists, Robert Wilson's aesthetics of visual inlays or Jerzy Grotowski's principles, with the metaphorical way, practised by Eimuntas Nekrosius and Oscaras Korsunovas (Lithuania). Anyway, all this work by young directors is a more or less vividly realised self-expression, filling the space of our theatres with the flow of new theatre semantics.
The structure of these performances is composed by verbal and visual codes, marks and metaphors, stated in sound, space and colour and realised on the stage which most often is open, not isolated from the spectator. Relative reality, sadly ironical games and intellectual constructions. Games of mind are mixed with sensual reality, the experience. Soft, cruel, cynic, true, artificial. Exploring of the world and creation of new worlds, where the borders between the sacred and the sinful, the holy and the dirty blur. The aesthetic minimalism is combined with super-refined choice of space and properties. They are freely using time, space, things.
Most often young directors choose free-made montages of the text, variations on the theme, dramatisations of a story or a novel, or self-made textual structures. After that the text is structured in new relations with the additional visual, plastic and musical comments. It is similar to post-structuralism's visual interpretation of language as an action or process, which creates some kind of transformation in the consciousness of the individual. Their performances are free from the so-called textual terrorism (by theatre semiotic A. Ubersfield). They are active in creating the system of textual signs and codes, deciphering of which becomes an element of the mutual game, played by the director, the stage designer, the actors and the spectators, and, what is very desirable, a source of aesthetic pleasure.
Montage and construction of meaning goes on now on the stage, now in the spectators' consciousness. The psychological discourse of text is denied in favour to looking for new possibilities of the theatre's mental function.
Young directors have their admirers, as well as antagonists. Some are angry with them for their challenging immorality or their incomprehensibility. Even now this new directing brings alternative tension to our theatre, which is needed so much. The waves of new energy spurt over the well-experienced building of the Latvian theatre.