Wednesday 25 March 2009

Day 8 - (20/03/09) - Final Day in Sweden



My final day in Sweden, and I have a few hours to myself.  Stockholm is made up of five islands (each dissected by a currently very icy river), and I decide to visit the Museum of Modern Art, based on the smallest of these, Skeppsholmen.  There's an amazing visiting photography exhibition, by a photographer called Andreas Gursky, whose forte is playing with scale.  This results in beautiful, painterly photos, which on closer inspection reveal tiny figures skiing, or picnicking.  The permanent exhibition is also very impressive, with works by Picasso, Braque, Brancusi and Duchamp among others.  It's an embarrassment of riches, and I'm glad to have been able to fit it into my busy trip.

I meet up with Gustav in town once again, for coffee, cake, and a farewell.  We talk about South Park, rural Swedish dialects, and how Swedes manage to stay so slim, considering the delicious cakes and pastries available in every cafe.

I set off for the airport, and the long journey home.

The week has been a whirlwind introduction to the world of Swedish theatre.  I've been impressed by the dedication to the arts, and the way cultural pursuits are completely integrated into everyones' lives.  I return full of inspiration and a renewed energy for my own work.  I've met some truly lovely, funny, and interesting people, who I hope to meet again. Maybe in the UK this time so I can return the favour?

Day 7 - (19/03/09) - Stockholm



Rani Kasapi, the head of the International Department at Riksteatern, kindly picks me up from my apartment and gives me a lift to Riksteatern HQ.  Riksteatern are based in large premises in the suburb of Hallunder, about half an hour away from Stockholm's city centre.  Riksteatern was  formed in 1933, with a remit to bring high-quality theatre to everyone in Sweden, reaching an audience of more than 1.2 million every year.  A network of producers around the country receive the Riksteatern programme every year, and choose which plays to buy for their local audience.  This network means that Riksteatern have a wealth of local knowledge to rely on. 
  
Rani talks about how much the institution has changed over the past few years - with an increasingly diverse focus, and the employment of younger producers with an interest in areas such as the grime scene, street dance, and other urban forms.  There's also an increasing attempt to program work for Sweden's migrant communities.  They're trying to get away from a departmental structure, so that people within the organisation work together in a more fluid, integrated way.  I'm really excited to find flyers for groups I've worked with in Birmingham pinned to the notice board in Rani's office!  It seems she also has a relationship with Ulfah Arts, a muslim womens' arts group who were involved in a project I worked on with the Rep, Kali Theatre Company, and Black Country Touring, called A Thin Red Line.  She's also in touch with Apples and Snakes, an organisation of performance poets who I worked with as part of These Four Streets, for the Rep.  I feel very grown up and international because of this.

I then meet with Lisa Hugoson, the head of the youth and childrens' theatre department. Theatre for young people is incredibly innovative and ground-breaking in Sweden, and this is reflected in Riksteatern's programming.  Lisa talks about the diverse range of young people they have to consider.  In Stockholm, they may be preoccupied with universal concerns, such as family, friends, boyfriends and girlfriends, while in more rural parts of Sweden, a more pressing concern may instead be whether they should continue to hunt wolves!

I have lunch at Riksteatern with Gustav, Lisa, and Anders Duus, the writer in residence who wrote 'Apberget' which I saw at the Angered theatre in Gothenburg.  It's great to be able to tell him how much I enjoyed the piece.  Anders talks about how difficult it is to establish yourself as a playwright in Sweden.  The traditional theatres focus on established works and writers (often dead ones)!  Because of this, youth and childrens' theatre is one of the few spaces for new writers to develop work and make a mark for themselves - a route that has served him well.  

Next, I have a meeting, back in town, with Rebecka Svensen and Louise Thuren of Kultur Radet, the Swedish Arts Council.  I'm quite nervous about meeting such official bigwigs, but they put me at ease straight away.  I warm up with a hot chocolate and learn about the funding structures for arts and performance in Sweden.  Despite the belief that everyone should have access to a diverse and high-quality cultural life, competition for funding is still fierce, and the economic downturn is even hitting this affluent country.  It seems the state theatres have a regular stream of income,  but the independent and fringe groups have to apply on a yearly, or three-yearly basis, and their future is never secure (similar to the UK).  After a brief discussion about a spooky but compelling sculpture in the foyer, made of a model completely covered in human hair (it looks a little like Cousin It from the Adams Family - but less friendly, somehow.  Hang on, did it just move?)  I set off to meet Gustav for more theatrical entertainment.

