Cezaris Graužinis: I Am Interested in the Anatomy of Joy

Vaidas Jauniškis 2007 05 30

10 out of 26 performances from the creative baggage of Cezaris Graužinis have been staged abroad
A new section of the Arts Factory/Menų faktūra called “Salon” is dedicated to conversations with Lithuanian stage art creators. Both dialogues of the authors of the website and interviews from various press and electronic publications will be placed here.

We invited Cezaris Graužinis for the first conversation in the Salon not due to his new performance Day of Lithuania (Lith. Lietuvos diena) that will be shown at the New Drama Action but rather due to the fact that at the moment, the newest turns in the author’s creation reflect clearly a paradoxical situation within the system of Lithuanian theatres.

Directors staging performances abroad no longer surprise anyone. Why do they choose to work somewhere else? There is an entire complex of possible reasons: on the one hand, this is financial support to a director who hardly finds any work in his homeland; however, this may also serve as an interesting experience with actors or actors-stars from other cultures. Also, a director staging abroad is often free to choose the material he wants and the conditions to create are much better in comparison to those in Lithuanian theatres. Thus, gradually, 10 out of 26 performances from the creative baggage of Cezaris Graužinis have been staged abroad.

You are reading a new play at the moment. Again, it’s in English. You have just launched Day of Lithuania. What is your next performance?

– This is a play written specially for the festival by a young and one of the most interesting Croatian playwrights – Life in the Shade of Bananas by Ivan Vidić. Ljubljana festival Ex Ponto produces the performance. They have ordered the play by a Croatian dramatist specially for me. The performance will be staged in two casts – Slovenian and Croatian. I will be working with both of them simultaneously. During the summer I’ll be rehearsing till the end of July and the premier will take place in the middle of September, at the festival.

This is a modern family drama that could as well occur in Lithuania. It is about people selling their homeland – a theme familiar to the countries experiencing transition from one system to another. The play is cruel, sometimes cynical and unmerciful to people and the homeland.

– You have been the art director of theatre Viirus in Helsinki since the New Year. What are your duties? What is expected from you and what can you offer?

– Officially, I’m starting to work as an art director from August this year. However, a new season is already being planned and I’m taking part in this process actively. I have to shape the face of the theatre, its ideology and aesthetic policy. I have been obliged to stage one-two performances per season.

I was invited to manage the theatre even though they had known perfectly well that I have my own troupe in Lithuania. What they asked me to do was not only staging performances. One of the conditions they offered me was that I wouldn’t have to spend all the time in Helsinki. I would be free to organize certain projects in Lithuania as well. And when I’m not in Helsinki, other directors invited by me will perform the work.

The Winter's Tale by Shakespeare in Swedish Theatre, Helsinki, 2006
– This theatre is familiar to you. You have already staged performances in it. So, you seem to know its profile. What are you planning to change?

– The creators of this Finnish theatre have their direction. This is a twenty year-old theatre. But I’m not that interested in the former profile. They trust me and this means that I have to create the theatre the way I see it.

I don’t think I’d like to create the theatre of a single stylistics or theme. I don’t feel like performing one certain aesthetic programme or ploughing some ideological furrow. I’m keen on changes. The most fascinating thing for me is to surprise myself while working. I’m absolutely not interested in doing something I know very well. If I see clearly how I am going to stage a new performance, I get depressed, inert and helpless.

So, today I think that it should be a theatre surprising with each staging. In other words, it should be a theatre moving in zigzags. I want to avoid predictability.

– How do you appreciate this offer? Is it a kind of reward for your homelessness here or is it comfort? Is this a certain guarantee of a more convenient life?

– I believe that this was a natural consequence. I enjoyed working with the troupe for the performance No Return based on the texts by Franz Kafka. I have known main actor Dick Idman for a long time already. I liked the process and we received great results. When such things happen, there’s a natural wish to meet once again and to try out something new, to plunge into something else. I have accepted this offer quietly – as the possibility to work with good actors and nice people. I work at a very beautiful place under fairly stable conditions. The theatre is located on the bay island at the centre of Helsinki. I remember the rehearsals of No Return in September - migrating birds were landing in the bay and the sunlight was brighter than in our dreams. While smoking during the breaks I kept admiring the view! But when I got back to the actors on the stage, I could sense beauty there as well.

