This year's Dublin Fringe Festival is looking to eastern Europe for some of the most exciting work in its programme, reports Belinda McKeon.
Last year Vallejo Gantner, the head of Dublin Fringe Festival, went to Sibiu, in Transylvania, with the newly founded Ireland Romania Cultural Foundation. Fairleighscu, as the organisation's director, John Fairleigh, has become known for his commitment to all things Romanian, introduced Gantner and his fellow guests to a city of medieval arches and Germanic spires.
Here a theatre ensemble from Abkhazia, on the borders of Russia and Georgia, had arrived after a five-day drive. Here also were companies from all over the world - yes, from western Europe and from the US, but also from Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Moldova, Hungary, Armenia, Cameroon, Israel and Mexico. The annual Sibiu International Theatre Festival brings them all together. "It's plugged into a mix and a flow, into a hybridity that you just won't see anywhere else," says Gantner. He went there looking for work to bring home to the fringe, and Sibiu delivered. Central to this year's fringe, which starts on September 20th, is To the East, a strand of work from Romania, the Czech Republic and elsewhere in eastern Europe.
It's exactly as Constantin Chiriac, the actor who set up the Sibiu festival in 1994 (and who comes to Cork next week to speak about the experience as part of a lecture series on creating a cultural city), would have wanted. A showcase for originality and a template for networks between artists, the festival brings Romanian and international artists together, exuding creative excitement and opportunity.
Ironically, however, the origins of this energy and dynamism go back to a time when excitement and opportunity were starkly lacking: the 25-year reign of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. "It is strange," says Chiriac. "Ceausescu's time was a good time for people in a way, in that it made them very cultivated. There was no possibility to watch television or listen to the radio or travel. Instead, all developed a very strong education and learned a lot."
If self-education thrived in a time of suffering, so did a sense of theatre as a channel of social and cultural critique, latent defiance and empathy between those under Ceausescu's shadow. "That was a time when theatre was very strong," says Chiriac. "Everything was repertoire theatre, but it was not just traditional: it was also a lot of images, and it became a place of freedom." It might not have seemed that way. Ceausescu demanded that theatre companies make as much money as possible for his coffers, which involved arduous year-round performances.
Chiriac, who was an actor at the time, recalls having to turn out 400 performances a year, with the onstage temperature dropping below freezing in winter. But the public came, watched and, says Chiriac, understood what was going on. "We had this second language," he says. "Like when we did Richard III all the people understood that it was really about Ceausescu."
What emerged was a younger generation that was well read, highly cultured and fluent in several languages - including that of theatre-making. Now it no longer needs the "second language" of Ceausescu's time, as it can speak frankly about whatever it pleases. Chiriac says that this was initially a difficult transition for writers and directors - the most successful shows after Ceausescu's fall took place on the street rather than in theatres - and that much of his impetus in establishing the Sibiu festival stemmed from an awareness of the need to translate the old language into something newer, freer and more diverse, incorporating voices from places where Ceausescu had never made the rules. And it worked. Ten years ago the first international version of the festival (the previous year it had been piloted as a student event) featured three shows from three countries. This year's festival featured 300 shows from 67 countries.
Among them were Bones For Otto and You Don't Feel It Here, from the Bucharest-based company Green Hours, both of which Gantner snapped up for Dublin Fringe Festival. Both were written by Lia Bugnar, who will come to Dublin to direct Bones For Otto. For her the thrill of working with Green Hours is that it is an independent company - not state run, as is 90 per cent of Romanian theatre - and based, literally, underground, in a basement venue that hosts theatre and jazz. "Everyone who belongs to a certain audience goes there," says Bugnar. "And not young people only, no. Younger inside, I would say, people even of 80. Just people who are open to everything. And you don't meet this at every step in Romania. For so many years we have been in a stupid system."
