 No, I don't. I'm too tired. I'm very, very tired. Yes, yes. Oh, very long. Yes, yes. Yes, yes. I'm very tired. Yes, yes. Yes, yes. Yes, yes. Yes, yes. Yes, yes. Yes, yes. Yes, yes. Yes, yes. Yes, yes. Stop broccoli. Yes, yes. Yes, yes, yes. Ok, stop. No, stop. Stop! Stop! Pause! Alarm! You got an outline back there! How long your technique has been gonna take? It's academic, and it's theater, and it's the place where they both meet. Examples of women sharing what it means to share how you do that. There's no way you can ignore that. You know that anymore. You can come and see the talk about it. It starts out a little thing, you're right there. You have to be completely open. Theater for everybody. Yes, everybody. That's just what it should be done. And indeed, my understanding of life, relationships, death, has already changed. Survival of theater as an art form depends on that. So, welcome everybody here to the Martinis Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, and I'm thrilled you all came out tonight. It's most of the first really beautiful spring day we had today, and we have three days of readings ahead of us, and I think a lot of people say we have to go to the readings, but it's really wonderful for you to come out here. It's a very special moment for us. As you know, for over 10 years we have been part of the Penfold Voices Festival. It's the most significant literary festival in the United States. It was created by Paul Oster and Salman Rushdie under the time of George W. Bush, and his first, the second, and some people say regime, others say government, so which now looks in a different color than we all thought when they came and went to the White House, but they felt at the time already that there was a tunnel vision in America. Pen and Made Statistics, 95 to 96% of all books published are actually from American writers, British writers, the five, four, five percent, half of them are German, half of them are French because their government subsidies helped them to publish, and so from the rest of the world, of the 180 countries, you here have one or even two books the most. So, and they felt that what's great about America, we know, but maybe that's what is not so great. People don't even know enough about the vision of the whole world and that this is a contribution to an openness and we have been privileged to be part of it for so many years. And we always had writers from different regions of the world, from Africa, Australia, from the Europe, from Eastern Europe, or from the South America, and whatever. For this year, for the very first time, we thought to highlight one of the great theatres in the world, I think, it's the Gorky Theatre in Berlin. There were two of the artistic directors who were invited to come, but as you know, it's a very busy time at the moment. It's the Ballentia Atatreffen. There is also preparations for the summer festivals and Shermene, Langhoff, one of them, looked like two days ago. She could come and she didn't, but we have a fantastic team here with us tonight and we're going to learn about a theatre that is really very different from most of the theatres, especially if we know here in the U.S., but also from the Berlin of the German theatre or the European theatres. So I won't take a talk about too much. We're going to see the next three-day sixth place and Christopher here who is with us and Antje Ögel, who I would like to thank for helping us also to do this festival and putting it together. We selected those plays who are one of the most meaningful from those over 10 years, 12 years of the run of the Gorky. And so it's a very significant, I think, selection and voices from all around the world also from the Gorky, even so it is a theatre in Berlin and we will learn more about it. The Siegel Center ourselves, we do bridge academia and professional theatre, international and American theatre, as you saw in our little propaganda video and thank you for sitting through it. And so this is really at the heart of what we do to also expose minority voices from countries that are not known. So normally we don't have so many from Germany or France or the UK because we feel they are already very well presented, but this is a very special case with the Gorky and I welcome two of the playwrights. This is Nora, who is here, Sivan, one of the great actors of the Gorky, so I'm also a writer and the buyers are in here stunning what they all already achieved in their life and work. And so thank you all for coming, Dimitri, also, and Christopher for helping us to put this together. Now it takes a lot of coordination and things to light up. Michael up there to make this happen. So it's the very beginning, that's why I'm talking a little bit more than usual and tonight really we're going to focus on the Gorky Theatre. So we have a cell phone now, it's starting to take it out and we just have a look, that's off, I'll do the same. So tonight we won't have the readings, all the readings will come in the upcoming days but we're all going to learn a little bit more about the theatre and we thought to ask Christopher who is with us here who worked since many years with the Gorky to tell us a little bit, what is this theatre all about, what's the Gorky? Good evening. Yeah, what's the Gorky? I would describe the Gorky Theatre since its run in 2013 with the artistic direction of Shamin Langhoff and Jens Hilje as a hub in Berlin of theatre art for many different voices, many different people, minorities but also I wouldn't say only minorities, it's when the artistic direction started both artistic directors said we want to do a theatre that represents the city of Berlin and the city of Berlin is a very diverse, very open, very multilingual population of people and this very diverse population of the city of Berlin we want to show on the stage and to put the focus on themes of migration, of exile, of feminism, of queer identities so I would say that is the idea of the Gorky in some sentences. So tell a little bit about the idea of the ensembles of the artists, how are they selected, how are they composed? Well, what was very unique at the time in 2013 was that when the new artistic leadership started what was very, very significant is the very diverse ensemble so that we have an ensemble that is put together of people coming from very different backgrounds and identities and that was very unique at that time if you looked at the theatre seen in Germany at that time you usually had only white actors and actresses on stage and also what was very significant is that you would see in the acting schools you would see white actors and actresses and mostly who would identify as heterosexual in public so that was not the case with the ensemble it was and it is still very diverse different backgrounds, different... I don't want to say class maybe because we define it as... our emphasis is very much about the idea of intersectionality as Kimberly Crenshaw puts it is to show the intersections of race, class and gender and I think that this ensemble when we started was very unique in that sense and everyone in Germany actually took notice because it was so many very interesting and very fresh faces who made up this ensemble and what you can see now is a shift in the German theatre in a lot of cities in Berlin but also in other cities and also in Switzerland and in Austria you can see that there is a shift that is starting to happen Just to give a little context if I don't misrepresent it Berlin has about 200 theatres and groups all together they have about 20 to 21 really big theatres including opera and everything there are five city theatres and the Gorky is one of them it's actually under in Linden, it's in a prominent spot and so the idea that it was given to Sherman Langhoff and to create such an ensemble had a very significant role in kind of redefining redeveloping the idea what a theatre should be so what do you think, what's the vision, what's the idea of the Gorky in the city of Berlin what does it want to do? I have to do two things the first thing is to say that it's also the thing is the idea of having a woman as an artistic director in the German theatre is not yet so common there was a study made a few months ago about how is the structure of the German theatre when it comes to artistic direction to authors and