“Who influences whom and why?”
Monika Dobrowlanska talks about her theatre work to Natalie Bloch

1As a German-Polish director, you yourself have an intercultural, multilingual background. Does that give you a specific view of border regions?

2Maybe that’s why I carry several borders and their transgressions with me: linguistic and mental ones, but also a different historical knowledge and collective consciousness that reflects both the Polish and the German perspective. This personal imprint possibly sensitises me to the border regions in a literal and metaphorical sense.

3I grew up in Poland in a multicultural family where several family members were bilingual. So different cultural backgrounds and multilingualism were part of my everyday life. In addition, three of my grandparents were born in regions that were not part of post-war Poland. Border shifts between countries as a result of the First and Second World Wars, changes in the nationality and ownership of regions, led to changes in the nationality of family members - also as a result of Poland regaining its independence in 1918. All this was thus part of my everyday family life, even if I only consciously reflected upon it in adulthood. Flight and expulsion were also part of it. Perhaps that is the reason why I actually feel most comfortable in a multicultural “family of choice”, one where I choose who the members are.

4In addition, of course, there is my own migration experience.

5I fled Poland at the end of the 80s as a very young person because I was madly interested in the world and we in the Eastern Bloc were as good as cut off from the rest of the world. There was no freedom to travel, the “iron curtain” ran through all areas of life. This was one of the most radical border crossings in my life, between two systems and two differently shaped worlds and, consequently, ways of thinking, two opposing ideologies. At the time, we had no idea that the Soviet empire, which was believed to be eternal, already had very deep cracks and would soon fall apart.

6Another very formative experience was when I was in my early 20s, still studying at the Ruhr University in Bochum, when I was engaged in an internship for theatre directing and working in various areas of the multicultural Theater an der Ruhr in Mülheim under the direction of the Italian-born Roberto Ciulli. To this day, this theatre is one of the pioneers of diversity in the German-speaking theatre landscape and one of the few exceptions that employs first-generation migrant actors who are not native German speakers.

7My cosmopolitan attitude and my great interest in different cultures and their exploration in theatre have remained unchanged to this day. I have sometimes strayed into countries that are of little interest to anyone in the cultural world. They were not cool enough...

8Which countries were those?

9Belarus and Ukraine, for example. I travelled to Belarus for the first time in 2004 at the invitation of the Goethe Institute Minsk and have since worked several times with Belarusian artists who are critical of the system and who have almost all fled abroad. We have critically examined Belarusian reality in several productions. Both productions, which were connected with my first visit to Belarus, already had very symbolic titles: I was invited with the production “Diary of a Madman” after Nikolaj Gogol, starring the actor Anatolij Kot, who has since become a superstar of Eastern European cinema. The premiere took place in Berlin at Tacheles. The guest performance in Belarus was to take place as part of a festival at the State Theatre in Minsk. We were granted a permit by the Ministry of Culture for this, but it was withdrawn just two weeks prior to first night.

10Despite several enquiries from the Goethe Institute and even an intervention by the German embassy in Minsk, they did not want to justify it. We heard from unofficial circles weeks later: “How can a play with such a title be performed one day before the elections of our president?”

11Despite this invitation, I managed to travel to the festival as a director to take part in an online project. The task was quite adventurous. Apart from me, four other directors from Eastern European countries were invited. On the first day, we were given several not-yet-published dramas by young Belarusian, Ukrainian and Russian dramatists in Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian. We were supposed to choose one and start rehearsals the next day with actresses and actors from the State Theatre. In 5 days, our premiere was to take place on a single evening, for which each director - I was the only female director - wanted to prepare stage material of 20-30 minutes. I perhaps don’t need to say that we hardly slept during this time and worked through the day and through the night. I decided on a short drama by a completely unknown Belarusian dramatist, “Podari mne bilet”/“Give me a ticket” by Pavel Prazko. Today he is one of the best-known authors on the Belarusian stage, although he has been banned for years. We dealt humorously with the topic “Who actually is Belarusian?”. We pursued this theme further in the Belarusian premiere of Büchner’s “Woyzeck”, which also featured outstanding actors from the Minsk State Theatre. There, the focus was on the analysis of the social structures under the then and unfortunately still current president. So, we were not surprised when the production was banned in Minsk after two performances. We were still able to travel and show the piece at a few festivals outside Belarus.

