Eleventh TESZT, the Euroregional Theatre Festival in Timisoara, has brought various verbal and nonverbal performances to the Csiky Gergely Hungarian State Theatre in the Timisoara city-centre. The theatre building, shared by the German State Theatre and the Hungarian State Theatre, is itself used for hosting performances in different languages. Yet when speaking of duality of the language, at TESZT 2018 there was a performance that draws analogies to the festival building - it is performed both in Bulgarian and English (and, at TESZT it was translated to Hungarian and Romanian). The reason why the performance was in two languages had nothing to do with the building, and is, in fact, very simple - the performers Alister Lownie and Katherina Radeva come from Scotland and Bulgaria and together they form Two Destination Language .As they write: "Alister’s Scottish heritage and Katherina’s Bulgarian background led to this interest in how cultures interact, develop and are defined" and, indeed, what they had presented at 11th TESZT was a multicultural not only in language, but also in tradition. In their newest performance Near Gone, Katherina is trying to bring across an almost unspeakable personal story. Her help in this quest will be Alister, who translates her words. Yet every time Katherina reaches a certain point in the story, she will break down in a wild dance with white flowers. And there will be gypsy music. And in the end, luckily, nobody will die. But Near Gone is a story on someone who was nearly gone. We spoke to Alister and Katherina about Near Gone:
IC: Having in mind what this story is about, I believe the process of creating this performance was exceptional. What tools of applied theatre have you used to research your own terrifying experience?
TDL: The events which lead to an interest in a subject aren’t necessarily the best way to present something theatrically. That is why we don’t treat ourselves as participants in a participatory theatre project, and for Near Gone we didn’t really work with the story for a long time. We concentrated on how people deal with trauma, looked at a variety of practices around death in different cultures with a researcher in that field, and developed ideas which we realised were trivialising the experience of trauma and death.That realisation helped us refocus on the personal experience which had led us to be working on the piece. Once it was clear that playing on our relationship in that story was a key which unlocked many aspects of how an intense experience can be shared but experienced in very different ways by each of the people involved, the process of making the theatrical work was a straightforward one of editing out the extraneous.
IC: How have your views on loss and potential loss changed during the process, bearing in mind that this was story of how you have nearly lost someone close to both of you?
TDL:We were born in different places and times (Kat is younger), but death was a surprise when it appeared in both our lives. The piece was made with an understanding that there was something new in people’s willingness to defy and resist loss. Something else, too: loss implies value. How long it takes for an ambulance to arrive, or how advanced the care a hospital patient receives, is related to the ability of the individual and their culture to pay for those things - and their desire to do so.
Questions of inequality, and the economic values placed on different lives are shadows in the background of this work.
IC: The humour in Near Gone is mostly based on glitches in Alister's translation from Bulgarian to English. How much do you think is lost (or gained) in translation in theatre?
TDL: The spoken word is only one of the kinds of language in theatre, and particularly in this show. We’re very interested in how theatre communicates with its audience, and so playing with verbal language was a natural way of illustrating the successes and failures of any translation, but the other ways an audience reads and understands are just as important.For audiences that don’t understand Bulgarian, we’re erecting a barrier which forces them to try to find other ways to understand. They translate for themselves before they hear the words. At TESZT, it felt that the subtitles were being used as a kind of check for people: they understood a certain amount from Kat, something more from Alister and then the projected translation confirmed one part of this: even more than Alister’s translation, it lacks emotional indication.
IC: How has humour worked for you as a defence mechanism in Near Gone?
TDL: Humour is important in dealing with any kind of stress: it offers a release. But there’s a danger, too: if someone perceives that you aren’t taking something seriously enough, the attempted humour can exacerbate rather than relieve that stress.
In living the events told in Near Gone, there was no humour. There was little communication. Sometimes, silence and time are needed for some healing to take place.
IC: Whenever the gypsy music starts, Katherina takes white flowers into a wild dance that destroys them. What is the symbolism of flowers for you?
TDL: Carnations are the flower beloved by Kat’s grandmother and used for her burial. More widely, in various countries, they are a flower symbolising death (often, audiences from Germanic cultures refuse to accept them after the show, because they wouldn’t bring them in to their homes for this reason).Each performance of the show requires 400 fresh flowers. They have been sown, nurtured, picked, packed, transported, cut and prepared for that one performance. Objects of fragile beauty, they get broken and trampled, but they are also cared for. There is nowhere for them to go after the show but into the hands of the audience: they go out into the world for a few more days, brightening a home or an office until they wilt and are gone. And then? Some people throw them out. Some keep them as reminder of the performance, as a sign of that hour spent together in the theatre, as memento mori.
IC: You state there are exactly 400 flowers on stage. Why 400?
TDL: There are 400 of them for practical reasons: to give us 13 bunches on each side of the stage of the size we need to dance with. At TESZT, the proportion of different types was a little awry, due to difficulties obtaining one type, but the bunches are made up to break slowly in the dances. 13 is a number related to Judas, bad faith and bad luck. In numerology, it relates to upheaval and worry. It used to be that there were professional diners who would attend parties in case a table might have 13 people seated at it, and they would quickly ensure a fourteenth: similarly, each of us brings one more bunch of flowers onto the stage, transforming the ill omen.
IC: How do you feel about Balkan gypsy music, Alister, since your origins are not from anywhere close to the Balkans?
A: I love it! The music has energy and darkness, but it also carries a history. It evokes something of place, playing its part in making the story vivid for audiences. We’re creating a sense of the world in which this British man is not at home, and the music is a part of that as much as the emotional facility or the family connections.
IC: How different are the reactions of the audience depending on the location you are performing (thinking of different cultural background)?
TDL:That’s difficult to answer in anything but the most general terms, but there’s certainly something about permission to cry which matters. People often take away something which they find has reflected themselves. In Tel Aviv, people spoke to us of family members serving as soldiers. In New York, we heard about their impatience with daily urban frustrations like traffic. People everywhere have shared stories of family members they’ve lost or come close to losing. It’s the similarities which are perhaps most striking. There are always people in need of a long, silent, hug.