to directors and if you look at the study it was mainly focusing on the idea of men and women in the arts in Germany, in the theatre and you can see that 70% of the artistic directors are men 70% or 74% of the directors for theatre are men and 80% of the writers are men so there's a big emphasis on the man and so it's still kind of a big deal if a woman, unfortunately, it's still a big thing that a woman is an artistic director and that was also, there was also this big emphasis on this we have now Barbara Mundl for instance who's going to take over the leadership at the Mutinakama Spiele next season and there was also a big notice in the press so it's still not common for a woman to be leading a theatre so this is one thing I think it's significant to and then the co-director Jens Hillier and that's where I would like to just go one step back because I think it's important to know about how the Gorky is put together as artistic leadership is that Charmin Langhoff already before she took over the leadership of the Gorky was the artistic director of the Bahlhaus-Nau-Nien-Straße Bahlhaus-Nau-Nien-Straße is a small off theatre in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg and Kreuzberg is very, very diverse but it also has a huge minority of the German-Turkish population and she basically, in 2008 when she started at Bahlhaus she coined the term in Germany in theatre of Post-Migrantes Theater or Post-Migrant Theater so the idea of creating a theatre and art and space for people who came as migrants and also the children that live in Germany or people also who came into exile, into Germany or identify with a very diverse background and to think about the idea of what comes after the idea of this background being a German-Turkish person in Berlin and doing art and opening this safe space for a lot of different people who until that time were basically not represented in Germany in the theatre so I think that's one important issue to understand the direction of the Gauki and the other thing is the co-director Jens Hillier who before he started at Gauki with Czajmin Langhoff was part of the artistic leadership of the Schaubühne together with Sascha Walz, a famous dancer, a choreographer and now artistic co-director of the Staatsballet Ballet in Berlin and Thomas Ostermeyer and the three of them actually built in 1999 this very successful and super interesting theatre idea of creating new plays, creating a very diverse theatre which was very open to the idea of new playwriting and to this idea of basically creating a leadership that included the process of the actors and the theatre of creating a direction together so that's the two things so maybe we look, you brought some stuff so tell us a little bit what we're going to see so this is the front, the main entrance of the Gauki and basically you can see it's very Greek because if you know the Acropolis in Athens it's the entrance, it's also the same, it's built after this entrance and I think we can go to the next slide and just to get a sense of where it is located I mean it's in Berlin Mitte, it's right in the middle of Berlin and this is the Staatsoper, the opera, the state opera it's also a very beautiful building that you can see when you stand at the Gauki you look onto the state opera you can go to the next one please the Humboldt Universität, one of the two big main universities in Berlin we can go to the next one and this is the Bode Museum, this is the Museum Island we call it Museums Insel in Berlin a lot of different museums that surround the area of the theatre and in the middle of the city okay we can go to the next one please yeah, this is the front again, it says De Beferkerung, so for the public basically if we translate it, okay we can go to the next one and this is the inside of the theatre this is the main stage which is right now closed we had our last show on 1st of May and it's being renovated right now and we're going to be back playing on this beautiful stage in September and we're building actually a container, a black box in front of the theatre where you can see 200 people and in this room you can see a bit more than 400 people and if I remember the word for Denkmalschutz I would say it, Frank, do you know it? or Antti, what's Denkmalschutz? it's a historical building landmark yeah, it's protected, so you can see the portal and you can't change anything so you have these grids in the front of the portals because you can't drill any holes in it because it's all protected so that's sometimes a bit of a, not a problem but it can get tricky if you want to do very different lighting yeah, and so this beautiful space is being renovated we can go to the next one and this is the view from the other side and the interesting thing about the stage is it tilts in a degree so it's not flat, it has a right so you can't actually, if you put something in the back of the stage it will roll down that's unusual okay, I think we can go to the next one okay, this so now we could, I think we can just talk about some of the key productions from the beginning of the Gauki from 2013 this is, as sagt mir nichts so genannte draußen the so-called outside, there is a reading on Thursday and the play is from the Billeberg and it was called Piece of the Year by the theater theater today, magazine which is the most important theater magazine in Germany and it was Billeberg got play of the year for this show Sebastian Neubling directed it and it was a very interesting, very unique piece of, it's a chorus piece I would call it, the four performers speak as a chorus of women and also it's choreographed in a very funny and very interesting way and it deals with feminism and the idea of a feminist of our time okay, we can go to the next one this was a production where I was also involved and it's one of my very favorite productions and I really loved working on it by Falk Richter, small-time boy which will be read on the 8th, yes, on Wednesday the idea of, it was Falk's first work for the Gauki theater and it had a huge impact in Berlin it also got the Stonewall Award we had many, many shows and a tour and it's basically, Falk wrote this piece about the idea of you know, putting the gay man basically or a suburb kid the song small-time boy from Brunsky Beat the idea of leaving the suburb going into the city as a young gay man and how does that, how do you work on how does that change your identity and how do you deal with being gay in the suburbs and then going to the big city and having this kind of new freedom of living and expressing yourself but it also deals with the idea of patriarchy and violence and at the time when the play was produced we had this situation in Russia where basically the Putin said there was this new law that basically put pedophilia on the same level as homosexuality and this was a huge issue and you can see the, see Putin in many different poses on the stage look at some of the clips maybe of, yeah sure anything, any specific one or should we show one from maybe we start with Papa Liebtich that he loves you which will be read tomorrow Should we, I think we should then show dark or first the making of by Nora Abdel-Maxut And then walk on the dark side by Yaronin and Ensemble Yaronin who was with us I think two years ago at the Penn Festival We basically have two dark cosmic entities Yes, let's just call them the Dark Brothers and these two Dark Brothers they fight for a cosmic battle of eternal promotion I get a Nobel Prize for it You are not I am interesting We have all researched I am an interesting person I think it's very nice that you all found the way here to celebrate with me the fact that you are actually the best with a large distance that happened to me in my life You are my brother and I forgive you I heard a lot from you Magda, I think we just saw each other at the funeral I wasn't at the funeral, I was at the bell Nice To love Good, so it gave us a little view of how it looks like Of course they are all full-length plays and much more is going on Before we come to you, how successful is the Gorky? Do people say we are not going to come and see any of this or how is that? What are the audiences? So how successful are the audiences? You are sensationally successful I think but yeah there's tickets and audiences Well I think it's been an amazing run for the last