We head off for the state theatre in Stockholm, near Central Station.  Monsterkabinettet (Monster Cabinet) is written by Malin Axelsson, who also spent time as a writer in residence at Riksteatern.  It's an atmospheric, gothic piece, about a young woman who falls into the role of assistant for a strange writer.  He lives alone in a mansion surrounded by portraits of his mother (who come to life, of course).  The piece is about female stereotypes, and how a writer has to smash them before she can express herself truthfully, and includes Medusa, Kirke, Salome, Lorena Bobbitt, Britney Spears, and Lynndie England, all living in the basement.  It's quite bonkers, but also incredibly ambitious and engaging, and I enjoy the mounting hysteria and the near-hamminess of some of the performances.  I certainly can't imagine such insanity being produced on any large British stage.  

Afterwards, we take the underground out to a suburb where Malin is working on her next piece - with young, local people, in a community centre.  Malin wonders whether this could be seen as 'community theatre', but as she's working with local people, in their space, me and Gustav decide it probably is.  It's very much still in development - the use of Twitter for the text has been experimented with, and ultimately abandoned.  One of the young people is a martial arts expert, so they're utilising this in some way.    

Gustav and I return to Stockholm, and Skanstull, the area I'm staying in.  We manage to fit in a couple of beers, and discussion turns to political theatre in the UK and Sweden, and the use of satire on stage.  It seems expectations of our politicians in the UK and Sweden are very different, with our expectations being considerably lower.  With good reason, many would argue.  In Sweden, the career of one politician was scuppered when it was found she bought a bar of chocolate on her expense account.  In Britain it's more a case of luxury second homes...

Day 6 - (18/03/09) - arrival in Stockholm



The train from Gothenburg runs through the Swedish wilderness.  I get an insight into how central farming and rural life is to Sweden.  The landscape's flat and icy, with tall elegant woodland.  I'm excited to see a deer, grazing calmly, and also a bushy-tailed fox, sneakily stealing up to a farm.  

I meet Gustav Tegby, from Riksteatern, my host in Stockholm, at a branch of 'Wayne's Coffee'. This is a successful Swedish Starbucks-style chain, and the main reason why the U.S giant has failed to gain a foothold here - hurrah!  

We rush off to catch a play in the nearby town of Uppsala.  Along with Lund, this is the other key university town of Sweden - comparable to Oxford or Cambridge.  'Knutby' is about an infamous recent case in Sweden where the priest of a 'free church' (a term coined from when certain churches received taxes from the state, and other 'free' ones didn't) brainwashed his mistress into believing she was receiving texts from God, ordering her to murder his wife.  The mistress eventually shot his wife dead.  
It's a massive production, with a full choir and a cast of ten.  A big attention-grabbing opening mixes video footage of the crime scene with a full gospel rendition of Jesus Washed my Sins Away.  The first half is an extensive introduction to the world of the church and its personalities, leading to the priest entering before the intermission (perhaps a little too late, considering the play is supposed to reveal the background behind the murder).
The second half combines video footage, monologues, and scenes showing the shifting power relations between the priest, his mistress, and his wife.  I feel that this power relationship wasn't explored as deeply as I'd like, and ask Gustav whether I'm missing the complexity, as a non-Swedish speaker?  He doesn't seem to think so.

Back to my apartment to rest up for a big day of meetings and theatre tomorrow.

Tuesday 24 March 2009

Day 5 - (17/03/09) - Gothenburg




With the sun shining, my voice on the mend, and my digestive system returning to normal, Anna jokes that the world is a Truman Show directly connected to my health.  

We get the boat across the river to Backa Theatre.  Anna Vnuk, who found fame in Sweden with 'Anna Vnuk Stages Cats', a show that became more about her painful divorce than the Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical, has choreographed a new play for children called 'Alla Ar Skadade', loosely translated to 'Everybody Hurts' in English.