12During my total of ten trips to Belarus, I did not come across any German or Polish directors, apart from those who were there only for festival or workshop appearances. I had a similar experience in Ukraine in 2015, where I premiered the international cast and multilingual performative reading “Different Views” in Lviv and Ivanofrankivsk. We explored different European perspectives and attitudes to the Russian-Ukrainian war. The project was based on research and analysis of Facebook profiles in Germany, Poland, Ukraine and Belarus regarding the presence/absence and quality of information related to the Russian-Ukrainian war and the Crimean annexation.

13I have always swum a little against the official tide of fashions and of cultural politics and simply acted - often career-damagingly - out of inner conviction, enthusiasm, solidarity with system-critical artists from politically marginalised countries, often out of curiosity for new countries, cultures, traditions. Besides, I’m a freedom-loving person and don’t like to be told what I should be interested in and artistically involved in. Artists are supposed to preserve the inner child. I think that has definitely worked for me to this day. However, it may or may not have been a coincidence that I was far ahead of the official cultural policy of Germany with regards to Belarus and Ukraine. I think it’s a great pity that cultural policy reacts mainly to the headlines instead of being more forward-looking and sustainable.

14A rift full of prejudices and misunderstandings is currently developing between Eastern and Western Europe, and there is hardly any cultural policy to counteract it. It is often forgotten that Eastern Europe is not only Russia…

15What interests you about border regions in general?

16How identities are formed and what triggers people to decide consciously or unconsciously to take one direction or another? Who influences whom and why? Also, how it is influenced by chance? How do transnational identities emerge and what does that mean in greater detail? I think that border regions have a specific liveliness and dynamism. I find these aspects, components very exciting.

17You are not from this region. What advantages or disadvantages did that bring to your work? How did you familiarize yourself with the region?

18The advantage for me was also the disadvantage. Because of my outsider position, there was a certain alienation effect. My view of the country was not fixed, there were no self-evident facts. On the contrary, there were many aha moments, surprises. At the same time, I was always afraid that I would miss something important, that I wouldn’t recognise it or would overlook it.

19The beginning of my engagement with the region came a year before the Remix Place project began, when I was conducting a practical directing seminar for the Master’s programme in Theater Studies and Interculturality at the University of Luxembourg. The participants were all Luxembourgers, and we dealt very intensively with the question of the cultural identity of the Luxembourgers and also of the Alzette-Belval region. I found the cultural and linguistic diversity fascinating and read a lot about the region, both in preparation for the seminar and subsequently. In addition, I had further intensive conversations with the students as well as with other Luxembourgers and travelled the country, especially the Alzette-Belval region, as well as visiting several museums. This led to further encounters and unexpected conversations.

20How did you prepare for the subject matter?

21Since the topic of the Remix Place project was related to the identity of the people in the Alzette-Belval border region, i.e. not only on the Luxembourg side but also on the French side of the border, I also informed myself about it in detail. We also had regular meetings and working sessions with colleagues from the field of geography, who are French and have done a lot of research especially on the French side of the border. Later, more personal contact was made with the local people living in the region.

22In addition, I read psychological and interdisciplinary research approaches on the topic of cognitive-emotional ties, attachments to spaces, places and especially about transnational spaces.

23You often work with interview material in your works, and you generally conducted the interviews yourself. The piece So mir: à quels lieux tu appartiens ? also consists almost entirely of interview material. However, many of these interviews were conducted by the Remix Place team months before and not with a production in mind, but rather under aspects that are foregrounded for another discipline, in this case geography. How do these interviews differ from those you generated yourself for your work previously? How does the focus shift when you interview from an artistic perspective? Do you ask different questions?

24This has been a particularly difficult aspect to my work. The interviews were intended to serve several purposes. They were not only to serve the development of a play, but also to provide material for an exhibition and scientific research in the field of geography. To consider all these aspects satisfactorily in the questioning of an interview has of course been a challenge, perhaps even touching on an impossibility. If the interviews were merely research for a theatre project, they would be conducted accordingly. Perhaps the biggest difference then is that one can react spontaneously to any answers that are offered and deviate from prepared questions if one finds a story scenically interesting. There is the possibility of pursuing conflicts and contradictions that are interesting for the theatre. To find a scenically interesting “gap”.

