conversations in ten questions 5 : Prodromos Tsinikoris - Clean City (Onassis STEGI & Goethe-Institut)
In this series of interviews we try to get to know the directors/choreographers who will be the international guests at the 23rd Istanbul Theatre Festival in November 2019. Our fifth guest is Prodromos Tsinikoris.
Ayse Draz & Mehmet Kerem Ozel
Art Unlimited Performing Arts Editor & Writer
[The Turkish translation of this interview is published and can be accessed on art.unlimited]
What is the spirit of theatre in your opinion? How do you define contemporary theatre today?
I see theatre as a publically staged political act to which everyone should feel free and invited to participate. It should ask the important and right questions for our time and open a new place of discourse for daring and provocative approaches in order to create a proposal for a future as we imagine it.
Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How?
By presenting different stories and creating alternative narratives against a mainstream mechanism, by exploring and proposing possibilities of beauty, solidarity and future social models, I think that art functions as a transformative force. A single work of art may nowadays not change the entire world, but it could and even should be aiming to shift and to displace a certain established set of attitudes held by some people.
When you consider the current state of the world in every sense, what is the most important and urgent issue for you as an artist?
The observation that societies have become over the last decade more and more conservative and intolerant is not new. What is distressing to discover today, is that this tendency is being followed and adopted shamelessly also by journalists, art critics and even artists. So for me, the resistance and fight against xenophobia, misogyny and bigotry seem nowadays more urgent than ever.
When you are working on a piece, what sources inspire you? Do dreams play a role in your works?
The great opportunity, that working in the documentary theatre field gives you, is that you explore an issue of which you may thought that you know enough about and realize that you actually don’t. So it’s always a welcoming surprise when you discover new things, when you get rid of clichés and stereotypes, which for many reasons have blocked your mind. This doubt – planting can function in a very creative way. Films, books and music are sources of inspiration as well, but I think the main driving forces during the process are our protagonists. People that we would have never met, if we wouldn’t have started the performance. Dreams play a lesser role, probably because they are mostly nightmares at that time.
When do you decide to give a title to a work you are working on, if it already does not have one?
We always start our research with a working title, for example it was from the beginning CLEAN CITY. When the time comes to finalize the title, usually we just continue with the one we had, because it magically still describes perfectly the performance we have in mind.
What’s your favourite line (or moment) in this performance, and why?
In the middle of the performance Freda, Mable and Drita are talking about their children. Drita, who came from Albania, speaks about the time when her son Enke told her that he will go to a drama school in Thessaloniki, to become an actor. Her daughter was already studying in Peiraeus and although she panicked in the beginning about how she is going to manage supporting two children in different cities, she took the decision to “As long as I can take it, I will work”. This sentence in combination with a US pop song, that all protagonists sing and dance right after (I will not spoil which song, you have to come and see), is my favourite moment in the show, probably because it reminds me the most of the difficulties my mother and my grandmother had to overcome in Germany.
How much do you let fiction to infiltrate the real when you do documentary theatre, if at all?
“Reality” often gets a bad reputation, mostly because of boring and plain stupid Reality – TV shows, but Real Life, if you are interested to look closer, can be an inspiration for so many things, it can be poetic, adventurous, surprising, heart-breaking, funny and therefore documentary theatre can be a mix of all it as well. So when we do our performances, we try to avoid any fictional elements and bring only the real experiences of our protagonists on stage.
When working on this project how did you select your performers? What were your criteria?
Usually we make over 75 – 80 interviews before we stop the research and start the selection process. Although we interviewed also some men, we quickly decided to do the performance only with women, because we were interested in what is happening in private spaces in contrast to men, who are usually cleaning in public spaces. Except of the interviews, we never do castings for our shows, so we mostly trust our instinct about which person could fit and which not. A significant criterion would be the different gestus that each protagonist could bring on stage, but the most important criteria in the case of CLEAN CITY were the stories, experiences and different backgrounds the women had, but also the combination of their narrations. For example, three of them lived under a communist regime and we wanted to explore the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
What was the most interesting audience reaction you had so far?
With the piece we have been to almost 40 different cities in over 18 countries by now and although the reactions vary for different reasons, I think that the most interesting audience reaction was in Ljubljana during the “Mladi Levi” Festival in 2016. In Athens the audience used to laugh a lot and on many different occasions, but in the Slovenian city the entire audience was absolutely silent for 75 minutes. When the performance came to an end, they all got up from their seats and gave our actresses a standing ovation.
Is there anything in particular you want to tell people before they see this show? Is there anything particular you would like to tell the Istanbul audience?
I grew up in Wuppertal, Germany, as a son of Greek migrants – Gastarbeiter, and since my mother’s origins are from Asia Minor, my grandparents spoke also Turkish. In Wuppertal they had many Turkish friends and I remember growing up with Turkish music and films. Furthermore my grandmother worked as a cleaning woman at “Johnson & Johnson” and had many Turkish colleagues. Cultural exchange between our two countries is unfortunately too rare, so this invitation to the Festival is not only a great honour for us, but also functions as a reminder of the common (hi)stories Turkish and Greek people share.