All my prejudices against dance theatre are blown away.  The use of actors rather than dancers (except for one professional dancer responsible for a particularly frenetic routine) results in deeply moving and poignant vignettes between characters.  The unspoken love an overweight porter holds for the chief doctor, which he can only express through dance, is particularly poignant.  
The young, schools audience are impressively quiet - they're really engaged in the story and relationships.  

The Backa experience is immersive - the whole space, right from the foyer onwards, has been transformed into a hospital, and all of the staff are kitted out in scrubs and uniforms.  The attention to detail is incredible.

We're given a tour by Lasse Waringer, one of the longest-standing members of the company, who played the jester in Everybody Hurts.  This is a new, bright, well-equipped space.  The larger stage is being prepared for an ambitious project, made up of three versions of 'Crime and Punishment' for different age groups, from young kids to teenagers.  The trilogy was a huge success when it was first staged, and is now returning for a second run.

Afterwards, we have lunch with Mattias Andersson, the artistic director of Backa.  He's also a successful playwright whose plays have  been performed all over Sweden, and also internationally.  He's adapted Crime and Punishment for the older, teenage audience, for instance.  Mattias is very young for an artistic director, and is clearly finding Backa the ideal space for ambitious and innovative work.

Afterwards, Anna takes me around the hip Haga area of Gothenburg.  In 1968 this was a site for socialist resistance and demonstration, but it's now studenty, bohemian, and very expensive, apparently.  It feels a bit like the Lanes in Brighton.  We talk about the differences between Swedish and British theatre - the status of writers, the writer's relationship with directors, and attitudes towards the text.  Then, time for a theatrical experience of a different kind.  Anna has an appointment to view a flat that she and her boyfriend are thinking about buying, and I accompany her.  'Home staging' is a big deal in Sweden, with companies devoted to transforming any flat or house into a show home - personal items go into storage and idyllic settings are created, complete with plates of plastic fruit and muffins, to suggest the lifestyle you could enjoy should you be lucky enough to live here.  

In the evening, we visit the State Theatre to see Hunger, devised by a company called Mindgroup.  This is the only play aimed at adults that I see in Gothenburg, and it's my least favourite.  It's post-modern and self-reflexive, with actors breaking in and out of character to describe Gothenburg's politically active history, and there's also a bit of a lecture about how the kids just don't protest like they used to.  I couldn't help feeling a little patronised and told off by this easy position, but it had a couple of laughs, e.g. when one actor describes her real-life experience of growing up in a commune with her hippy parents in the 70s.  The same actor's transformation into an empty-eyed 'angel of debt' when her fictional character has maxed out one too many credit cards is also wonderfully done.

In the evening, there's time to relax over a couple of beers with Anna and Hasse.  I've been lucky to have such welcoming, generous and fun hosts - thanks!


Day 4 - (16/03/09) - Gothenburg



My lovely, generous, and welcoming hosts, Hasse Carlsson of Folkteatern, and Anna Berg, of Regionteater Vast, pick me up from my hotel just before lunch.  It's just as well, as I'm still shaky and am now losing my voice.  They're very understanding.  

We get the tram out to Angered, to visit a theatre built in the relatively new suburb as an ideological act.  The idea is to bring theatre to the people, rather than expecting them to travel to the city centre to enjoy it.  The theatre is now hugely successful, and also houses a drama college,  which is oversubscribed every year.  It's friendly and welcoming - everything you'd want from a local arts space.

We watch 'Apberget', translated as 'Monkey Mountain' in English.  This is a lovely Swedish phrase used to describe the place where disaffected teenagers congregate when skiving from school.  Behind the bikesheds if you like, with perhaps less overtly sexual connotations.  The play's been really successful - this is its second run, and the the house is packed.  Anna kindly offers a brief summary of each scene in English, but the themes of adolescent vulnerability, social awkwardness, and the search for your own identity, smash the language barrier.  It's funny and moving - I  thoroughly enjoy it.

Afterwards we meet Ulrich Hillebrandt, the artistic director at Angered.  He talks about his desire for the theatre to go further than just reflecting its diverse and multicultural surroundings - he wants to move towards a truly international outlook.

Afterwards, Anna takes me to Salluhallen for lunch - a typical Swedish food market, with loads of well priced and tasty food stalls.  Despite my still delicate constitution, I'm able to eat some soup, before returning to my hotel and collapsing.