years and there's people are noticing the work and it's spreading all around and you can see what kind of an impact it has in Berlin as when you say Gorky most people already have an idea of what the Gorky is and also all around Germany and in Europe and I think the audiences it's really interesting to see that especially on the main stage of each night you have many different audiences coming in people coming for the first time people coming to look at the play for the sixth time and a lot of different people so it's not like we have one audience or I would say that this is the audience but what I really like about it is that it's always a very different mixed audience the interesting thing which we have is that at the studio at the smaller space we have also in the theater in the studio we have a program that has also plays that are in different languages so sometimes you have plays that are in German or in Turkish or in Arabic or in Polish etc and also concerts and other events or book readings at the studio is that you sometimes have people coming in for the first time ever into a theater and also seeing a lot of different communities coming in so we did an Arabic piece by Bashar Murkos who was also part of the Pan World Writers Festival and then you have an Arabic community in Berlin coming in and watching the play and I think this is amazing and I normally wouldn't reach and it's a very very young audience incredibly successful a fantastic energy when you go to the theater I also was once one opening when there's a DJ in the bar afterwards the actors dance with audiences in the Dionysian interpretation in a way also that the theater is a part of a city that celebrates work and we also people reflect on each other and the society they live in and politics but let's come up to you guys what does the Gorky mean to you how did you get to it I think I can speak I think that for me Gorky first of all was I live in Berlin since soon seven years and Gorky was the first theater that basically staged my first three plays how did you connect to the Gorky well to say the truth I wrote a play I was sitting in South Tirol in a little conference reading the play in a little theater and the ex-artistic director of Studio Ja which is the small space of Gorky just came to me afterwards and said do you have something additional like could we go like maybe somewhere maybe you want to read to me and a year after she directed the piece herself and this is how I entered like I got to know the Gorky team and then I got the opportunity to be staged and my first three plays were commissioned by the Gorky so basically I started to write with Gorky I'm originally from Tel Aviv I used to direct my pieces so mainly I worked for the stage I wrote as well but it was one factor from this thing that I created like I used to no one could read my pieces and with moving to Germany and starting to work with Gorky I started to exclusively write and for me Gorky I think is a unique theater a unique space to present my works because I think that as a person let's say a Jewish Israeli woman who often is a kind of a diversity Joker let's say like it fits and I think that exactly as Christopher said Gorky created a change in the theater landscape in Germany and now we need like every theater that respects itself like would put like this one of those little diversity Jokers in each and every season I think that often the feeling is that one is invited or I am invited to write a play or to write an article or to participate in a panel discussion but still the discussion is always about me or above my head I am contributing and giving my experience in order to establish a discussion that is happening or that is that is being conducted by the majority and by the group and majority and I think that in Gorky there is a chance to really mold in a way a theater discussion theater in political level and in artistic level that is mirroring this diversity that is called Berlin I am not standing on stage as a a representative of anything but I am somehow from this position in the margin I am saying this is maybe the best view in order to describe the whole landscape the whole panoramic picture of society from this position in the margins Thank you Dimitri also what do you come from and how do you get to the Gorky and what does that theater mean to you so originally I was born and raised in the Soviet Union and moved to Germany when I was 8 and started studying acting and by that time basically what was told to me that for example in Germany it was in the 90s usual for people who are white to change their names so they could still fit in German society and not to see that you are not to show yourself as coming from some place else so I started acting school then and worked in a different theater and then when Shamil Langhoff got the artistic direction he told me whether I want to be part of that and the thing is that as an actor they saw my work before and thought that I could maybe fit in well and so they invited me the thing is that all of us who came to work at Gorky could have been paid much more money at different theaters in Berlin in all of Germany in Switzerland and Austria and the decision was really to go there and to do a new form of productions and what we talk about so if you see the Gorky sign the R is you know pushed around it's the Russian letter for YAH for me so this was kind of the idea of the reflection of me is a reflection of society so it was not mainly about to get black, white and Jewish and Arabic people all together and just to talk about their backgrounds but to say how can we view on to German society with our backgrounds and what kind of perspective do we have on German society which people who have been raised and lived in Germany don't have as much so and this was this idea that came out of it is that we are the only theater in Germany, Austria and Switzerland which is a state theater and makes most of its money with plays we write so with plays which come out with us so normally in the German repertoire system it's usual that you have the classic piece by Goethe and Schiller and some Shakespeare but also only the four or five main plays in by oh yeah let's see Richard III for the 100th time and this was now the idea to write new plays to have new perspectives which have been around there for most of the part of humanity so perspectives that we started writing on and developing on through ourselves and the thing which was then astonishing is that to make a niche product like an even common ground where it's people from ex-Yugoslavia who reflect upon the war in Yugoslavia and how they perceived it as refugees in different countries that this is a production which runs sold out every time it's there and played well over 100 times sold out every time and this is something which is really huge and astonishing because really honestly when we started we didn't think that anybody would give a shit about us and then something really different happened or having a monologue which I had written a monologue for one play about my family coming to Germany and this migration of Russians to Germany and there were about three and a half million of us and there was never a talk about that or a play about that or anything and to play it and have people in the audience be thankful for their side of the story being kind of represented or heard even once and this was something completely astonishing having kids who grow up in Berlin and have either Arabic or Turkish background and to see Arabic or Turkish actors but not to perform as drug dealers or as drug abusers you know but having them in a different form of light which was completely unheard of to have a check of play and to have the brother of Raniyevskaya being an Afro-German and this was something which was completely unique and nobody did it but once you start doing it and it starts getting normal and this is something which was really then huge and became a huge thing and then starting to get people starting an exile ensemble of people who come from Syria or Afghanistan and them having be a part of the ensemble and to hear stories and perspectives from them and to have different forms of production for example what we do with Yael Runen so the trailer of Darkseid is usually to start out with just the topic and then just