{"id":1497,"date":"2017-06-07T17:21:40","date_gmt":"2017-06-07T16:21:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/?p=1497"},"modified":"2017-06-07T17:21:40","modified_gmt":"2017-06-07T16:21:40","slug":"old-world-order","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/2017\/06\/old-world-order.html","title":{"rendered":"Old world order"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to dismiss someone who looks you in the eye and tells you their truth. We were in the front row for Atlas des Kommunismus<\/em><\/a> at the Gorki Theatre in Berlin, so the amateur performers could and did catch our gaze \u2013 amateur because they were there to tell their stories not to dazzle with professional sheen.<\/p>\n

This is a documentary play from the Argentinean director Lola Arias<\/a> \u2013 whose Minefeld<\/em><\/a> in LIFT last year was equally arresting, performed by veterans of the 1982 Falklands conflict. Atlas des Kommunismus<\/em> is more ruminative \u2013 a citizen\u2019s relationship to tumultuous events isn\u2019t quite the same as a soldier\u2019s. But Arias cuts the speakers\u2019 recollections with theatrical panache \u2013 political anthems, melancholy ballads, famous speeches embodied by a nine-year-old girl. The cast don costumes, grab instruments, manipulate the cameras during live film sequences. Sitting on both sides of a traverse stage, close-up video of performers with their backs to us is projected on a fluttering paper barrier across the stage. (Is this the wall<\/a>? So flimsy, so fragile? How did it hold up all that time?)<\/p>\n

A history of communism might be male \u2013 Lenin to Gorbachov, Honeker to Helmut Kohl. Men \u2013 straight, governmental men \u2013 stamping their names in the record, their deeds in the chronicle. Arias\u2019 atlas is different \u2013 seven private women and a self-styled dissident queen marking out the boundaries of ideology by the impact upon their own lives. This isn\u2019t just a bottom-up telling but also a beguilingly sideways one.<\/p>\n

The older speakers have been through the ideological wringer \u2013 living under fascism, embracing communism as a shining alternative, watching the shine come off. The middle aged came to adulthood with the socialist state already in place, so knew more of its shackles than its sparkle. The young activists, for whom identity politics are vital, long for such simplicity.<\/p>\n

A woman in her eighties (Salomea Genin, pictured above by Ute Langkafel) describes being willingly recruited by the Stasi. She reported on the lives of others: friends, neighbours, colleagues \u2013 including, possibly, one of the other women in the piece. Slow-moving (she has a back problem, we\u2019re told), stern-featured, Genin carries the gravity of what she\u2019s done. She stopped working with the Stasi before the wall fell \u2013 and, bravely, straight away began telling people what she had been doing. It\u2019s a life worthy of a play in itself.<\/p>\n

Everyone announces their age and relationship to this material as the piece began. For some, there\u2019s a poignant distance between the people they were and those they are now. The self-contained middle-aged stoic who bursts into snarling song and stompy movement as she relives her punk youth (\u2018Nazis! Nazis! Nazis living in East Berlin!\u2019). The Vietnamese woman, sent to Europe on a harshly-monitored student programme, describing decades of prejudice and privation as she made her home in the GDR.<\/p>\n

Tease out the truth<\/strong><\/p>\n

These aren\u2019t professional performers. They shuffle, stumble, in one case read from file cards. Yet their amateur status is their authenticity. It\u2019s harder to know what to make of the elegant Ruth Reinecke, a member of the Gorki ensemble, whose anecdote concerns an adaptation of Three Sisters<\/em> at the theatre in the last years of the east German state. Her warm professional poise occupied a different register to the people around her.<\/p>\n

Far different was the irrepressibly twinkly Monika Zimmering, who looks utterly delighted to share absurdist stories or bang a pair of egg whisks as percussive accompaniment. Yet she\u2019s the most conflicted when recounting the decline of east Germany. She resisted a move to the west, but doesn\u2019t recognise the country regrouping around her. She stayed still, she says poignantly, but the country moved. The old GDR may have betrayed her hopes for a just international socialism \u2013 but it was still a repository of those hopes, however flawed.<\/p>\n

Verbatim and documentary theatre can \u2013 and often do \u2013 feel fake. The National Theatre\u2019s calamitously wrong-note My Country<\/em><\/a> sought out anxious voices of the Brexit debate, only to parrot them through accent-audition performances drained of all conviction. (And let\u2019s not forget the poems. I may never forget the poems.) Public-address voices, knotting a degree of stiltedness alongside the suit and tie, sound greyly convincing (as in the series of tribunal-style reconstructions directed by Nicholas Kent). Far happier are the verbatim texts swirled through a theatrical shape by artists like Alecky Blythe<\/a> or Nadia Fall<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But Arias\u2019 speakers offer their own words in their own voice. Political systems engrave themselves upon their citizens \u2013 whether embraced, resisted or simply endured. That\u2019s why we listen, to tease out their truth and perhaps relate it to our own. Teetering as we are on the verge of a new world order, it\u2019s useful to look back at what an old world order felt like, for good and bad. I\u2019m writing on the day before Britain votes in a general election. The last time we did this, I went to the theatre<\/a> and allowed myself unguarded optimism. This time, I\u2019m keeping my hopes in check.<\/p>\n

Follow David on Twitter \u2013 @mrdavidjays<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s hard to dismiss someone who looks you in the eye and tells you their truth. We were in the front row for Atlas des Kommunismus at the Gorki Theatre in Berlin, so the amateur performers could and did catch our gaze \u2013 amateur because they were there to tell their stories not to dazzle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1498,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[34,102],"class_list":{"0":"post-1497","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-theatre","9":"tag-verbatim","10":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1497"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1499,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1497\/revisions\/1499"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}