Monday 23 March 2009

Day 3 - (15.03/09) - Reflections on Workshops and departure for Gothenburg

We met together for one last time, to review and reflect on the day of workshops. 

A few interesting points came up:

The question of aesthetics and realism within community theatre was raised.  Would it be possible to create non-realistic plays within community theatre?
Jan from Stut saw their role as serving the people they worked with as artists, while having to understand that they're not trained as such.  

It was pointed out that community theatre can feel like a success before it's even been performed - because of the success of collaboration, dialogue, and what has been revealed in the process.  Because of this, judgements on the success of the finished piece are insufficient.   The door has to be open from day one - with rehearsals open to visitors, journalists, etc...

However, for Kunq and Qaos, engagement with critics wasn't an issue.  The only important thing was for participants to be inside this closed, safe space.

It was acknowledged that community theatre is often dismissed because of its collaborative nature - it's not fully 'authored' in the conventional sense.  So the fear of community theatre is a fear of losing property.  But Erik Ehn believed work could be both divided and shared, or enjoyed collectively but ultimately owned by the author.  He gave a lovely analogy of how you can successfully share a pie, but if you take it for a walk it won't be as appetising.  Equally, you can take a dog for a walk, but if you cut it up to share amongst your friends, you'll just have a dead dog.  Definitely the analogy of the conference.

Then tea, cake, and goodbyes.  I got into Gothenburg after dark, and grabbed something to eat at a Mongolian restaurant beneath the hotel.  I was then struck down with painful and seemingly relentless food poisoning.  Of course, I cursed the restaurant with each retch, but later I learned that I wasn't the only delegate to suffer.  Lund was truly wonderful, but it seemed to be repeating on me.  

Monday 16 March 2009

Day 2 (14/03/09) - Workshops and Party in Lund

Three workshops today, with delegates rotated across them over the course of the day.  I'm in a group with the other non-Swedish speakers and our translator Therese, among others, and our first workshop is with Kunq and Qaos, two Stockholm-based queer theatre companies.  
Kunq's ethos is one of 'embracing your outsiderness'.  They provide a space for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender youth where it's okay to be different.  They spoke about how you gain something when you work separately, as you're not always defining yourself in relation to something else (i.e hetero dominance).  Qaos was set up by a former member of Kunq for slightly older teenagers.

Next, Stut, a community based theatre company from a working class area of Utrecht, Holland.  A 'stut' is a device that supports coal mine shafts and stops the roof from caving in on people below.  The idea behind Stut the theatre company is to ease the pressure on the lives of working class Utrechtians by providing a release through participation in theatre.  Stut have been going for an impressive 28 years, and have developed an effective and successful methodology.  They hold a series of indepth workshops and discussions with local residents, on the theme of the proposed play, and listen to the 'experiences rather than the opinions' of the participants.  Stut have learnt that it's more effective to begin with a personal conversation, before gradually moving onto specific themes and issues that the play may centre on.  They then ask members of the group whether they'd be interested in performing in a play, and these people are asked to attend workshops, where scenes are improvised, showing the dilemmas and experiences they face in their lives.  These provide open and honest insights.  Joss Bours, the resident playwright at Stut, makes a note of behaviour patterns, mannerisms, ways of talking, and attitudes, to enable him to write parts that will use the natural presence of each of the non-actors, rather than expecting them to inhabit a different character.
Stut's primary audience is made up of the local community with whom they work, but they also play in more traditional theatre institutions.  Jan Rijnierse, the General Manager of Stut, spoke of the markedly difference audience reactions - the difference between a direct and immediate response from the local community, and a more indirect, polite one from the more  traditional theatre-going crowd.

Finally, House of Dreams, who held the most active, participatory workshop.  Lotta Lundgren and Liza Fry led the session with the warmth and enthusiasm of particularly likeable childrens' TV presenters.  We were asked to form groups and become a whisk, a vacuum cleaner, a boat, and finally the physical representation of togetherness.  This was a theatre conference after all - I'd just had a lucky escape so far.  House of Dreams work primarily with young people in the disadvantaged area of Rosengard, in the Southern Swedish city of Malmo (near Lund).  They showed us some slides of their large, ambitious productions, and talked a bit of how they'd slowly won the trust of the teenagers they worked with.  