the actors and the artistic team in the room and just basically talking about their lives for a longer period of time so even and not having a play in mind or what we will do with that but just to get to know people from completely different backgrounds for several weeks and to hear somebody tell his story of how he fled and went through the middle sea to come to Germany this whole route and explain it but not in 20 minutes time but in two or three days that you listen to somebody and this was then a complete shift of perspectives of people who worked so we you went to the Balkans where you took a trip some people sometimes is with place that you do trips in order to prepare it and the trips then become the main part of the show and sometimes it's just really listening to people and sharing their own stories and thus growing together as an ensemble and developing your point of view as an actor which is really something so now it's really hard for me to imagine working in another theater because really just this thing of alright so here we have like Richard the third and somebody will be playing him and Shakespeare and this and that by that it's kind of boring or it gets boring if the normal process is you sit in a room with various people with insane people with people with insane life stories and just to get to know that and then the artistic part is yeah we'll do that in the last one and a half weeks and it's good because you build it all up from within the group and that people got interested in that this is really the biggest miracle because yeah as I told we all thought that the Berlin audience will hate us that nobody nobody will pay attention to that but the contrary happened and this is something astonishing. Maybe a question, what about the Exile Ensemble, what is that in the Gorky ecosystem? Yeah the Exile Ensemble was created I'd say out of the thought in 2015 there was the play by Erun the situation where I have played one of, was part of the production and Karim was also part of the production and I have had this idea of because he's from Syria and you need to know there's only one academy in Syria for acting, for theater in Damascus, one and everyone knows each other so he already had a network of people he wanted to bring into the Gorky and because it was also parallel 2015 was the peak of I have to say the word although I don't like to say it, the refugee crisis One million Syrians came into Germany and so basically Germany had this new, they called it this new reality of people coming into the country and having to adapt the situation so it was part of the everyday life now so it seems but I mean migrants have been coming in for a very very long time but now you have this huge impact that was going on in the press and in the streets and you could see people speaking different language, Arabic which was also kind of frightening for a lot of people because it's still connected to an idea of I don't know that Arabic is connected to terror or war or only to these two things so this idea was with IHAM and with with Shamin Langhoff and with the the idea was to create a space for an ensemble that could come and work at the theater alongside the ensemble and alongside the repertoire that we were doing as to allow them to continue their artistic process because they also did the Hamlet machine they did Hamlet machine Interestingly enough but I mean it's a process because and I want to say that they're not all refugees because when you have this idea of Exile Ensemble it immediately always goes to the idea of refuge but the ensemble is made up of people who came as refugees but also people who decided on their own to come and work in Germany as to be able to express and work on their craft which they could not do in Syria anymore we have one actress from Afghanistan and so then this idea grew out to create this Exile Ensemble and they started doing their own production Winter Reise with the El Run so they took a trip through Germany the Heinrich-Heine Motiv and to see different stations in Germany and as Dimitri also said to share their personal stories and we need what I need to say is that at the beginning I mean they came in and they were speaking English and Arabic and so there was this process of learning German being as a group together coming in doing this trip through Germany and sharing the experiences and then creating this piece and Hamlet Machine is kind of a step forward in a sense of how to deal with the idea of what I would say post-post migrant theater is that it creates something new I mean we can look at the trailer in a second is the idea of creating a piece that works on a multilingual level and creating a space where it doesn't matter anymore and I think the ensemble itself made a really amazing process because they started maybe we should watch it and then I'll say something about it Do you know what time is it? It's a crazy clown time Yes Heine Mutter Enjoy it Both image-speeder I'm wearing my dress on the street in my blood No, thanks Is it interesting? Read it It's Heine Mutter Maybe a little bit more about it than we move on, you said you wanted it's been a very interesting process just to have this ensemble with us and to see that it started from this idea of a closed group and now it has moved on into that four actors are part of the ensemble they can switch very easily between German, English and Arabic and I find that an amazing process It's truly a sensation public theatre would say or the New York Theatre Workshop we have an ensemble we have refugees, we have actors they can do what they want give them a space and support their production I don't think we will see that here in New York where you might imagine it should be a step ahead and it should have happened a long time ago but let's talk a little bit about the way you produce your work Hans-Tis Lehmann said here when he came last year the theory that he never meant it's the end of writing or writing is no longer as important he said what is important there are new ways of writing in a way like Hanna Müller, Friedrich Jallienek or Rene Paulisch others work with text that it's a new way so tell us a little bit more let's say for your play how does it work you write it and then you create the play what is the process to say the truth after I started with developing texts with actors in a rehearsal room and now these days after 10 or 12 years of working on stage with actors I'm now alone in my kitchen everyday writing everything on the page so from stage to the page which is kind of old fashioned I have to say still it's the way that I choose to do it I think that let's say you bring the text to the Gorky what happens I think just before that I think that in a way for me in my writing and I think very much Gorky is a very good partner for that I would never define the bodies on stage and I would ask the director to put her or his hand into this empty glove of text of textile that I am designing in order to check in a performative way who speaks why and this is for me I would wish my deepest wish is that every play could have been given three or four stagings in order let's say for the audience to reflect what kind of choices are we doing when we are putting a body on stage how do we see a normal body on stage how do we see which ages do we tend to see on stage which skin colors which backgrounds and I think that for me the most important thing is to always ask the director to answer this question I have other colleagues for example Sasha Maria Nazalzman that was here last year I know that we would actually to write characters that are so clearly representing something that the ensemble misses that they have to bring a different body to stage so now for example I am willing to write a choir for 10 women that are above 50 or 60 and can we find them and can we see them on stage so this is another strategy that works very well same question to you you also become very well known and he is really one of the most recognizable actors in the Gorky we want to thank you for coming and taking your time to come here to be with us how does that work how do you create the text how is it distributed and created and how do you interact if there is a drama tour first of all it kind of developed so this form which I talk about was something which was not already made and