Multiculturalism is about understanding and appreciating the diversity of world cultures. But the National Multicultural Festival is not only important to the citizens of Canberra.
For Moscow’s Dimitry Aryupin, Marcella Soltan and Andrej Ivashnev, performing Berthrand’s Toys in Australia is one more adventure and learning experience for their independent theatre company blackSKYwhite. Soltan and Aryupin go back a long way, starting up in 1988 amidst the massive social changes then under way in Russia, with no funding. For almost 20 years “we earn money by performing and providing masterclasses around the world” using their returns for new productions.
What is it about their work which makes their theatre sustainable? What is Berthrand’s Toys about, winning the 2000 Edinburgh Festival ‘Fringe First’ and ‘Total Theatre’ awards? And how did the audience in Indonesia respond?
Eight years of struggle led to their first success. “Our first trip abroad – everything was surprising there – I was 37 and had never crossed the border of my country. It was like a moon expedition, something very new and unpredictable. Five years later there remained only four European countries we had not visited.”
Aryupin explains that their success involves two main elements. First there is the longstanding European tradition of the Auteur, much more than writer. My French dictionary says “author, creator, maker, perpetrator, achiever, contriver, framer, informant, authority”. The name that comes to my mind, because of his influence in Australia, is Poland’s Jerzy Grotowski. Australians like Rex Cramphorn and film maker Paul Cox seem to me to fit the bill.
The point Aryupin makes is that European theatre is never “based on traditional forms but [each auteur] starts from the very beginning – like our world itself [we] don’t stay on elephants and turtles – referring to Asian traditions – but [we] fly over the abyss.” This constant search for originality is part of blackSKYwhite’s success.
Second, Aryupin’s work is about fundamental philosophic understanding of reality, but, he says, not with the German intellectual emphasis. He remains true to his Russian culture, keeping in touch with people and their emotions, “going down to the layer of dreams, which is common to all homo sapiens, despite their knowledge and experience.” Berthrand’s Toys has been described as a “danse macabre” about our fear of not knowing what reality is. Not too different from Chekhov, I thought.
In Indonesia he expected a negative reaction, in a Muslim country, to theatrical representations of clownish monsters, masked figures and the strong emotional effects in this production. To anyone who has seen wayang puppets, or Ranga the Witch, and knows how Indonesians have melded their ancient traditions, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam into an open and democratic culture, it is not surprising that people responded to blackSKYwhite’s “disturbing, terrifying and poignant” performance, coming backstage to talk about their feelings.
But who is Berthrand and what are his “toys”? Look up Sergeant Bertrand (spellings change as words float between languages) and your search engine will bring up necromancy, onanism and the real case of Bertrand who engaged in necrophagy. In 1847 this otherwise apparently sane individual believed his condition was connected to being a werewolf. After one year’s imprisonment he disappeared into obscurity. One later description of his case says he was “named a monomaniac” because he concentrated on animals’ entrails. His “focus on viscera, which is not a single object nor subjectivised, rather than a past-tense person-corpse, seems to change the inflection of the monomania beyond a perverse dialectic of subject/object.”
I see Aryupin’s concern about Germanic intellectual analysis, as early Twentieth Century psychology took over from the werewolf theory. Berthrand’s Toys concentrates on the way people like Bertrand use elements of their environment, including other people, as no more than toys for their own pleasure, however twisted or destructive the results may be.
Experiencing something of the obsession and paranoia of such a character, mediated through the theatrical art, will certainly be challenging. Yet as in the Samuel Beckett season at the Sydney Festival, referring to another European auteur, Peter Brook, the Canberra Times reviewer noted “Beckett’s characters affirm life even as they seem to deny it.”
Berthrand’s Toys, of course, is not designed for children, but is certainly an important feature of the National Multicultural Festival, bringing in concentrated form both a Russian and European vision in a “magical, radical and abstract piece of dance-theatre … where fantastic music and lighting create a world of great truth and illusion.”
Berthrand’s Toys
National Multicultural Festival
Presented by the Embassy of Russia
Courtyard Studio
Canberra Theatre Centre
Tuesday February 6 to Friday February 9 at 7.30pm
Bookings: Canberra Ticketing 6275 2700
Tickets: $32 / $28 concessions and Festival Card holders
Link: canberratheatre.org.au
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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