A dialogue between dramatists Sinna Virtanen (FI) and Isabel Cruz Liljegren (SWE)
ISABEL
Sinna, we need to talk about the state of new drama. Does new drama have to die in order to be resurrected?
SINNA
New drama has already died, it is already a corpse. Plays are zombies, they are living dead, undead, ghosts that exist simultaneously in many times and spaces. And this is so that the performances associated with them can be alive… Or is it perhaps the other way round? What is actually more alive, the performance or the play? What kills what, or which of these keeps the other alive?
ISABEL
At best, the performance brings the text to life and then they become inseparable because the text amounts to the performance itself. But for me, the dramatic text is not only the way but also the goal. I’d like to have a lot of books on my bookshelf full of just lines, making the world around the words exist or not exist depending on what the dialogue evokes in each individual mind. But those books are not undead, they non-exist. The most alive people in this business are the directors and they don’t understand new texts so when they, with the knife at their throat most of the time, are forced to make new drama they have to come up with a lot of their own ideas in parallel with the text so that they feel all their living life pulsating in their veins. And so there are two parallel, ongoing lives. Which are you more interested in? What you see or what you hear?
SINNA
What interests me most is what is in the space between what is seen and heard, what is between the senses, between the words and at the borders of dusk. Drama can open up dimensions in our universe that no other art form can. It is capable of something that neither a dramatisation of a novel nor a performance concept script can do. The best plays make us uncomfortable, they are complicated and difficult and therefore so interesting and urgent. And all too often, as you say, the challenge is not received or accepted. You pull out the cheap tricks or the kid gloves… It makes me so sad when I think of some random artistic team that has reluctantly taken on a “difficult” (brilliant) play and after a first glance complains that the text is just…. Too hard to do… There’s no situation… What can you play here… There’s nothing to act… I don’t understand the characters… And usually each member of the team is paid more to work on the piece for a few weeks than the dramatist is paid for years of work. How can you get rid of these issues or turn them into something interesting?
ISABEL
This is where the director needs to step forward and dare to rest in the challenge. Dare to say no, there is no situation YET. It is difficult to understand the characters RIGHT NOW. But we’ll try. We’ll TRY TO UNDERSTAND. You work so differently with classics and with new texts. We try to understand Strindberg, Chekhov, and Ibsen and all of them. Maybe even Norén. But most contemporary dramatists you give up on before you even start. It’s a shame. I think the only theatre that has a strong dramaturgical structure and where the story can touch us deeply, or overturn us, is that which is based on a script. Nor do I, as an audience member, have a need to understand everything. Sometimes it can be exciting to be left with questions, to think further. What is really important to UNDERSTAND about a performing arts work?
SINNA
I can be irritated as a spectator if I feel I don’t understand anything. And I’m not talking about anti-art comments like “I didn’t get it.” I’m talking about the feeling that my connection to the performance is broken, that I’m simply not following what’s happening on stage. This usually happens in action-driven spoken theatre performances with lots of characters, mix-ups and references. Something that takes place “in America” where the actors speak to each other in Swedish or Finnish with English names and argue loudly. The opposite of this, the experience of understanding a theatre piece, is something other than an everyday understanding. Understanding can mean that in some deep way I feel part of the world of the play and performance, and that it is significant that I am sitting in the audience. And this does not mean that the work has to be somehow participatory. Sitting in the dark for three hours can feel like an active and living participation in a performance. The experience of not understanding as a spectator can also be due to a bad, inflamed relationship between the play and the performance, that the performance tries to over-explain the world of the play in the wrong language. Then it becomes a kind of anti-symbiosis where both parts just suck the life force from, and simply kill, each other. In Finland, the publishing of plays has been almost completely stopped, so there is no chance to familiarise yourself with texts that have been mistreated when they were first published. Or with those that never come to light… I really wish there were more plays everywhere in the world. In different forms, on different stages and between covers, translated into a thousand different languages. I wish that drama could be present in new media and interdisciplinary entities. However, I do not think that art forms should be preserved for the sake of preservation – art forms should die and be reborn. Does new drama have to die in order to be resurrected?
ISABEL
Perhaps it has to be missed even more, perhaps forgotten, so that there will then be a performance that is great with a fantastic text that makes everyone think that THIS is how theatre should be. Imagine that it can be like THAT! We should do more of this, why haven’t we thought of it before?! And then everyone starts trying to develop drama as an art form and you ask yourself things like: what’s the difference between an invisible text and a text that shows itself and says something?
SINNA
Yes!!!! And you answer the question by writing more and more, and even more, just absolutely fantastic plays, one after another. And then, abracadabra, like a hundred years from now, we have a world where drama is no longer in any way marginalised. In this new world where drama has died and been resurrected, and new drama is the king of all art forms and we all either are or want to be dramatists and consume drama from morning to night in a thousand different ways, what will dramatists want to ask each other and themselves?
ISABEL
We will probably ask ourselves how we can represent more art forms through drama. And why only dramatic works are included in our cultural canon. Has it not gone too far? Shouldn’t some step down? Audiences are clamouring for new drama, but do they really know what they want? Should we give the audience what they want?
SINNA
I think the fact that the artists themselves are more conservative than the audience will never change. The assumption of what the audience wants is always an assumption, a reflection of the artists’ own fears. We do not dare to do something because “the audience does not want it” or do not dare to refrain from doing something because “the audience wants it”. How could we overcome our fears, how could we save the art form from ourselves, from our – the creators’ – cowardice, conservatism, pettiness, convention and fear of failure?
ISABEL
I’m not sure if it’s the artists who are cowards. I think the anxiety is a structural problem, that it is the administrative monster we have created as coordinator and enabler of our art form that is TERRIFIED. The monster is afraid that it knows too little about art, because it does not understand the creators of art. Nor does it understand that art should be about the repressed, the unfinished and the inexplicable in life. That this is the kind of art the audience wants and NEEDS. This is precisely what is found in new drama. That which is too embarrassing and obscure to be worked out by a collective. But what I’m talking about is barely visible right now on our theatre stages. Does new drama have to die in order to be resurrected?
SINNA
No, absolutely not. I believe that drama must be kept alive through the power of collectivism. I believe that through the collective courage of dramatists, and communist collegial friendship, by generously sharing ideas, aesthetics, practices and tools, we can keep drama alive and vital. Or is drama a single and solitary activity of individuals and therefore an outcast genre?
ISABEL
The dramatist is a lonely soul who wants to be part of something bigger, who wants to contribute, but from a distance. Do you recognise yourself in that description?
SINNA
I do. At the same time, I feel that drama and thus the dramatist is in the centre of the world, at the bottom, in its interior, a skinless and disembodied being between the performance and the audience. Do you recognise yourself in that description?
ISABEL
It sounds lost and rootless, a little sad, to exist in the spaces between. But also a bit like a god who is in everything, everywhere and nowhere. Is the dramatist God?
SINNA
No, not the dramatist, or I hope not, for anyone’s sake… But perhaps the play, the drama, is some kind of godlike creature, and if so, it must absolutely die.
ISABEL
And WHEN it dies, it will be punished – that, if anything, we’ve learnt from the ancient Greeks.
Sinna Virtanen is a Helsinki-based author, dramatist and performance creator. Isabel Cruz Liljegren is a dramatist, director and dramaturg who has written over 20 plays and music theatre works.