Bugnar, who is regarded as one of Romania's most promising writers, abandoned the security of one of Bucharest's state-owned theatres after nine years to freelance because, even though she found the state's attitude to theatre "good, because it is diplomatic", she could no longer bear the demands of the mainstream. "With what I think about theatre I found it unbearable. It was not for me, no." For her, rather, the independent scene, supported by the Theatre Union of Romania, a group set up by the actor and former culture minister Ion Caramitru (who was at the Gate last year and is in the new Irish film Adam & Paul).
Fittingly, the two plays are set under the surface of the everyday world. In You Don't Feel It Here a man and a woman trying to escape the smothering stink of an unidentified city lie together in an underground crevice, the only space in which they can breathe. Strangers at first, they fall in love under the audience's gaze. Bones For Otto takes place in the underbelly of polite society, as two roadside prostitutes talk, sing and work their way through the evening. They sound like visions born of bleakness, but Bugnar denies this - and denies that they are overtly shaped by her upbringing in a dictatorship. Although there is poverty in the plays, it is not the poverty she knew, "when, 15 years ago, you had to stay all day to buy your pack of butter, and then it was not there". It is a poverty of the spirit rather than of a place.
"You Don't Feel It Here is about every man and woman in a relationship. Something nice, something beautiful appears, and that's international. And with Bones For Otto it's that I think all women, clever or stupid, have everything inside of them. And I made a bet with myself to go deeper inside myself and see if I have the part these characters [the prostitutes\] have."
That tension between being inspired by a country's political background and seeking to escape it is familiar to Petr Lorenc, director of the young Czech theatre group Krepsko, whose production Rubbish is another part of To the East. It was not at Sibiu but at Prague Fringe Festival that Gantner discovered Krepsko. The group's work combines improvisation with set pieces and incorporates the art of clowning, he says, to acidly funny effect.
But Lorenc is quick to point out that Rubbish is not a conventional clown work. The play's characters, two people who live together for the sake of having a television to watch, and who find themselves in crisis when it breaks down, share the roots of the clown, he says, adding frankly: "It is about accepting that you are in the middle of shit."
People thrust together, deprived of the diversion that television brings: they sound like what Chiriac described as the freedom-seekers in Ceausescu's Romania. And Lorenc, at 29, is old enough to remember the Czech Republic's own imprisonment by harsh powers; he was 14 at the time of the velvet revolution, in 1989, when communist rule gave way to the leadership of the playwright Václav Havel. Even as he talks Lorenc is finding that the experience has had some bearing on the work he will bring to Dublin. "It was my childhood," he says simply. "For me, in memory, Prague is grey, really grey. Really depressing, lots of disappointed people, and vicious. . . . And I was thinking that that was everywhere." But, researching a production with a Dutch theatre company, he was surprised to discover otherwise. "That Holland, in the Sixties, was open and everywhere was . . . was hippy," he laughs. "And here in the Czech Republic was the memory of everything grey." Maybe, he says, this memory is also in Rubbish. "Because everything in our performance is brown, really brown, like a colour without a colour. And that is the opposite of the TV shining. Maybe in there is the memory of my childhood."
Along with Krepsko and Green Hours, two other companies from Romania and one from the Czech Republic will visit the Dublin fringe: DCM, a radical Bucharest dance company, and TeatrulACT, another underground theatre company from the city, which is bringing a comedy - in the spirit of Goodbye Lenin! - about the last hours of an elderly woman who badly misses communism.
From Prague Lhotáková & Soukup present Question For Next Year, a choreography for three performers, including Ivana Gottliebova, who was born in 1925 and taught Sokol, an exercise regime similar to callisthenics, to Czech factory workers for decades. There'll also be a play reading from Romania, as well as from Russia and Bulgaria - countries whose theatre remains a mystery to most of Westerners.
Gantner hopes to change that. "We're opening a window," he says. "Beyond the prettiness and the postcard there is a really active kind of questioning, thriving, contemporary environment. Where people are making exciting work, that is distinct from anything you would expect. It's like working from a different place, a different style - and it's very fringe."