we kind of got into it this form of developing plays so but I need to go one step back for it to explain it so in Germany there was a tradition that after the 1990s kind of the well-made play which is in England or also here quite popular died out almost completely and then it started the time of deconstruction so deconstruction in place and mixing them with other topics and so thus became you know those 10 hour long German theater evenings with yelling people and just doing kind of a Dostoevsky novel but where nobody should understand anything or feel anything or just really be repulsed so this idea of creating art through you know pushing the audience away which is kind of a bit Brechtian but very aggressive towards the audience so this was kind of the most play which started to be developed in the early 2000s so there was not a big interest in original writing and then there came a few writer-directors who developed their own style of post-modernism and one thing that was said in connection with the Gorky was a word which I really like by a journalist and it was the post-ironic theater so in the 1990s and 2000s there became you know because Germany was quite prosperous and everything went well and you know the wall came down and communism was defeated so everything was kind of you know amazing so people started just writing ironic plays which were in the end about nothing they had nothing to say but just were a word place or something being about boredom and depression and stuff like that and the style of acting was also a style of acting which pushed away the naturalistic acting or the emotional acting the actor who identifies with what he talks about but it was just really about somebody who just stands there and screams text like this basically for two hours so so in order to do what we started doing it was necessary to get new plays from people who actually have something to say besides telling the world that they're depressed and I don't know so some kind of message about society and it doesn't even really matter whether it's through expressed through characters or whether it's expressed through you know a text which is about 100 pages long and there are no you know dots or something in it but still if you have something to say so this was the first necessary thing which we needed to have in German theater in the 2010s and so also the style of acting changed due to that at least with our theater so that if you have text about something and which want something and which want to express something there became a new form of emotional playing or of authenticity some might call it but I personally don't like the word because you can also be very funny it doesn't mean that you sit on stage and cry about stuff it's unnecessary but the process of developing new plays for us was out with the topic and then through out conversations and ideas which we collect as an ensemble developing a play and it can vary in structures so either a well made play or a play which is much more performative and also it may vary in tone whether it's funny or highly emotional it depends on what you find actually when you go through the process but the point of that was still that everything we do we really try to mean it and we really try to act it with that it's something which we really connect with it's world that we design which we actually connect with and sometimes this process might be quite difficult for directors or also for writers because if an actor is then used to or trained to say I want to give a shit about what I tell here it's not just a text I want to perform and just cry a few tears but I want to mean it I want to understand why do I say it why do I do this so sometimes I take the liberty of cutting out maybe some paragraphs which the author written but I just say I cannot with my conscience it's not possible to say that I think it's dull or stupid or whatever it's just so but then but no so sometimes it's very very difficult or sometimes also that you need to restructure it or rewrite it or give it your own spin but in general the thing of an author gives you a play and you have to do it exactly what the author wants it's just if it's an author director like Nora here who is very very very strict she's the Indiana Jones of director her own place but basically it's throughout communication but tell us about you're known also for writing monologues inserting how does that work how do you do that and well basically I it's a full freedom of something that if you want to express something and if it resonates then then I sit down and write for a few weeks you say to the director I want to write a monologue and I want to put in there or maybe I'll just write it and then I said I've written something and just would you would you watch over it and then I'll just present it and then she says yeah just do it and then you do it but but basically it come it comes out really out of this thing of if you have to add something thematically so through the themes that are that are done there and yeah most of the time not that yeah I always wanted to do you know a musical number or something so even just just if it fits so the content comes always comes first you have something to say yes and then I normally search for the form for it yeah so to you I don't know how does it work is Charmine or Yen so you do you go to rehearsal and then you say we don't like it we like it what's your input in the production I have an idea also I want to write something how does it work but do you mean in a sense of what does the artistic leadership do in the rehearsal or as a dramaturg are they all are they also dramaturgs or you just the dramaturgs is it also an unusual role the artistic leadership takes in how do they interact with the rehearsals or the work I mean it's important to say that each production has its own dramaturg but I think selected by the playwright or well it depends some dramaturgs have their directors they work with they're familiar with them or with the authors so they have a connection and they truly understand the language for me I have a big connection to because I've worked with him for a long time so I know his sense of I know exactly what he says when he writes something or when he interacts in a rehearsal so I know what he what he's doing and I think every dramaturg has this and the artistic leadership I think it's a process that we do together is we sit together and we really talk about what kind of what in which direction do we want to go what are the ideas of the directors what are the ideas of the authors and what would the ensemble talk would like to talk about so I think it's a process that happens together as in a way of what kind of productions or directors do we want to work with this in this season and then when it comes to the production itself we have one dramaturg or sometimes two dramaturgs for one production and basically what we we do is we come in at the end of the process so like for instance in the last two or three weeks how long is the rehearsal six weeks well most of the rehearsals are eight weeks and so you have or nine weeks so you have kind of is that short or long incredibly long it used to be longer you know 30 years ago you had four months for a production we write a play in that time we need to rehearse it so you have basically you have the process itself starts before so before even before you go into production you have this process where the dramaturg meets with the author they have a discussion with the director and then you have this whole build up to the rehearsal phase and in the rehearsal phase you have this basically and I think it's important to have this space for the director, the dramaturg and the ensemble as a team to create something and not to interfere too much because I think it's important for you to create something and then basically you have this tech rehearsals which start three weeks before where you start to go on stage you have the real stage you have the props so it starts to take shape and I think this is a good point to get into the process as the team of the dramaturgs so we basically come to the runs the run-throughs and we just talk with the process and I think that's what Shamin and Jens also do yes of course but it's not this idea of you have to do this it's just the idea of well I see this