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
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