sarma

The German director Helena Waldmann presented recently a special performance of “Lucky Johnny” by B. Brecht at the Athens Concert Hall. Wldmann has increasingly distanced herself from traditional theatre in the past 6 years; she therefore brings to the audience a different type of performance, where basic elements are the video projection, the narrator, the music, the dancers-whose body is transformed by the stage lighting which also determine the character of the performance. H Waldmann has collaborated in the past with H. Miller, A. Dressen, G. Bonner, P. Steckel and many others. During a brief interval in her busy schedule, she talked to us about her sombre, substantial and extremely interesting kind of theatre she presented.

Q: Let’s start with a general question about your direction…

H.W.: I started with the theatre. My ideas were very modern, so people like Heiner Miller, Robert Wilson and others became interested in my work. At that time I was taking on more conventional jobs, but I decided to stop and only focus on what I call performance. In this, I brought together everything I had learnt from the theatre, choreography, music. It is strange…speaking of performance, I am reminded that what we understand by this term is not at all what I have in mind.

Q: What is then performance for you?

H.W.: I would say that it is to show aspects which are belong to the theatre. There however, traditionally there is a text and the actors. I took away some of the levels of the concept and created a different composition. Many times dancers-because I now only work with dancers- have found this way of working tiring; I say to them “you are not the main part of the programme, stage and music are also very important”. The theme is to bring all these points together and to have a composition.

Q: When, how and why were you interested in dance?

H.W.: As I said, I do not work with actors anymore. I have not had done so for the past 6 years. My thinking was that if I wanted to forge a separation of the many parts, it was important to allocate every aspect to a different person. I like one person’s voice, another person’s movement and so on. This observation freed me and gave me the opportunity to work on small things and details that were significant for me. There is a narrator, however, the dancers are on stage to serve my own vision. In this way I can achieve the separation I have already mentioned.

Q: Which is the biggest difficulty when one chooses to work with dancers, “using” them in this way?

H.W.: The problem is with the dancers. They really find it very difficult to be behind screens and not on the stage. In “Lucky Johnny” for example, the dancer who participates almost “does not have a body”. He dances with the light. He moves with the lights and sometimes he simply stands. The lights reflect his image when he stands. At that moment, he is not a dancer anymore, but someone who gives his body over to the video, the lights, the screens…

Q: What kind of characters are you interested in, so that you can work with them? “Johnny” or “The Cheshire Cat” which you are preparing, have some peculiarities.

H.W.: All my performances deal with what I would call “pageantry” or dreams or illusions. It is not a world like the one we inhabit. If you try and close your eyes, then you will see different things, you can imagine different….It is a little erotic, I would say… It is a game one can get addicted to.

Q: What are you trying to achieve on stage with your insistence on the use of light, or rather with your experimentations with light, or with “making a body disappear” and placing in its position a virtual one?

H.W.: All these bodies are non-existent. They are illusions. Foe example, “Johnny” does not exist in the performance of “Lucky Johnny”. Such a person can not exist. Do you know anyone who can be so lucky all the time? He is a creature of the imagination. The performance probes people to imagine things.

Q: What was that appealed to you in this play by Brecht?

H.W.: Initially it was an idea by Eleni Varopoulou. She had seen my work and she told me that she believed I was the right person for this project. I liked it because I was attracted by its writing. Also the theme of the addiction to gambling and the players’ emotions. I found it extremely stimulating to explore what I call “the time we do not know”, that is the unknown; this is shown in the play in the journeys that Johnny and his friends make from Havana to New York. They leave but know nothing of what is going to happen. In German there is a word for this “unknown time”.

Q: How did you work with this text?

H.W.: I began by making pictures, as if I was addressing children. The ship, the sea, the shark, are all kept simple and symbolic. Then I tried abstraction. I was interested in playing with the number of cards and the likely split of the text, so if we speak of a theatrical performance, the audience sees a different version each night, the plot in an another order…In a multimedia performance though, this is not interesting, so I presented it in the format you have just seen.

Q: The four jacks we saw projected on stage, assuming they were jacks, had all the same face.

H.W.: Yes, they were jacks, and the faces were the four players and in the porthole in the middle, it was us, the spectators, that was the fifth face, same with the others.

Q: In your next project, the famous cat from Alice in Wonderland, what are you going to present? The fairytale is tantalisingly close to your preoccupations as it already has a body that disappears, of its own will at that!

H.W.: I have thought of working with mirrors this time and to explore more the theme of hallucinations, because the cat is in a way a hallucination. What is important is to find a way to present what the cat does, its disappearance, which however, is not on its own that extraordinary. I would like to see what possibilities can be provided by lighting, mirrors etc. This project is in a continuum with what I have done todate.

Q: How easy is it to stage such productions outside the space for which they were designed in the first place?

H.W.: It is not easy at all. They are based on absolute accuracy and I usually need a lot of lights which most theatres do not have. I have to transport most of the stage design myself and I need two to three days to build the platform in the various auditoriums.

Q.: How do you work with music?

H.W.: I have been collaborating with the same musician for the past three years. I brief him about what I want to do and he then thinks of ingenious ways which fit in completely with the result we want to achieve. Music is a basic element in my work. First, because I employ dancers and second because as I do not use traditional theatrical tools, the story is told by the dancers, the music, the lights, everything.

Q: Who is the choreographer?

H.W.: I am. I improvise. I am not a choreographer, technically, so I do not instruct my dancers in technical terms. I speak mostly in a theatrical language, I tell them what I want them to do and I then either keep or throw away material from what they come up with. My dancers, feel liberated and they do not see me as a typical choreographer. Though, come to think of it, they are not that free!

Q: How do you put together your projects?

H.W.: I work separately with the dancers, the musician, the video operator during the course of the day before everything is joined up. The process resembles perhaps the making of a movie. One has frequently to check the video material as it is different when is first seen in the studio to how it shows on set. It is a slow process. I need three to four months to prepare each performance.

Q: What is theatre for you?

H.W.: Research. Especially for the format I create I would say that research is linked with the visual field. Every angle of a mirror I use changes so much what one sees that a lot of trial and error is required in order to achieve the desired result.

Q: Who are the artists who have influenced you most?

H.W.: They are painters I think…Mondrian, Bacon… I name those but there are many more. In my first project I wanted the body to look like it’s come off a painter’s brush. My work resembles live images, I would call them installations. Many times, I have been told that they would show equally well in a gallery.

Q: Your breaking up with traditional theatre what does it mean for the future?

H.W.: I do not feel that I am obliged to do the same thing for ever. However, the last six years I am busy with something so different. I explore the possibilities that technology offers and I happy doing just that for the time being.