maybe you could do this so it's a process of selecting may I add something also which is also very different so in other German theatres it's normally when the artistic directors come in they watch the run-through and then they only talk with the director and then the director tells you well we need to cut this scene and stuff like that and this is really the only process where the artistic team where the artistic directors also meet with the actors so most of the time that you're all together hearing what there is to say or what are their concerns which I find a very very healthy process so also if you develop something it's necessary if you develop something with the director it's very necessary that not this director all of a sudden gets heat from the bosses and then just starts changing something but that you still can talk about it and even I also had situations where Shamin and Jens were completely opposite in the opinion of what I should do on stage and then it was just like yeah you need to shorten this no I won't do it but you need to no I don't so even if you can play the opening night like I do it now so you will need to hunt me down from the stage but then they say okay then just try it out then so this this form of understanding or respecting each other's abilities and on the other hand really to say or to have an argument which is about the content of the play and to say it's just plainly wrong or there are this and that solutions to do it in a smarter way so which is much more fruitful and not as dictatoric or authoritarian as it's used to in other German theaters can I just add and I think yeah and to add what you just said I think it's also the role of the dramaturg in the theater like the Gorky is also a bit different because the dramaturg is not there just to you know to edit the text or you know just to be just to do what the director wants but I think this kind of dramaturgy is a dramaturgy that is involved in the process because if you look at other state theaters you have dramaturgs who come in once a week to look at the rehearsal and then to give feedback and with us the dramaturg is always present in the process it's a vital part of the process and a voice inside the production I think that's really important to point out because it changes the process very important anything you before we go to audience question something you comes to your mind or something you want to add in general anything we said about well I can talk about the kind of dramaturgy I need because I write the plays myself and then I direct them myself so the moment that I come to the first rehearsal where we are like talking about the concept I'm already pretty blind for the stuff I wrote because I deal with it for month in month in month so what I need and I found that the Gorky is like a pretty classical dramaturg who tells me like I have three acts and I need to know what do you understand here and what does the audience get there so this is a kind of classical dramaturg which actually in Germany right now is pretty hard to find I think because it's so old school and there's more discourse, what's his discourse there's a lot of discourse and you have to be very smart and very zeitgeistig zeitgeistig so these are the skills I think that are very important right now especially in like the big cities as Berlin and most of the time I need the opposite I just need craftsmanship somebody who which information has to be given where and do people get this character and I found that at the Gorky and I don't find it everywhere so I'm pretty pleased which is also interesting we see a variety of styles of writing directing of dramaturgies so it's a very open process so Michael maybe we can have the light up for the audience too and we have 15, 20 minutes more we have always a good audience here at the Siegel so if you have a question or a comment or something that comes to your mind please also take a mic we are recording it and maybe say who you are what do you do and then say a question Hello my name is Aaron and I just have one well two questions one I looked at the Gorky website and I could see that everything is in in repertory how many shows do you have on stage say on the main stage and on the chamber stage in a month is one question and the second question is something that all of these discussions of what the Carson rehearsal is leading to what is the role of the author if the author is not the director what is the role of the author in rehearsal it seems like the Gorky is dealing almost entirely with living authors and so it's not like you can ignore you know Schiller or you don't need to Schiller won't return your calls but you know all of your authors except for maybe Hiner Muller are around and can be consulted if you care to consult them or if they are interested I mean how does it what is the author present what does the author do in rehearsal thank you I'll answer the first question and maybe someone else can answer the second one so yeah we have a repertoire theater system and well I mean it depends for month to month but let's say we have around about 20 to 24 different shows in the month sometimes you have blocks like where you have yes we have running a repertoire on the main stage and then we have the studio doesn't have this kind of we have pieces that are shown in the repertoire but the studio has different events that happen we have about 40 40 different which are running it could be shown at any time 40 plays yes so each night I play in nine different different productions so it changes and sometimes you play four or five different plays within a week so you can imagine how many stages are put up and broken down in a week or sets so yeah so we don't have en suite we only have shows for instance third generation next generation which premiered in March basically sometimes has four or five shows after each other so five days of the same show but usually we have a different show every night so you basically have this these 40 plays which are built up and put down every day and then you also have the running rehearsals on the stage the second author what's the role of the author is the author engaged in the creative process by standards it depends on what the author wants sometimes and also what the team wants because there are authors who just want to give this away and who don't interfere who don't even write characters in there or write any kind of direction and some people sit there within the rehearsal space and try to communicate with you yeah it depends on what the author wants and most of the time also how he or she works with the director and with the actors I think often it happens that actors are a little bit intimidated by the presence of the author they're like okay what's happening and I think like at least in my case most of my plays were developed really with the drama turks and the directors from the first moment it was developed together then the idea for the stage design and the process of thinking about the stage thinking about the bodies on stage was like somehow let's say developed together and then I think that for me at least to arrive to the rehearsal room and meet the actors and the actresses and like I found myself in a different role like when I came to the rehearsal room so it was a kind of a different level of communication with the actresses and the actors like I'm not directing them I'm not interested like how they move what they're doing but we have like we communicate in the deep level of the text and of what's really happening and for example if there are topics of shame and of exclusion and of fear that are present in the text going through these bodies so sometimes like we discovered that this is an intimate discussion happening between the actresses actors and the writer that sometimes the director said okay I'm out which was interesting so it's a variety of styles there's a question over there for the pen festival is everything in English or are there some plays in the original German everything will be in English when we do the readings we translated actually three of the plays for this festival Kyoko Hi my name is Kyoko Iwaki I'm a visiting scholar here first of all I saw you Dimitri I think in Common Ground when I was in Berlin and you were the only person I saw a lot of shows when I was there