The honour to represent Estonian theatre for the first time in Bitef’s history has been put into the hands of Talin based TheatreNo99. Theatre’s 9 member ensemble, led by artistic duo Ene-Liis Semper and Tiit Ojasoo, has performed very “Bitef like” NO43: Filth in the festival’s main competition program. Filth is 43 productions away from the planed death of the TheatreNO99, as the theatre was designed to produce only 99 performances in its career, counting backwards, towards zero, or how the artistic duo sees that – towards oblivion. Whether oblivion is what comes after zero is yet to be seen. However, we discuss what we saw at 52nd Bitef with Ene-Liis Semper:
Speaking of a performance that features actors stuck in 20 centimetre deep mud, it is inevitable to ask: What does mud mean for you as an author?
Mud brings us to the level where we share pain and beauty of human existence. It is a substance we are unable to avoid – when you step in it, it becomes your reality and you have to deal with it. We use mud, dirt and water as an impulse to describe people of today. Our play is not social critique and it does not pretend to criticise anything social in particular. It deals more with the people in close contact, with the relationships between people in a limited space. The shared space around us is getting smaller and tighter each day – I ask myself, how do people survive in this space, where they are enforced to get closer without exploding?
What describes people today, living on the existential edge, so to say?
People are not that different amongst themselves, not only today, they, or we, have never been that much different. I consider to people to be rather similar. Sometimes we are similar on a very primitive level, meaning that the basic primitive instincts are always the same, while in the same time, we are all looking for a higher level of that primitive existence – that brings us together. We all share everyday life, and there is both pain and beauty in sharing which is a contradiction. According to that, our play is rather existential than socially criticising, even though the viewer is free to see whatever he prefers.
What is the relationship between verbal and nonverbal in your work and how does that relationship resonate in the mud?
There is not much dialogue, so I wouldn’t name our play a real drama, it is also not dance. I would better call it a contemporary drama, because what our actors do is not dance, its communication, its reacting. For me the unspoken communication is stronger, because the spoken word might be used to hide something. Communication by gesture, look or touch brings much more real information. Because the actors are in mud, they can always react to each other.
Does this necessity to react in the presence of mud mean you are actually using mud as a medium for communication?
No, not directly. It is a reality of shared life, rather than the mean of communication. Communication is happening directly between two persons. In verbal theatre actors are waiting for their line, but if we take the text away from them, they have to react in movements to what is happening around them. That reaction is not possible to avoid and I like to call it the “really honest truth”, because this is also what happens in real life. But in real life we are already used to hiding it. We wanted to bring this reaction out to the stage, to exaggerate it.
Not only the actors are stuck in the mud, they are also surrounded by the glass wall. Could this space be seen as a fighting ring?
For us this wall has different meaning – it gives our play a notion of museum. In the museum there are objects that are already dead, or old and fragile, protected by the glass. Our glass wall works in the same way, as a metaphor of the human kind – people are fighting for life, for love, for leadership, but the glass wall puts them in the category of “already dead”. That’s the question – is it really possible to survive or is it museum that awaits us?
The glass wall also generates feeling of captivity. Do you see the world today as a captive space?
No, the space in our play should be taken on a more abstract level, without direct connections to the real world. It is just a space with a lot of windows and no doors. Normal space, but with no doors. Abstract space, neutral, like millions of other possible spaces. It is a built up space, like one people would like to have.