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T h e...C I R C L E S...S E L E C T I O N |
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Sterijino Pozorje Festival |
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Novi Sad |
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May 26th - June 5th 2008 |
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FRIDAY - MAY 30th 2008 |
Comprehensive School 'Laza Kostiæ' |
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21:30 |
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A project done after the motives of
Philippe Garrel, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean Eustache
LIEBE 1968
Bat Studio Theatre
Academy of Theatre Art ‘Ernst Busch’, Berlin (Germany) |
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Director
ALEXANDER CHARIM
Set and costume designer JULIA KNEUSELS
Composer AURELIEN BELLO
Premiere:
February 23rd 2007 |
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Lilie |
EVA MECKBACH |
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Luc |
MATTHIAS HUNGERBÜHLER |
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Veronique |
CHRISTINA ATHENSTÄDT |
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Antoine |
FLORIAN JAHR |
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François |
RAFAEL STACHOWIAK |
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Léa |
MONIKA VIVELL |
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P E R F O R M A N C E...... |
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Paris, May 1968. A group of young people from different circles experience a moment of rebellion, the emancipation of a generation, a short triumph of anarchy, a moment saturated with freedom and intemperance. There is only one night together ahead of them and they spend it in rich Antoine’s flat. While the sounds of street protests echo, reaching them even in their dreams, they debate about politics, talk about art and use drugs. Some of them celebrate new freedoms in private spheres; some enthusiastically evoke anarchic violence as a social mission. They want the return to nature and ‘free love’. They rebel against the absurdity of the Vietnam War, object to endemic materialism and resent the future of a boring life modelled after their parents’ lives. But reality is soon to disappoint them. The group gets lost in the increasing chaos of life; the passionate dreams of freedom recede, giving way to resignation. The group falls apart, love breaks, one young man commits suicide. Won’t the ideas and actions from 1968 leave nothing but a foggy memory, a memory of failure, forty years later? We feverishly pose the question: How would we like to live?
To director A. Charim, these stories are known as History: some distanced, some idealised, some refuted. He asked himself why the 1968 student protests had so obviously either faded away from the political consciousness all together, or were regarded as a mistake nowadays. Back then, a wall of the Odeon, one of the bastions taken over by the students, bore the inscription: ‘Imagination takes power’. Why do anger and rage against injustice and poverty, acknowledged by politics, leave nothing but a painful memory of a dream long gone today? Why can ideals not survive reality? Why is there nothing but a cliché left of May 1968? What has happened since May 1968 to make the possibility of change such a distant thing to us? Far away from ideological trench wars? And Charim and the young actors tell a series of individual stories which intersect, supplement each other and vanish. Some situations clearly chart the paths of individuals, others become a reflection of the social climate. They sing, play, reminisce, quote… A generation who was not even born in 1968 faces History with touching honesty: why are, and that is the question posed by the director, our lives marked by such conformism today? And how do we want to live?
Inspired by the film Regular Lovers by Philippe Garrel (Silver Bear, Venice, 2005). Charim added the motives and texts by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean Eustache, from Dante’s Death by G. Bihner and Heinrich von Kleist’s last letter to his father. This did not yield a drama, but an adroitly connected series of scenes whose flow contains different constellations of characters, but there are also reflective experiments; slogans are stated, revolutionary songs are sung – and, by the way, some of the easiness that had to be permeating that Parisian May, full of idealism and the desire for changes, is transferred to the stage.
Georg KASCH (Junge Regie, 31st March 2007) |
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S E L E C T O R ' S...R E P O R T...... |
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Concurrently with the 53rd Sterijino Pozorje Festival, in the early days of summer, it will be exactly forty years since the student protests and other turbulent political events that marked the already historical year of 1968. Besides the social turmoil caused by this movement all around the world, as well as in former Yugoslavia, it also had a significant impact on the art of that time, theatre in particular. Some of the most important local Yugoslav reflections of 1968 were recorded, among other places, in Sterijino Pozorje, causing an adequate aesthetical and ideological turbulence. Today, forty years later, the Berlin Wall has fallen, Europe has united, Yugoslavia has disintegrated; in our country the burdensome decade of the civil war is now behind us, and the decade of slow and unfinished democratisation of the society and economic transition is near its end. Our theatre after October 5 is only just timidly starting to grapple with the social and political problems of the post-Milosevic Serbia, and the socialist past of this country is a special kind of taboo: it is being treated superficially only as a dark dictatorship, without a need for critical and dialectical insight and possible recognition of elements of its positive heritage. In such a context, the treatment of the 1968 revisionist or leftist movement is equally inadequate.
The situation is such in our theatre, but not in the European as well: the programme of the Circles is, therefore, dedicated to problematising the leftist legacy of 1986, both on the level of topics and theatrical language. The questions raised by this year’s Circles are: how do we see 1968 today and all that has emerged from it in the political sense? Is a radical political change based on progressive ideas possible today? Is there any aesthetic heritage of that period present in contemporary theatre?
Ivan MEDENICA |
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ALEXANDER CHARIM
Alexander Charim was born in 1981 in Vienna, where he studied Literature and History and started assisting in theatre and opera, with, among others, Peter Zadek and Luc Bondy. From 2003 to 2007 he studied Direction at the ‘Ernst Busch ’Theatre Academy in Berlin. He has directed several plays after texts by Else Lasker-Schüler / David Hare, Robert Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, Derek Walcott, H. Müller (Quartet), and Friedrich Hebbel. Liebe 1968 (Love 1968) is his graduation work, and has been staged in Berlin and performed within tours in Hamburg, at festivals in Heidelberg, at the National Theatre in Strasbourg and Paris. In 2008 he has directed Walcott’s Omeros at the Kunstfest in Weimar, Die Strudlhofstiege by Heimito von Doderer and Die Mountainbiker by Volker Schmidt at the Schauspielhaus in Vienna, as well as Verdi’s Rigoletto at the Schauspielhaus in Graz. |
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A story as beautiful as it is sad, already told in a similar way. It is about the year of 1968. A group of young people live through student upheavals together. During this short moment they share love and ideals. Then the reality returns to their lives and breaks the friendships into pieces, leaving each of them alone.
In the rendition of the final year students of the ‘Ernst Busch’ Academy of Theatre Art and the Academy of Arts, this story is embroidered with gentle melancholy. From the motives of French film directors Garrel and Eustache, A. Charim’s composes a text which breaks a collective down to individual destinies (...)
On the stage of the BAT Theatre there is a huge tree. In it, six young people embrace: a skein of yearning arms, legs, lips, sniffing each other like young dogs. Then the individual characters stand aside (...)
This safe haven of a bunch of dreamers is no place for realistic politics. The political dimension in A.Charim’s production comes from the outside. Collages of sounds, choirs that recite and projected revolutionary slogans are there to shed light on the historical background. That is indeed done in a modern way; while in the contents it seems a bit too ambitions – although the directing, thanks to the excellent cast, has managed to tell a story about friendship and growing up in a new way.
Mounia MEIBORG (Berliner Zeitung, 27th February 2007)
What is Left at the End is Only a Vision
The play unfolds easily and flowingly. The performance shows that the best ideas also fail if they do not find a form they can develop in. One character becomes an entrepreneur, the other turns to esotericism, a woman devotes herself fanatically to terrorism. A realistic portrayal, passionate acting. A well-deserved round of applause.
(Neues Deutschland, 1st March 2007) |
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management preserves the right to change
the schedule.
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Copyright
: Sterijino pozorje 1998-2008.
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