for three months and most of the soliloquies as you said were shouted out top of their voice was the one which didn't like perform in a way that is so obnoxious so your performance was like a bliss for me so thank you for that yes so my question to you actually as an actor is that stemming from this experience that I had in Germany so you said that actors actor methods are still there the traditional ones like so they do in a different way the traditional actors so I hear that you are talking about these different contents different plays different directions happening but then how are the actors trained are they kind of adopting the new methods like acting more naturally or more post-traumatic of course but then how is it kind of shifting from these old style acting it doesn't which is a pity acting schools and the level of acting in Germany is really poor so most German actors are shitty and they are trained in a stupid and very old fashioned manner many people would disagree but no the problem is that now what emerged is this new kind of actor performer so what were in the beginning two different styles of an actor who is a naturalistic playing acting acting and then the performers who you know take some some tube of red color and push it somewhere in their body and you know shit on a canvas or something like that so in the extreme form so there are still people who do that but then it kind of started switching together so the necessity of being able in the one moment to act a passionate scene and in the other moment just you know turn around to the audience and talk with them and have a philosophical text which you try to present them like a normal human being in a discussion and this is something which is rarely trained in acting schools because the people who perfectioned or develop this style I think this is something which emerged in our generation maybe of acting or maybe a few years before but if they are still active and take part in this actively they are rarely teach and then in the acting schools you have very very old fashioned who teach acting so this is something which usually happens if there are people who are interested in that or even ask you after you play the show how do you do that or how do you develop that or what kind of technique do you use they can they can adopt to it but with most acting schools it's really really really dark it's dark but if I may add I think it's also everything in the theater world it's such a long and weary process of change what we are now only seeing in the acting schools that they are diversifying in a big way is that now it's a trend you see in the schools and also what I would notice not maybe in the acting school but what happens after the acting school right now is this idea and I think it's also you see it also in the Gawke from the last year last season would also influence that is that the actors are becoming more active in a sense of their awareness how they deal with theater and rehearsals so they're not puppets they're not dependent on the director it is an alliance of art in a sense of everyone contributes to this functioning brain to think about what they are doing so you don't have the almighty director standing there or the almighty author maybe but everyone is on the same playing field and you need to be very conscious about the process that you're doing together and I think that's a very vital and important thing definitely so in terms of storytelling or how you convey a topic it's really something which is new and people need to adapt to it so that you're also part of a creating team even if you don't write anything but still so I think also most directors nowadays need this diverse type of actor who is at the same time able if you say to him just play it fast funny, loud whatever so this is a very high level of craftsmanship and on the other hand this ability of being highly personal and vulnerable and direct so this is something and there are not many people who are able to do that but hopefully there will be more because this is something which is really which makes the experience of going to a theater for me at least is something really special and I think since everybody got Netflix and Amazon Prime you can watch very good actors and actresses perform in very good movies so if I go to a theater I want to see individuals I want to see personalities I want to see real artists and not puppets maybe one more question towards the post-migrant that term that people might have show me a problem and we create a play about it and something switched or happened and you talked about this I would like to just hear a little bit or two more sentences of this idea of a post post-migrant theater I don't know if we even have in New York because there is a post-migrant if there is a migrant theater I'm not sure if there is a post-migrant but what's the post-migrant the post-migrant theater is a theater I think well for me it's the idea of the individual being something that is put together of so many different things that you are such it becomes unique in itself so and you can look at it from many different angles so if you think about the idea of post-migrant I think we're going into a direction of the idea of not just what is your background so I would not I mean I can only also think about it in my personal sense I'm not Arabic I would not consider myself German I went to American school I speak three languages I'm queer etc etc so all these things put together creates an individual that is me trying to express myself through art so this intersection of many different ideas makes it very interesting to deal with the idea of art so you can highlight you can connect to it on many different levels so it's not the idea of well I'm I'm only it's not one fragment so it's post-post for me I don't know if I explain it well but I think I hopefully got the idea I think that there are two aspects for me for example daddy loves you so it's a piece that is dealing with the female body and the female aging body and suddenly in one of the parts there is a reference to a story of a Jewish Holocaust survivor of course that it is already tagged like in the newspapers in Germany as a play that is dealing with Jewish Israeli-German topic and no it's not there is just a voice that is referring suddenly to this aspect this is for me a way that would be important for me to speak about my background not as the main topic not as your topic but as an element that comes to deal with something I would say that the post-post for me is the fact that identity is no more it's not anymore this one thing that even I decided that it is it's fluid it's changing it can't be the same like usually every year or every two years I will have to re evaluate what it is and what kind of word I would give to it one second we get the microphone after that we have one more well actually to some extent you already got to my question but I was going to say that I saw the situation in Berlin last time I was there including your inserted monologue which had I read on the page I would have thought was distracting but when I saw you do it I thought it was brilliant so I think it really worked very nicely a couple of things I'm curious about so much of the post-post-migrant experience so much of what Gorky works with first of all it's extremely multi-lingual so I was just wondering in the technical side obviously in the situation you did that with super titles in addition to the fact that you had a fairly multi-lingual audience I'm wondering how typical is that and does that limit the kind of audiences that you could otherwise have because the other question was that there's a lot of this very Berlin intersectional many things that's actually going to be problematic for a lot of the kind of official community leadership in a lot of these communities I'm just thinking in the situation there were things that would have made both Israelis both the official Jewish leadership and the politicized Arab leadership very uncomfortable in that play and I'm wondering how that ends up working out in as these become part of the public discourse so two things, dual-lingual how does that work, how do you deal with it and then these messages that are offending each side with the multi-lingual of course it has some difficulties within the developing process