An Interview with Jan Fischer

Old age, loss – and optimism. The prize-winning director Semion Aleksandrovsky, who was born in 1982, is presenting his play Kurzzeit(Short Time) at the Theaterformen Festival. A discussion about theatre in Russia, language as a border and a production that must be constantly renewed. 

When did you have your first experiences in theatre?
I graduated from the Saint Petersburg Theatre Academy in 2007, but I had my first experiences with a youth theatre group in Israel.

Did you go back to Russia for your studies?
My parents were divorced, and my mother and grandmother, who’d emigrated to Israel in the 90s, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, were living in Israel. I’d decided to study theatre, and Russian was my mother tongue. But I don’t think it’s important where you live. The Russian poet Brodsky once said that there are no borders between countries anymore. The only empires left are linguistic empires. 

Borders can be crossed. Is this what convinced you about theatre? The possibility of crossing these borders? Or was it something else?
I was about 17 and going through a phase of intensive self-development. I was reading a lot of books. Then I went and picked up my then girlfriend from her theatre group and saw what was happening there. I had the feeling it was a unique place. People came together there to discuss major philosophical problems. It was like a Platonic academy: 20, 30 people sitting together and immersing themselves deeply in a text. I was hooked. 

Is this still how you work? As somebody who explores texts for his productions?
That really is my approach. I always like to quote a Russian cultural and art historian: ‘There is no such thing as art, there are only different anthropological options for investigating the world.’ I use the theatre to explore the world.

Is director the right job title for you then?
I am primarily a director, although this word isn’t ideal. Peter Brook suggested the wonderful word ‘distillator’. It’s about finding the essence of things. My approach to making theatre isn’t really the classical dramatic Stanislavski approach, even if my alma mater is a traditional, Stanislavski-based school. My mentor, Lev Dodin, also had a lot of sympathy for more experimental theatre. But still, being at the academy was a bit like serving in the army. It was all about obeying the teachers, we were part of a very strange patriarchal system. The courses in theatre history didn’t deal with anything that had developed after the middle of the 20^thcentury. After I’d graduated, I had to reinvent theatre for myself in order to feel at home in this field.

What did you learn in the Academy about directing then? Or rather: what didn’t you learn?
For example, we read the book Life and Fate by Vassily Grossmann, it’s this enormous book about the Second World War. We read a lot generally, analysed texts and worked with contexts. We learned to read the material. That was probably the best knowledge I’ve ever been given, aside from my classical education, this academic knowledge.
But the main question I had to grapple with was: who are these people on the stage, really? The Stanislavski school assumes that they’re characters. We imagine something and try to make it real, to construct a character. But I was unhappy with this. If it’s a character standing on the stage, where is the human being playing this character? So I have tried to develop my own system, and to work with human beings, not characters, on the stage. To respect both the character and the human being. And I’ve tried to find a way of building something like a relationship with the character. The character is not the person on stage, it’s something this person is working with. The character is an object.

Is this also how you work with the ‘Pop-up teatr’?
I founded the Pop-up teatr in 2015; I was working freelance at the time, but mainly for big institutions, because the Russian theatre landscape is very vertical. I’ve always been interested in experimental theatre, but the official rhetoric was: if you want to make experimental theatre, then do your experimenting on your own. This made me furious, so I founded my own theatre, which is based on a few specific ideas. Above all the idea of working with different documentary practices and developing new ones, creating high quality documentary theatre. The other idea was to make theatre based on the fact that we have no fixed performance space. If you want to work completely independently and you’re not applying for funding, it’s not doable financially. So I developed this pop-up practice, through which we really pop up in different places. A lot of theatre practitioners of my generation do it this way. 

How do you manage to work without any funding? 
I try to keep everything as simple as possible. ‘Pop-up theatre’ is also an attempt to use horizontal connections, meaning that when I want to show something, I need to have the right partners for it. For example, we’ve had several performances in bars. We talked to the owners of various bars that had an interest in us performing individual episodes in their venues, because it would bring them attention. And in doing this, the bars help us to understand our topic better. The individual episodes deal with a crime, and the character we were interested in was the drinker, so we had to drink to understand his thought process. 

There aren’t very many independent theatre production companies like ‘Pop-up teatr’ in Russia.
That’s because the economic system isn’t set up for private and independent theatres. There is funding that is intended to help people develop something new. But you can’t rely on this funding, and I’ve decided not to apply for it. I want our experiment to be an example of how you don’t have to wait for the opportunity to work with public theatres. That makes it sound like I’m against public theatres, which isn’t the case. I created an opera last year, a huge production which could only be realised in a public theatre. But I believe it’s also important to develop alternative practices. 

So whoever attempts to work without public funding in Russia like you do is doing political work?
Jean-Luc Godard once said: ‘I don’t make political films, but I make films in a political way.’ My way of doing everything, not just theatre, is very political, because I have certain ideals. The way in which I work with people in the theatre and with audiences is, in its own way, a manifesto. For example, I never hold any castings. Because the system of theatre casting, in which somebody selects somebody else for a role, is a very atavistic kind of relationship between people. Even when I’m working with a big institution, I simply invite all the performers and let them decide whether they want to stay or not. And then we create something together. This is why I’m not so keen on taking finished texts as the basis of my work, but prefer to work with ideas that are then developed into a production. 

