Some Traces of Katie Mitchell: Europe Theater Prize (III)

Director Katie Mitchell was awarded the 12th Europe "New Theatrical Realities" prize in St. Petersburg, Russia, last week (see previous posts regarding the event, below).

At 46 years old, Mitchell has lengthy directing credentials, first at Paine's Plow and the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she was an assistant director, and more recently as associate director at the Royal Court and currently at the National Theater. Mitchell trained extensively in Russia and Eastern Europe, in particular with Russian pedagogues Lev Dodin, of St. Petersburg's Maly Theater, and Anatoli Vassiliev of Moscow's Gitis school. In Britain, where she has been called one of the country's "most polarizing" directors, she is known for her almost obsessive background research, her strict application of Stanislavsky's system and a growing, complex body of multi-media work, as well as operas. An intimate collaborator of Britain's most famous contemporary playwright, Martin Crimp, she has directed two of his works, "Attempts on Her Life" and "The City", as well as his versions of others, such as "The Maids" and "The Seagull". That production earned her enormous criticism for her reworking of Chekov, but the experience has not prevented her from yet more ambitious adaptations, of Virginia Woolf's The Waves and Dostoevsky's The Idiot ("Some Trace of Her"). A children's show, from Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat, is scheduled to come to Paris next December.

Extremely controlled and precise in her answers during a public interview at the conference, she provided, in the absence of an actual production, some insight into her concerns and methods. Extracts.


"I came here 22 years ago and looked at the work in this city with Lev Dodin and then in Moscow with Anatoli Vassiliev and in Georgia and Lithuania, in actually December '89 just after the Wall had fallen, and it was the most informative part of my... everything actually. It shaped everything that I did and do. I studied Lev Dodin's work and watched him train directors for three weeks in this city, so I was shaped by that visit and those international practitioners much more than I was shaped by anything in my own country."

"I suppose in the UK there is a preoccupation with language and speaking words, but there isn't such a preoccupation with constructing behavior and psychology, of which language is a small component. So in this country [Russia], at least, the legacy of the investigations of Stanislavsky, which were very rigorous investigations into how to represent life-like behavior on stage, that legacy created an amazingly sophisticated and complex methodology of acting and directing, with the emphasis on behavior and not on language. I think that was the thing I learned: the way that someone like Dodin or Vassiliev would scan every inch of the actor's body for the data, so that wherever the audience would look on the body they would get very thorough, precise data. And I've never really forgotten certain productions by Dodin or Vassiliev. They set the bar in my head for everything I make. And Pina Bausch, obviously."

"It's very strange to constantly have your influences a long way from you so you have to really work hard to hold them in your head. I think that's been the hard thing. Obviously, to fully understand Stanislavsky's late work, which is my interest and speciality, and to communicate it to actors in the rehearsal room, and then through the actors to the audience, has been 20 years of work. That's all I've been doing, really."

"I'm often sort of taking ideas about how to play an actor's intention or ideas about esthetics, color, the use of light, through several shows over several years. I think that to direct work is such a complex art because you have so many components: the writing, the acting, the lighting, the sound, the colors, the design. There are so many things that it's probably not possible to practice getting all of the strands of work without practicing over several shows. [...] If each production is life or death I get so frightened that I get paralyzed. But if a production is a production as well as a covert investigation of something, then I'm less paralyzed because I'm intellectually somehow free. [...] I don't think in individual productions. I think in arcs of work all the time."

"[As a director interpreting a play], I suppose you've got the surface dialogue of the text and you've got to analyze that, moment to moment: what every character is playing. That's one level. And then you take a mine shaft down deeper and you discover the ideas that consciously or unconsciously preoccupied the writer when they were writing the play, and these determine all the surface action. With all of Chekov's plays, one of the key ideas would be death or illness or family. Those were the ideas that were in his head, maybe not formulated as simplistically as that, but they were there. So those are things that I spend a lot of time trying to find: what are the key ideas that are driving the writer or driving the play at the same time as analyzing the surface, textual exchanges that are going on. That's why we're making theater, isn't it? We're making theater to communicate ideas. I don't think there is any other point to the act. The ideas have to seep through everything: the sound, the lighting, the acting. Everything. The reason that Chekov is so powerful is because the idea structure is so terrifying. Or Euripides: absolutely terrifying ideas. Every inch of the action that the audience sees has to be somehow in relationship to those ideas. And that's really hard. Its very easy to do the story of a play; that's really, really simple. But to do the story [of the] ideas is much harder; it requires a different form of articulation. But ideas aren't very popular, just like politics aren't very popular and morality isn't very popular and metaphysics aren't very popular and philosophy isn't very popular. There's a lot of interest in diversions and entertainment and escape and romanticizing behavior and making beautiful people. [...] My aim is only to honor the material. I'm incredibly rigorous and incredibly serious about what I do."