Dafnis and Chloe in Poreya, Athens, 2006.
– Could you tell where you feel yourself at home? What is home comfort to you? You have always been and still are “in between” – between the studies in Moscow and the courses at the Tadashi Suzuki Theatre in Japan, between Lithuania and Scandinavia, the Faroes, Greece…

– I’m like that Jew from the Soviet joke – constantly flying from the USSR to Israel and back. “Where do you feel best?” “On a journey.” It’s not important or exciting for me to see new places. Travelling is not a physical but rather an inner process for me. An ideal form of loneliness encouraging self-knowledge.

For example, in Athens I and my companions stage designer Vytautas Narbutas and composer Martynas Bialobžeskis felt really bad. Heat, chaos, noise and permanent cultural shock got us down. However, now we do remember those days with nostalgia as we had a chance to work with wonderful people. Before the selection of cast members for the project of Dafnis and Chloe nobody knew anybody. We became friends through work and later something else emerged among us. And I know that I’ll return to Athens because that “something else” calls me to go back.

On the one hand, two months from the beginning of rehearsals of a performance to its premiere is a very short time to get to know your actors better. Especially if you are working with them for the first time. On the other hand, those two months seem to be a too long and precious period of life to spend it hastily. I am concerned not only about the result but also about the quality of my life during that two-months period. I don’t travel to show myself or my art. I travel to meet people and spend some time with them. The possibility to stage a joint performance that might turn out well is of secondary importance. I think that talks about service to one’s profession are absurd. Profession is only a tool. Professional activities have to bring you pleasure. Those who forget this, tend to waste their lives in vain.

The Taming of the Shrew in Vilnius Youth Theatre, 2004. Photo by Dmitrij Matvejev.
– Don’t you think that this approach is a bit hedonistic – to create and experience pleasure instead of suffering?

– This isn’t a hedonistic but rather a practical approach. Suffering and tormenting others is a silly method of work. In theatre the ethics of rehearsals determines directly the aesthetics of the result. How can you guarantee good ethics if you stand in conflict with yourself and the environment, and you are incapable to control yourself?

– And yet sometimes bitter, unpleasant and intense performances are born out of this. Do you as a viewer see clearly the disharmony of their creation on the stage?

– I don’t accept hysterical self-expression of creators. It is possible to reveal your anger, fear, and loneliness quietly. Sometimes even with humour. Among representatives of my profession it is popular to be famous for radical work methods. A director is a very favourable profession. It allows one to provoke, humiliate and physically torture people. But let others do this. To me, life is good enough and people are nice and honourable. Recently, I have started analyzing joy – the joy of being. What is it? I believe that only theatre can explore and trace the mechanisms of joy and its structure, if there’s one. The phenomenon of joy, joy as the theme is the deepest to me.

– Are you trying to say that it’s deeper than our favourite theme of death?

– Undoubtedly.

– You are one of the last directors from the pleiad of Lithuanian directors who have completed their studies in Moscow and stage their performances here. Later, you had a chance to learn of various other cultures. What could you tell now about the studies at GITIS, its school?

– I should start from the fact that when I entered GITIS I was very young and immature. I was only 17. Well known directors and strong personalities such as Mark Zakharov and Andrei Goncharov gave lectures to my course. As I was so raw, I rebelled against their teaching, especially against the ideas of Goncharov. Goncharov taught us to do everything only the way he thought was right. His thinking seemed to be old-fashioned, and aesthetics – irrelevant. Unfortunately, during my studies in Moscow I didn’t learn anything. I started learning only when I began working professionally, teaching others – giving lectures to students of acting. And then, an interesting process started – the information “charged” at GITIS returned. I started remembering certain fragments and began assembling some kind of a thing out of those bits and pieces. So, that information had still settled somewhere and I am rethinking it over now. It helps and inspires me.

But the most important thing that I realized there is the understanding of ethics. Andrei Goncharov, God rest his soul, was a real “theatre mastodon,” a giant – very honest, proud and ambitious. What I took away with me from Moscow was ethical charge. The realization of scale. The categories to think with in theatre and the reasons for staging a performance.

– Did you have to revise your knowledge and your system when you had to face other cultures?

– No way. When I was invited to teach to Scandinavian actors, I knew very well that this wasn’t in order to make me do things their way but due to something in my works that might be useful to them. Therefore, I never pay attention to the environment or else we wouldn’t have complemented each other. Say, if we speak about the realism according to Stanislavsky, Scandinavian realism in Scandinavian theatres is the strongest, to my mind. Stanislavsky’s school in Russian theatre as it is now and as it was during my studies could be described as grotesque and the understanding of Russian creators has been Baroque. I see powerful, motivated and realistic school in Scandinavian countries.

