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| Spatial Words, or the Universe of Stage Direction by Alvis Hermanis Edīte Tišheizere Normunds Naumanis once wrote that modern directing began in Latvia when Alvis Hermanis returned from America. So, what did Hermanis bring back from the land of opportunity? Not in material terms, of course, but in terms of consciousness. | |
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Some of his more recent productions, where the director is also the scenographer, reveal a kind of formula according to which the production is built - "space derives from the person". Space as the consequence of the human being. No human, no space. (By the way, quite a good way of perceiving one's surroundings and surviving in a megalopolis - in New York, say, or Moscow. Or of surviving at all.)
From the productions, the publications and the videoclip by Alvis Hermanis, I obtain the impression that he really does think primarily in spatial categories. Like an architect, I would guess. (At the same time he himself remains in an inaccessible, locked room - a black box, perhaps. Attracting and intriguing, but at the same time frightening and repelling.) Hermanis' spatial variations tend towards infinity. They start with the New Riga Theatre itself - a space where everything is subject to art, without seeking to expend time, money or effort on that which does not apply directly to art. Without fostering the illusion that a neatly organised environment is synonymous with "culture". I write this with no irony at all - in poverty, priorities have an entirely different weight. Also flowing into and merging with the idea of "Hermanis' space" are entirely different, seemingly inappropriate things, phenomena and categories. A space, a certain area of square metres in a school hall, is transformed into time in the videoclip "You Thrilled Me", directed by Alvis Hermanis. The 1960s girls, stylised and stylish, with starched petticoats and elaborate coiffures, gaze across the hall, where at the other end, twenty odd metres and forty years away, Ainars Mielavs is singing to them, standing in the present day. After all, time is the category closest to space. The spaces of different times flow and merge quite naturally in "The Young Ladies of Wilko". The deceased sister continues to live alongside the rest in a self-evident manner, separated only by silence. Quite easily, influenced by similar situations, the living and the dead merge into one - like a stereo image demonstrated in a physics textbook. In the manor itself, the director creates space in the form of a labyrinth - a single movement serves to shift a screen and a certain direction is closed off. There is no way out. The characters can tread a different path, but without the conviction that the route will not be blocked by a new, unexpected wall. Already in "The Young Ladies of Wilko", Hermanis turned to that space which lies closest to the person - their dress. All of the sisters have a complicated hat or coiffure. As a unified cage in which to trap their possibly all too individual thoughts. In "The Government Inspector", the space surrounding people has already become a principle. But this is only one of the many spatial models in this production, fitting one inside the other like matroshkas. The outer one would seem to be the temporal space - the interior of the Soviet-style canteen, an interior familiar right down to details, smells and sounds. Underneath this, the next layer is revealed - the flesh, the private volume accreted close to the core, which each of the characters has stocked up around themselves. Perhaps this is in order not to allow the big universe to approach, with the plash of rags when washing the floor, the onion smell and the clucking of hens. Each person walks around with their own flesh space like a snail in its shell. Right inside, visible only to the extent that the actor's energy permits, is the hidden core. Bright as the tears in the eyes of forsaken bride Baiba Broka. Iron grey and hard as the imperturbability of Guna Zariņa, playing the wife of the city mayor. Soft and damp as the generosity of Maija Apine as the mother-provider canteen worker - inviting all and sundry to come and milk her. Only Hlestakov, played by Vilis Daudziņš, is denied the intermediate space of protective flesh, and so he wanders around as the bare soul of a fool. In "The Government Inspector", I was puzzled and slightly offended by the natural and matter-of-fact way in which the director arranges this space: one person is provided with an extra middle, while another has only flesh. This freedom of the demiurge is threatening. It's as if he were sitting on a cloud and pondering with detached interest as the little balls of flesh potter around, collide or slide past each other in the little universe that he has created. It makes your flesh creep - it's like the perspective of an atomic scientist. Or the big, round eyes of the hen, regarding the tiny insects in the moment before it gobbles them up. In Alvis Hermanis' productions, that which in the last century was known as scenery - an environment characterising a particular inhabited location and particular years, furniture that does not change just because the active individual thinks of it and regards it - is an impossibility in principle. That which surrounds the characters of Hermanis' productions - let us use the most neutral term, "space" - begins like a ray within themselves, breaks through the skull, through the tissue of the flesh and, transcending the skin, the limits of the person, is materialised. In accordance with the character's view. Thus, any stable scale is broken down: person to person, person to thing. The scales are created by the feelings of the characters. On paper, these are entirely abstract musings. On the stage, the director turns all of this into a tangible artistic reality. Caspar Hauser, dug up from his sandpit, sees a world of microbes. It is worthy of interest and study, but in principle remains unintelligible, since the different scales are incompatible. Hauser, played by Māris Liniņš, is physically incongruous with little society of benevolently fastidious petty-citizens (real diminutive citizens! - played by children around the age of ten). Conversely, for the microbes, Hauser is incomprehensible, for one thing because they are microbes, small beings without feelings or reason. Their feelings and intellect - actors dressed in black and masked, speaking in their place and moving the tiny hands and heads of the miniature beings - exist at yet another, third scale, let's say an invisible scale. Somewhere in the middle between the microbes and Hauser lives the horse, but neither is this a point of reference: too large and natural for some, and too small and different from the rocking horse seen in the darkness underground. It is only from the auditorium that one can view the characters at the real scale, if such exists at all. From outside of space. Alvis Hermanis is a very clever and philosophical director, and so his productions are quite difficult to describe. Every element is augmented with such a rich layer of associations and synonyms that the right word for it is simply not possible. For space too, there are innumerable alternative names in Hermanis' productions. Time, flesh and scale may be some of them. Emptiness and darkness are others. Darkness may be that space inhabited by the faceless black people who move the porcelain faces of the dolls with their painted-on feelings (Hermanis creates this image very precisely - the years and emotional experiences are drawn on the smooth children's faces using makeup) and make voices sound from the open mouths of the dolls. The black figures, by the way, are the same scale as Caspar Hauser himself, but are invisible. Contact between them and Hauser would be possible in the underworld, in the darkness, but it is from there that the foundling has been dug and drawn out. In the light, in this doubtful possibility of seeing, they are invisible. Light is thus another name for space. Matter is also a name for space in "The Story of Caspar Hauser". The outer space from which the mysterious guest arrives and where he goes, the object of short-lived adulation on the part of the doll community, is sand, heavy and cold. Taking this thought to its logical consequence, it is the grave. This is where Caspar Hauser has become that which he is, where he has pondered and fingered his world landscape so concretely that the bunch of microbes seen in the light of the world above, with all its laws and ABC of good manners, Biedermeyer dolls' house and poetry, simply shatters. In order to protect at least the broken shards, the microbes quickly and practically transfer Caspar Hauser back to his real space - they dig him under again. The grave is his home and his refuge. The space from which Hauser appears is heavy, while that which he would like to become acquainted with is cold and cutting. But the outer space of the microbes, shown from their perspective, is equally threatened, should the sand once again reveal something truly alive. If the truth be said, the space and thinking of Alvis Hermanis does not really let me approach. The cool and calculating calm with which he uses categories, people and any dimension to attain his aims. Despite the fact that the productions of Hermanis permit the theoriser too to engage in various thrilling games, to search for words, to seek out regularities and in like manner to manipulate with artistic impressions. | |
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