Photo credit: Luciano Rossetti © Phocus Agency

In Photos: 14th Europe Theater Prize (II)

A glimpse of the winners in the "New Realities" category of the 14th Europe Theater Prize held from April 12-17 in St. Petersburg, Russia (see article in previous post). Photo credits: Luciano Rossetti © Phocus Agency

Finnish director Kristian Smeds at a conference on his work



"Happiness" by Russian director Andrey Moguchiy at the Alexandrinsky Theater



Vesturport Theater's "Faust" and "Metamorphosis"




Teatro Meridional performing "Contos em Viagem - Cabo Verde" at the Komissarzhevskaya Theater



"The Theater" by Viliam Docolomansky's Farm in the Cave company

Diverse Realities: 14th Europe Theater Prize (I)

Built on flood-prone marshland and steely political will, St Petersburg was meant to be Russia's "window on Europe", at the Western-most edge of Peter the Great's empire. The organizers of the 14th Europe Theater Prize, awarded last week in the city equally famous for the October Revolution and the beginning of Communism, not improbably had in mind Peter's visionary project when they chose this former imperial capital to host the event. Their intentions would have been well placed: like no other edition, the 2011 Prize opened its own window on an eclectic spectrum of artists, most hailing from the confines of modern Europe and whose work the Prize legitimized in ways they never could have hoped for at home.

Created in 1986 under the auspices of the then European Community to recognize theater artists who are "promoting understanding and the exchange of knowledge between peoples", the Prize focused originally on superstar directors like Ariane Mnouchkine, Peter Brook, Georgio Strehler and Robert Wilson, before opening its boundaries to rising talents, in a section bis entitled "New Theatrical Realities". As Europe has grown and EU directives kept apace, the latter category is today bestowed on no less than five artists, so that, with the Grand Prize winner, at least six member states can be recognized every year. In addition to the hugely influential German director Peter Stein, whose decades of creation and innovation at Berlin’s Schaubühne made him a natural laureat of the Grand Prize, the New Realities section this year recognized directors Viliam Dočolomanský (Slovakia/Czech Republic), Katie Mitchell (UK), Andrey Moguchiy (Russia) and Kristian Smeds (Finland), as well as companies Teatro Meridional (Portugal) and Vesturport Theater (Iceland): an impressive cross-spectrum of "European realities", to be sure.

As a glimpse at how theater is dreamed, constructed and played out across the continent, this year's Prize event proved illuminating. Between the wordless anthropological studies led by the Teatro Meridional and the coolly high-tech narratives of Katie Mitchell, or between Andrey Moguchiy's animated cartoon characters and Kristian Smed's anarchic fury, or again between Vesturport's high-flying acrobatics and Dočolomanský's anti-globalization choreography, the possibilities are widely disparate and not likely to shrink any time soon. But if the quantity and imagination of these propositions seem limitless, their quality was invariably irregular, or in the case of Katie Mitchell, whose work was not shown at the festival, impossible to judge. A general if not always unwelcome sense of confusion reigned over the Prize's six days of conferences and performances.

What unites these artists, if coherence was on the agenda, is the physicality of their different approaches to story-telling and performance. Watching their work, it seemed already a truism to say that a shared belief that human beings are inherently theatrical as well as a consequent desire to translate human experience through the body rather than words, are probably the defining characteristics of new European theater. In any case, the Jury's choices made for an unusual showcase of generally unknown artists and their unfettered attempts at finding appropriate forms for their texts and ideas.

Of the work on offer among the New Realities, the most likely to book passage to France in a not too distant future comes from Mitchell and Vesturport. While the former was only briefly present in St. Petersburg, a meeting with her past and present collaborators, including the British playwright Martin Crimp, along with a public interview, provided a skeleton of Mitchell’s interests and methods, inspired from research and training in Russian and Eastern European traditions and Stanislavsky's system for actors. Firmly established on the British arts scene, as associate director of the National Theatre and a close collaborator of Crimp, Mitchell might have offered the most serious and evolved work of the New Realities laureates if she and the Prize organizers had found a way of showing any of her plays here.

So it had to be the Vesturport theater from Reykjavik who captured the most attention in St. Petersburg, with its casual hipster charm, good looks, team spirt and circus tumbling. The company presented two very different works, both adaptations of novels: Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and Goethe's "Faust". The former was as controlled as the latter was wild, but both pieces manifested clear interpretative choices. "Metamorphosis" showed off actor/director Gisli Örn Gardarsson's gymnast training, in the role of Gregor Samsa's anti-heroic cockroach, but focused on family mores over existential crisis. Their “Faust” shrugged off Goethe’s philosophical and metaphysical considerations entirely, in favor of a love story between an aging actor and his young nurse, made contemporary by a rock opera esthetic and an original Nick Cave score. Physical theater and theater of ideas are frequent strangers but it might be hoped that Vesturport may develop stronger content to match its already massively appealing signature forms.

As the main reason for the Prize, Peter Stein was also strangely absent from the event, offering limited time with the public and, for the awards ceremony, a solo, one hour reading of "Faust" that showed off his frustration with the venue rather more than the doctor's dilemma or Marguerite's crimes. Stein's other work presented during the conference, an early 19th century comedy by Heinrich von Kleist, "The Broken Jug", performed under his direction by the Berliner Ensemble, was a perfect, even too clean example of Stein's work, better known for its uncompromising political vision. Along with Russian director Lev Dodin (winner of the 8th European Theater Prize), whose reprise of "The Three Sisters" at the Maly Theater was a reminder of the excellence of his company and the mastery of his art, at the forefront of contemporary Russian theater, Stein's presence at this year's edition starkly contrasted with the urgency of the New Realities' winners, even if they have much to learn from his vision of theater as essentially text-based.

The face of European theater is perhaps only harder to define after the 11th Europe Theater Prize but like the view through Peter the Great's "window", this edition showed a vast continent of artists waiting to be discovered.

Photo: Prize Ceremony at the A.S. Pushkin Russian State Academic Drama Theater, April 17, 2011. Credit: Luciano Rossetti © Phocus Agency