Kurzzeit, the production you’re showing at the festival, is based on a photo diary by photographer Philipp Toledano about his father’s old age and loss of short-term memory. How did you come across these images?
That wasn’t me, it was the author of the play, Konstantin Steshik. He had developed a text about the images and submitted it to a competition as part of a theatre festival, where he was put on the shortlist. I always read the plays that are shortlisted in all theatre festivals, there are maybe around 50 a year, and that’s how I discovered Kurzzeit. 

Why did you want to work with this text?
It moved me. I felt very connected to the text, because I can’t imagine growing older at the same time as my parents are also growing older. But this is an issue that concerns us all, because time is cruel to us all. The problem with the text was that it’s only three pages long. There was a rehearsed reading of the text with an actor who pretended to be the old father. It was very classical, it made me furious. After the reading, I had a discussion with another director who said that the text was very good as a start, but that maybe we should ask the author if he would develop it further. But I thought the author had done his job already, and that it was time for us to do ours. That was the point when I wanted to find my own way of staging the text. 

Kurzzeit became something that isn’t really a classical production, but almost more of an installation. 
There’s a very strong installation-like approach, but the production is a theatre production, it always has to take place in a theatre space. When I’m directing, I always try to focus on three aspects. The first is the content of the text. What is it about? What is this? This is something I always wait till the end to try and find out. I find it more important to ask the question of what relationship the audience is establishing with the work, what the audience’s role is within it. The third question is how the production is located within the context of the theatre. Kurzzeitunfolds on a stage, but it breaks through the fourth wall. The audience is sitting in the auditorium, but at a particular point it has to decide to go up onto the stage. No one takes them there. The stage and the auditorium are usually separated in a theatre, the stage is higher and more brightly-lit, the better seats are at the front, the less good ones further at the back. In Kurzzeit, the issue is destroying this hierarchy. No, not destroying it. Creating a place where the audience crosses over this border of its own accord. 

How long does it usually last till the audience realises it can go onto the stage?
It depends on which country I’m showing Kurzzeitin. When I showed it in Belorussia for the first time, there was a big barrier in front of the audience, because it’s a very authoritarian country. People are very fearful of crossing this boundary there, to the extent that even the organisers of the festival I showed it at were afraid nobody would come onto the stage. But we gave the audience the time they needed, and it worked. In this sense, Kurzzeitis a very strange project anyway, because there isn’t one single version with which I’m touring the festivals. The flat that is constructed on stage is meant to awaken childhood memories, to encourage audience members to think about themselves. So every time we’re invited to a festival, we have to carry out research on the ground and completely rebuild the flat anew. We also always ask local artists to go and visit their fathers and to make the recordings that you then hear in the flat.

Do the fathers always cooperate?
Sometimes parents can’t accept that their sons or daughters are artists and don’t have a ‘proper’ job. This opportunity to carry out artistic work with the fathers sometimes has a huge effect on everybody involved. I’ve already had artists say to me that their fathers would never in their lives get involved in a theatre project. And then when they tried it, they were surprised at how seriously their fathers took this opportunity to work with their sons or daughters. It can be an important moment in their life. I try not to use the artists, but rather to give them something, a common experience. And when the audience hears the recordings onstage, it becomes a very personal experience, the audience starts to hear the relationship behind the recording. Until they come to the point of focussing on themselves, on their own situation. Their own parents. 

Kurzzeitis about ageing and loss – is it a sad production?
I wouldn’t say it’s sad. Toledano ended up moving to Great Britain to be with his son and lived there until he died. And the son made this photo diary on which Kurzzeitis based. The father is so full of life in the pictures. He feels the full value of life. Kurzzeitis based on very light moments, not on some huge drama. There is drama involved, but I would call it ‘light drama’. 

This conversation took place on 5 December 2018 in Hannover.

Semion Alexandrovsky is a theatre director. He was born in 1982 in Saint Petersburg and grew up in Jerusalem. As a young man, he studied under Lev Dodin at the St Petersburg State Theatre Arts Academy, from which he graduated in 2007. Since then, he has been working as a director in his native city. Four of his productions were nominated for the prestigious Golden Mask Festival in Moscow and won several prizes at the New Siberian Transit Festival in Novosibirsk, at the Texture Festival in Perm and at the Breakthrough Festival in Saint Petersburg. Since 2015, Alexandrovsky has been running his own independent company, Pop-up Teatr.

Jan Fischer was born in 1983 and grew up between Bremen and Toulouse. After his first job as a souvenir seller in Disneyland, he studied creative writing and cultural journalism at Hildesheim between 2003 and 2010. As a freelance journalist, he works locally and cross-regionally, on and offline, mainly for nachkritik.de, the Deutsche Bühne, the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung and the WASD. He runs his own small online magazine called zebrabutter.net. Every now and then he publishes short stories in literary magazines and anthologies, and a few of these have won prizes – others only just missed out on them. He is also a part-time text messager and an internationally-renowned air guitarist.