Uncle's Dream by Dostoyevski in Vilnius Youth Theatre, 2003. Photo by Dmitrij Matvejev.
– So, now you are working with your Cezaris Group – cezario grupė. Don’t you feel a bit off-stream? Your aesthetics stands on “project” legs. You do not have your theatre building, your repertoire is very moderate and the performances are shown somewhere, sometime.

– But this only proves the professionalism of the group! We work without premises, the locations change, we create new performances and Arabian Night by Ronald Schimmelpfennig has been shown for four years already!

We simply never could allow ourselves to get involved in one-day projects. We value possibilities to work that are so hard to create too much. We cannot waste them. And the “minimalism of image” is one of the dominants of our aesthetics – the consequence of our voluntary decision rather than small budgets or poor work conditions.

I like that powerful visualisation and metaphors of Lithuanian theatre. However, there’s always a wish to do something in a different way next to that main-stream. For example, to trust a single actor’s abilities to provoke images in the consciousness of a viewer while placing him all alone in the emptiness, within the ray of a spotlight.

– Next to plays you have also chosen to stage prose. Hunger by Knut Hamsun at the Vilnius Youth Theatre was your first performance. There have been two performances based on the texts by Kafka – The Trial and No Return (according to The Man Who Disappeared (Germ. Der Verschollene) or Amerika together with the short story A Fratricide). Day of Lithuania emerged from etudes and various texts written by you. Why do you want to take up prose? Don’t plays satisfy your needs?

– Work with prose provokes to search for unexpected solutions. I feel that I’ll continue with dramatization of prose. I feel freer when I can create through improvisation and selection.

That classical structure: the exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and denouement have remained in dramaturgy and even in modern theatre. But in reality, human life doesn’t fit in such canon. I’m interested in post-drama theatre. Why can’t the culmination of a dramaturgic action happen during the 15th minute of a performance and then the denouement continue for three hours – just like ripples? I wonder if only that classical composition has the right to exist. I guess not. And prose gives you that freedom.

– From the very beginning, starting with Hunger, the prose or plays you selected were not easy. Later you continued with The Sea by Edward Bond and you also wanted to stage The Dreamers by Robert Musil. What you are working on now with the Cezaris Group is aesthetically new in comparison to your previous performances. Maybe this is that exploration of joy you have talked about. Arabian Night in comparison to, say, former performances is simply – I’m a bit exaggerating – a beautiful, joyful and comic “cartoon.”

Cezaris Graužinis: „How can one grasp something that’s written between the lines of life?” Photos by Raimundas Urbakavičius
– I love this Lithuanian cliché claiming that joy is shallow. I tend to think in a different way. This is certainly the matter of taste, but that’s what I work for – I have to make people question such attitudes. Most of the performances scream of this rotten world or the fact that a man is born crying and dies miserable and lonely. Well, I have always known this. I don’t see any point in creating anything that would make a viewer leave the theatre with the tail between his legs expecting that theatre would arouse his conscience?!? I don’t believe in this. Such approach could only cause depression to a person.

You don’t have to teach people how to live. The audience is often cleverer than actors on the stage. But how can you grasp something that’s written between the lines of life? How is it possible to capture the pulse of the flow of life? I really don’t know – and I’m interested in that. It’s like creating that, as you have said, “cartoon.” Yes, the montage of this performance is cartoon-like, but the technology doesn’t determine anything. So, I’m purposefully keen on selecting some traditionally “ungenerous” technology and observing whether it might create the fourth dimension and lead us to some non-banal theme or not.

– But when you say that you’re not interested in the theme of “this rotten world” you seem to negate the traditional principle of Aristotelian tragedy – allowing the audience experience catharsis and purification through villains and their horrible crimes.

– At the moment, I can say neither “yes” nor “no” to the theory of Aristotle. It’s difficult for me to speak about this as I’m thinking of staging Caligula in Finland. Now I see this story as a fairly tragic one. And this is my next stage – to look for joy in tragedy. Joy is not only about good or funny things. One should look for joy even when everything seems to go wrong and life becomes unbearable. I know that joy can be found in defeat, loss, or trouble. Even in illness. And even in death.

Translated by Monika Kisliakovaitė