Later, we heard from Erik Ehn, a dramatist and decan visiting from Cal Art, L.A, who started the Center for the Study of Genocide and Culture over there.  He talked about the changing principles of his school: 
- a desire to find students who would be 'thoughtful anarchists', who understood that art doesn't exist in a vacuum, and that work is more valuable the less personal and the more common it is.
- a move towards a nuanced and complex view of the world that must be viewed from all angles (rather than THE great novel or THE great play).
- that work is most experimental when it uses metaphor - when more than one thing is happening at once.  A function of art today is to keep things strange.  We can offer stillness and silence in response to the rapidity and pace of the world.
- and finally, that we have 'spiritualise the internet'.  i.e find a way to internalise the networks of the web and find a stillness within those relationships.

He saw the artist's role as running alongside that of the social worker or health worker (except we have unintentional goals), and saw the relationship between art and education as providing a safe space for impossible language - e.g. with personal experiences of genocide.

We also heard from Jonatan Stanczak from the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, and Ylva Gislen, the Head of Education at the prestigious Dramatic Institute, Stockholm.

In the evening, we congregated at a grand hall, hired from one of the local universities for the evening.  Apparently the place was more used to black tie balls and old boys network gatherings than theatre types watching avant garde dance.  A lavish spread had been put on for us, and it was a chance to wind down and do more 'networking' (or engaging in mindless banter).  A DJ started playing after the avant garde dance (brought to us by the Botkyrka community theatre, and choreographed by Paloma Madrid) had wound down.  However, the fact that the dancefloor was fully lit, while the surrounding areas were cloaked in darkness meant that I didn't venture out to join the more gregarious types busting some moves.  I mean, people might have been looking...

Sunday 15 March 2009

Day One - (13/03/09) - Arrival in Lund

Arrived in the charming little university town of Lund, Sweden, tired and full of  trepidation.  I'd been up since five (yes, in the morning), and had already been in Denmark (where I caught the train to Lund, a fifty minute journey away, avoiding the temptation to wander off course and begin a hunt for my hero, Lars von Trier).  

I was here for a conference about Theatre and Democracy, the only representative from the U.K, with a slightly convoluted story as to how I ended up here.  I'd been one of the writers of 'White Open Spaces', a play made up of seven monologues about the 'silent apartheid' of the British countryside, for Pentabus Theatre, and the play had played in Riksteartern's (the National Touring Theatre of Sweden) international theatre festival the year after it was produced in the U.K.  Pentabus, and the Birmingham organisation Script, had already sent a handful of writers over to Sweden to help continue this loose relationship, and I was the latest in that lucky line.

On arrival at the conference venue, I was introduced to Therese, our lovely and endlessly helpful translator, and also other non-Swedish speakers who would also be relying on her.  The conference delegates were a mixture of writers, trainers, producers, actors and other theatre professionals.  Primarily Swedish, there were also people visiting from Denmark, the U.S, Australia and Holland.

We began with a key note address by the academic Nikos Papastergiadis, a professor of Culture and Communication from the University of Melbourne, about the 'Concept of Democracy after the War Against Terror'.  He talked about a new 'ambient' nature to our culture - we're bombarded by information from many different sources and many different countries, resulting in a general impression of events, rather that a precise, complex understanding.  Because of this, our experience of fear, specifically in relation to the War on Terror, is also 'ambient', and he described six features of this type of fear:

- The enemy has no home and no specific territory to fight for.
- The enemy has no name or face.  No single profile fits all the enemies.
- Chaos can spread from tiny, innocuous things - the wearing of rucksacks or heavy coats on public transport, the arrival of envelopes of white powder.
- The war is no longer about material things, but instead is a struggle for our belief systems - the media itself.
- Osama Bin Laden is a remote, abstract leader, who only acts in an imaginary sense.
- The structures of war have become polycentric.

Because of this, the main terrain being fought over is the public imagination, and this is where Nikos saw the role of the artist or dramatist coming in.

Afterwards, there was a lovely spread put on for us at a local restaurant, and I put my 'networking' skills into practice.  I spoke to members of Kunq and Qaos, two Stockholm-based queer theatre companies, who would be giving one of the workshops the following day.  They were friendly and charming, and promised their workshop would demand no performance skills from an anxious writer like myself.  What a relief.