Ayse Draz & Mehmet Kerem Ozel
Art Unlimited Performing Arts Editor & Writer
[The Turkish translation of this interview is published and can be accessed on art.unlimited]
Prodromos Tsinikoris
What is the spirit of theatre in your opinion? How do you define contemporary theatre today?
I see theatre as a publically staged political act to which everyone should feel free and invited to participate. It should ask the important and right questions for our time and open a new place of discourse for daring and provocative approaches in order to create a proposal for a future as we imagine it.
Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How?
By presenting different stories and creating alternative narratives against a mainstream mechanism, by exploring and proposing possibilities of beauty, solidarity and future social models, I think that art functions as a transformative force. A single work of art may nowadays not change the entire world, but it could and even should be aiming to shift and to displace a certain established set of attitudes held by some people.
When you consider the current state of the world in every sense, what is the most important and urgent issue for you as an artist?
The observation that societies have become over the last decade more and more conservative and intolerant is not new. What is distressing to discover today, is that this tendency is being followed and adopted shamelessly also by journalists, art critics and even artists. So for me, the resistance and fight against xenophobia, misogyny and bigotry seem nowadays more urgent than ever.
When you are working on a piece, what sources inspire you? Do dreams play a role in your works?
The great opportunity, that working in the documentary theatre field gives you, is that you explore an issue of which you may thought that you know enough about and realize that you actually don’t. So it’s always a welcoming surprise when you discover new things, when you get rid of clichés and stereotypes, which for many reasons have blocked your mind. This doubt – planting can function in a very creative way. Films, books and music are sources of inspiration as well, but I think the main driving forces during the process are our protagonists. People that we would have never met, if we wouldn’t have started the performance. Dreams play a lesser role, probably because they are mostly nightmares at that time.
When do you decide to give a title to a work you are working on, if it already does not have one?
We always start our research with a working title, for example it was from the beginning CLEAN CITY. When the time comes to finalize the title, usually we just continue with the one we had, because it magically still describes perfectly the performance we have in mind.
What’s your favourite line (or moment) in this performance, and why?
In the middle of the performance Freda, Mable and Drita are talking about their children. Drita, who came from Albania, speaks about the time when her son Enke told her that he will go to a drama school in Thessaloniki, to become an actor. Her daughter was already studying in Peiraeus and although she panicked in the beginning about how she is going to manage supporting two children in different cities, she took the decision to “As long as I can take it, I will work”. This sentence in combination with a US pop song, that all protagonists sing and dance right after (I will not spoil which song, you have to come and see), is my favourite moment in the show, probably because it reminds me the most of the difficulties my mother and my grandmother had to overcome in Germany.
How much do you let fiction to infiltrate the real when you do documentary theatre, if at all?
“Reality” often gets a bad reputation, mostly because of boring and plain stupid Reality – TV shows, but Real Life, if you are interested to look closer, can be an inspiration for so many things, it can be poetic, adventurous, surprising, heart-breaking, funny and therefore documentary theatre can be a mix of all it as well. So when we do our performances, we try to avoid any fictional elements and bring only the real experiences of our protagonists on stage.
When working on this project how did you select your performers? What were your criteria?
Usually we make over 75 – 80 interviews before we stop the research and start the selection process. Although we interviewed also some men, we quickly decided to do the performance only with women, because we were interested in what is happening in private spaces in contrast to men, who are usually cleaning in public spaces. Except of the interviews, we never do castings for our shows, so we mostly trust our instinct about which person could fit and which not. A significant criterion would be the different gestus that each protagonist could bring on stage, but the most important criteria in the case of CLEAN CITY were the stories, experiences and different backgrounds the women had, but also the combination of their narrations. For example, three of them lived under a communist regime and we wanted to explore the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
What was the most interesting audience reaction you had so far?
With the piece we have been to almost 40 different cities in over 18 countries by now and although the reactions vary for different reasons, I think that the most interesting audience reaction was in Ljubljana during the “Mladi Levi” Festival in 2016. In Athens the audience used to laugh a lot and on many different occasions, but in the Slovenian city the entire audience was absolutely silent for 75 minutes. When the performance came to an end, they all got up from their seats and gave our actresses a standing ovation.
Is there anything in particular you want to tell people before they see this show? Is there anything particular you would like to tell the Istanbul audience?
I grew up in Wuppertal, Germany, as a son of Greek migrants – Gastarbeiter, and since my mother’s origins are from Asia Minor, my grandparents spoke also Turkish. In Wuppertal they had many Turkish friends and I remember growing up with Turkish music and films. Furthermore my grandmother worked as a cleaning woman at “Johnson & Johnson” and had many Turkish colleagues. Cultural exchange between our two countries is unfortunately too rare, so this invitation to the Festival is not only a great honour for us, but also functions as a reminder of the common (hi)stories Turkish and Greek people share.
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