SESSION 6 - Cultural exchanges: a European theatrical education?

I would like to focus my presentation on the final question of this 6th working session. I have been coming to Grenoble since 1994.  Then it was for the 7th Rencontres and they were called “Rencontres Theatre and Youth for Europe”. From that moment, I’ve only been missing them for a couple of years. So I saw them growing, developing, getting into crisis and transforming.

I love the Rencontres as a sort of “ homeland of the soul ” where I come to, year after year, with the same passion, even if strength are diminishing , the vision of world and  theatre  changing  and the look on  future becoming  less and less optimistic.  

I wait for them all the year long and the years when I didn’t come, I missed them as you miss a loved person who has been too long away from you. That’s why the future of these Rencontres is so important to me.

Before tackling the theme itself, I would like to underline that the future of those Rencontres is like a symbol of the future of Europe and European Union.

The funding cuts that Culture and the Rencontres have suffered from on the local but above all on European levels, tell us a lot on the suicidal and schizophrenic direction in which the European Union has engaged. In 1994, the European Union was our future. Today it is a weight, a cage, maybe a nightmare. Xenophobic actions, religious fundamentalisms, nationalisms are not only a result of selfishness, irrational fears and power desires. They are also the result of political mistakes by a technocratic Europe that takes decisions looking technical but which are in fact political, and are inspired by  a precise social and political model given as shared by everybody but which has not gone through  the fundamental stage of democracy that elections are.

A political and social model, and consequently a vision of the world that is good for one part of the population, but should go through verification-elections- during which, on the basis of a political project, the population would give  its representatives  the responsibility to govern it. With possibility for this population to control, in a few years, what has been done.

What has happened in Europe is the following thing: a group of technocrats, nominated by different national governments, outside any democratic control, takes political decisions inspired by a precise model even if they are  presented as objective decisions and not ideological ones.

In some way, we are confronted to some kind of technocracy which expresses itself by a soft dictatorship strongly conditioned by private and transnational economic powers. To all this, we have to add the European left wing which, blinded by the possibility of extension with infinite rights never seen before, has lost its senses of realities and so transformed its utopia to be the centre of the political action into the pretention of creating an immediately practical program, without considering concrete situations, all sensibilities and in short forgetting that politics is the art of the possible. Thus it has lost its roots and has closed itself into the lounges, leaving the public space to xenophobic, nationalist and authoritarian right wings.

How can the Rencontres fight against all this? What kind of future can they have in such a context? How can they face the economic crisis that has been lasting now for more than 10 years and deprive the Culture of its resources?

There are moments in history when we have to accept to be a vestige. That has been said by authorised persons. Today, theatre is no more the society centre. It is no more the place where a community gives somebody  the charge of talking about its myths, stories, problems. Today, theatre is marginalized by the mainstream of the dominant culture.

Other opportunities of engagement attract the public more, this one being  not enough educated on the theatrical language. If Paolo Grassi, the biggest cultural manager Italy has known, cofounder along with Giorgio Strehler of the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, could say:” Theatre has to be as necessary as bread”,  today it’s not the case anymore. The theatre people have their part of responsibility, often closing themselves inside their ivory tower, pretending that any of their vague theatrical attempts was an astonishing masterpiece that everyone had to see, or insisting on  their own need of expressing themselves , and at last, on  the level of establishment, repeating for years the same dead practices without paying any attention to the potential public: A theatre of “theatricals” for  “theatricals” of the same circle.

Even the transformations of the Rencontres during the last few years can be evaluated in the light of the following considerations: we have attended to a renewal of artists as well as  shows, and we have gone from, if I can say it like that, from the Rencontres organised by Fernand Garnier to the Rencontres led by  Romano Garnier. I’m not talking about quality, in both cases we have seen shows being very beautiful, beautiful, bad, disastrous. I’m talking about what I’ve seen happening and what seems to me illustrating the entire society.

Some political shows, strongly engaged- as  would have been said formerly, which  questioned society or took position about History, some shows that asked existential questions with kantorian and grotowskian connotations, have left the place to shows questioning  themselves about the transformation of  society, about everybody’s enclosure on  oneself, or about those who try to run away or escape,  looking  for  some sort of consolation in front of the confusion of the present  or the gloomy future.

The “Greecity”-our common home land- and the classics themselves which constitute the common patrimony of  Europeans, have little by little disappeared from the stages of the Rencontres and been replaced by  new sensibilities and ways of expressions that seem to need a little more time to mature their codes and their poetics.

The hand over between  fathers and sons is in  nature itself and even today, when a new rupture seems at work  between generations, it could be an added value. From all this, maybe we could establish some hypotheses  concerning our work, on our different working places as well as for the Rencontres.

Being a vestige means to preserve a knowledge, a savoir-faire which at the time of the eternal  present  of internet risks getting  lost. It means that we have to put in place a strategy to transmit the  older masters’knowledge  to the younger ones. These knowledge transmissions, no Wikipedia encyclopaedia will be able to assure them.   It involves giving a memory to the future and a future to the memory.

That is, in my opinion, where can be the part of  tomorrow ‘s Rencontres.   We have always said that the Rencontres are a real European school of theatre and indeed, 10 days of workshops, seminars, shows and debates, bilateral exchanges between the many groups of the participants,  workshops  led by different European teachers in different associations or participant companies (Studio Novecento itself has welcomed: Martin Danziger, Franck Radüg, Sergei Timofeev, Anna Dziedzic, Anna Caubet Gual, Fernand Garnier...) are the demonstration of the pedagogical vocation of the Rencontres.

Moreover we must not forget that school has always been one of the places to go beyond social, economical and cultural differences.  It is also a privileged place for changes and consequently for social transformation. In that way, the school that the Rencontres offer, has not only been  a school for theatre but also a school of European citizenship.

It is on these paths that the future of the Rencontres should be. Of course shows are important but the  education space has always been more essential. So essential that we should, I think, spread it out to another level.

The new generations of artistic directors and dramaturges are, quite rightly, looking for their place, by experimenting, making mistakes, or stupidities and by presenting as discoveries or novelties, things  which have already been seen. They sometimes look as if they had invented theatre.

It is clear that, in all this, there is the strong influence of internet and of the eternal present, without past or future, as  I mentioned it above, but there is an authentic necessity in it, too.  What more can we do after the extraordinary history of 20th century theatre, after all these researches, discoveries and conquests? The risk is that an excess of knowledge may exercise a sort of censorship and obstruct the energy of creation. In the same time, how farther would these new artists  go if they could avoid the mistakes already made and the competitions already  lost!

Here is the question of a renewed transmission of knowledge. A question on masters and students ‘ methodological level as well as psychological one. I shall limit my intervention here by saying that it would be necessary to organize a School of Masters in which the older Masters of the Rencontres would put their knowledge, their skills and even their story at the disposal of the younger ones, so that their practical knowledge might become the patrimony of the new generations that will transform and renew it according to their sensibility and poetic.

On one hand, we have to avoid the knowledge of Masters to be lost and the  young people  to  refuse it a priori, and on the other hand we have to avoid  the Masters to refuse to share their knowledge out of envy and jealousy based on seeing the young ones’energy.

All this has already happened at a time looking  a lot like ours and whose  following consequence has been  the extraordinary blossoming of Renaissance.

Documents

Intervention in french : Click on this link to open this document.

Intervention in english : Click on this link to open this document.