which can be very very difficult in a room and trying to talk and you feel really like at the UN because here's somebody translated into Arabic and so this is sometimes kind of annoying but necessary and necessary process so also that sometimes you need to switch to German in order to express some things which can be purely done if you write a text if I write a text in German and present it to Aaron in German but if I have some certain nuances which I can only express in German and not in English or people who write in Arabic but can only explain those nuances in Arabic or maybe Hebrew then this is a process where you really need to be careful that nothing gets lost in translation just within the process and while acting so what also made the Gorky kind of unique is that we started to subtitle each and every show so every German whatever the normal where you think oh you just do it in German everything is translated everything has subtitles like you would say in New York every play should have subtitles because you cannot assume everybody speaks English and this is something which we started because there is a huge community in Berlin who doesn't speak German so they have access to it and then the interesting part is if you also get Arabic or Hebrew within this equation something interesting happens that while you play you can see how many people in the audience know this language because sometimes then people do a joke in Arabic and people react to it before it's even subtitled so we have about 40 Arabic speaking people in the audience tonight and so on but for many people especially for elder people they say that it's often quite problematic if you don't know English or if you don't know any of the languages which is spoken there but just to sit there all the time like this and try to watch the stage is quite problematic but this is something which we cannot really change maybe you could do like your plugs like oh yes but I think I mean if I always like to say if you go through Berlin if you walk through the city or if you walk through New York City you don't just hear English you hear French, you hear Arabic you hear Italian you hear many a variety of many different languages and this is if we're talking about representing a population or a city like New York City or like Berlin then the idea of transferring it onto stage is for me very natural and you don't have to understand everything to understand and speaking as a translator myself I think this is a very potent process and I think it needs a little bit of training for an audience but there is a universal thing of understanding and sometimes things get lost in translation but I mean and I think that's also natural in a sense I think because we've seen so many plays performed in perfect or seemingly perfect German I mean Schiller, no one talks like Schiller anywhere ever so is that how we are represented on stage and no one talks like Shakespeare anymore so I think this is for me it's a very natural thing and I think it's amazing let it be lost sometimes in translation then we have the state of the person who walks through a city and sometimes doesn't understand and sometimes understands and that's amazing I think it's great and sometimes it's also fruitful even for scenes to have it you know okay we could do the scene basically in German but to have a scene of a couple but she is Israeli and he is German but both of them speak in not too perfect English it's an interesting scene or it becomes immediately much more interesting it can reflect more also of this situation so sometimes you can even use it in the artistic process of making it to a crucial point within the scene that you don't understand you don't see everything but you also won't understand everything just the second question very fast right wing, left wing, common ground were there reactions, did you get bomb threats or did people applaud it or what happened I mean if you do political theater you're going to irritate someone sometime anyway but there were no bomb threats but I think sometimes of course it irritates people but I think for me it's always if someone asks me or if I have the situation where I feel like okay there's this irritation I would put it into a discussion of but why does it irritate you and it mostly irritates because it questions status quo that does not exist in my opinion there is this idea of something that is fixed especially if you talk about political conflicts coming from two different sides that are very heated and very very political so you got away with it and it works so the last question over here and then I think we're a bit over time yeah you you mentioned at the beginning that people know what they they know the Gorky so when they go there they sort of expect something that they that they're familiar with saying that well no I think there's a certain style or certain idea or certain authors that are connected to the institution so then you mentioned that you have these for me as an actor really long rehearsals which I think maybe is good maybe not good I don't know and then you have 40 shows in rep so when and I've never been to the Gorky to see a play and I will some day when you put the play on and you do it for a few five days of maybe am I seeing the play that you rehearsed or am I seeing a version of the play you rehearsed so in other words because I've seen like Nihai you're familiar with Nihai they're from England and they do plays that look totally improvisational and they're actually not so they're really highly rehearsed so that they look like they're not rehearsed is this what you do at the Gorky is this a this is kind of yeah I would say this is sometimes this I know this style that it seems kind of you know very very very very light or on the spot or something but which normally it isn't but it's rehearsed we rehearsed five days later you would see more or less the same you saw the first one you would see more or less the same thing of course if you have repertoire system it develops throughout the years and sometimes there are shifts and also if you do political stuff it shifts due to the perception or sometimes we even change lines or need to change some things if it's you know biographical and some actors you know change and so we need to write new rehearsals within that but normally you would see from show one to show 150 more or less the same show so if you put an actor into the show like five years later the dramaturg then or someone we do rehearsals we do new rehearsals so for example if it's a play and it's biographical texts then the process starts again with the new person or persons new arrangements have to be developed and new arrangements have to be done yeah so I know we could go over much longer we already are a bit over time I think as we always say Breit said we do need new forms of theatre for the new times we live in and I think the Gorky it found something that's new the way they work the way they produce and the way the aesthetics is new and this is all connected and to learn from so it anticipates all the future it will be different the future it will be languages different in cities and in places so and it also makes us okay with it it gives a meaning that you might not understand everything but it's interesting it's good it's full of energy and again this Gorky is a fantastic theatre if you go there where you're really it's alive and I think hopefully also the readings that are coming up now will confirm that they are of interest to American audience most of them have never been read I think none of them so these are all completely new premiere plays they've been translated new so I hope you will come or tell your friends but again thank you for coming thanks for the Gorky to be here and to be with us thank you for having us for how round to how round to live stream it so it had also a much larger audience and we all gonna meet between 5th and Madison or if you want to hopefully you guys can join us for a drink if you want to have more so again thank you for coming so you will hear the opening of the Penworld Voices the entire festival opened today go on their website it's fantastic program chip early put together and I hope we will see you again we also have some of the directors of the place here Ashley Sybil so maybe we so thank you all for coming