25The personality of the interview partners, beyond the general vocabulary chosen in any reply, can also provide many ideas for the scenic presentation. Sometimes it is even more exciting than the story being told, it may even contradict the actual answers given. Theatre is, after all, multi-dimensional. It’s not just content, but also the manner in which someone talks, moves, what drives them, the baggage they bring to any question, where they come from and where they are going.

26Another aspect that should not be underestimated is that art must not pursue any purpose except itself, it mustn’t be instrumentalised. The geography of emotions, on the other hand, has a clear goal of formulating proposals for spatial planning. This may involve a conflict.

27How did you deal with the interview material? Did you develop a specific methodology to analyse it?

28First, I did a pure text analysis, filtering out themes and leitmotifs. In the second draft, I looked for overlaps between these themes and systematised the corresponding text fragments accordingly.

29At the same time, I compared the position of the characters on the common themes, whether they were similar, complementary, contradictory or dialogical. The same procedure was then repeated in relation to the motifs. In parallel, I looked for personalities whose fate could transfer the story of the Alzette-Belval cross-border area of France and Luxembourg in a way that would be effective on stage.

30Practical aspects also played a role in the selection of the material, for example how many roles we could cast within our budget.

31What themes interested you most as a writer and director?

• As always, the question of identity, in this particular context of many multi-local identities with different reference points.
• Why people feel they belong to places, or not.
• Fleeting, barely tangible moments of encounter and what they can trigger.
• Paradoxes, such as the story of the “made Luxembourger”.
• Human fates that grow beyond the local level and include an universal level.
• The history of the colonisation of Luxembourg; linked to this, a national trauma of forced recruitment in the Second World War. Basically, it is high time that the topic of colonisation of some regions such as Luxembourg or parts of Central and Eastern Europe was also addressed and named as such within Europe.
• Mutual reflections: The view of Luxembourgers in the French border region and that of French people on the corresponding side, their rapprochement and their conflicts, as well as the limits of understanding each side has for the other.
• Borders in general in the literal and metaphorical sense on different levels, both personal and political.

33You also conducted your own additional interviews, but also used material from documentary books.

34I wanted to achieve a proportionally balanced relationship between Luxembourg and France. For this reason, I found it important to supplement the material with the stories of native Luxembourgers. Through my work as a lecturer in the Master’s programme in Theatre and Interculturality at the University of Luxembourg, I had good contact with former students and was able to talk to them about the region. They put me in touch with others with whom I could conduct further interviews, and they drew my attention to some interesting stories in advance. I discovered other topics related to Luxembourgish identity in books and exhibitions in the region, such as the Migration Museum in Dudelange. This resulted in spontaneous, interesting and inspiring conversations with other contemporary witnesses, such as the director of the Migration Museum, who has witnessed the development of the region since his childhood and has also systematically expanded his knowledge on the subject through his work at the museum. This gave me first-hand information about other aspects of the region as well as unexpected life stories.

35What motifs, what thematic focus did you set?

36One of the interesting motifs for me was that of forced recruitment. I am familiar with forced recruitment by the German occupying power during the Second World War from a Polish and Central and Eastern European perspective. For me, the Luxembourgish position is much fairer to the people who were exploited and forcibly conscripted into the German army. In Luxembourg, those are seen as victims of National Socialism. I consider this to be a progressive and self-confident approach to history from the position of an occupied or colonized country.

37You developed some texts for the production with elderly ladies from a retirement home. What was your aim here?

38I found it interesting to learn about the dreams and unfulfilled wishes of people who possibly don’t have so much time left. Also, because senior citizens are usually more focussed on the past.

39The theater text you have conceived is in the tradition of documentary theater, which primarily brings real-life material, i.e. interview excerpts, documents, archive material to the stage. Peter Weiss, one of the fathers of documentary theater incorporated individual documentary elements into his plays, providing a definition that still applies to documentary theater today: the material is brought to the stage “unchanged in content, edited only in form”. So, the artistic achievement consists primarily in the selection and montage of the theater text. What criteria did you use to conceive the theater text?

40It was exactly as Peter Weiss put it. The content of the texts remained unchanged. But the form was creative - I imagined while I was reading the interviews: What if person X had met person Y?

41What interesting discussions would have arisen? In which situations could certain statements happen? How do you create this microcosm of different languages, views, multi-local identities?

42What motivic correspondences and other connections can be found between the stories and people you have chosen?

• First of all, there is an inherent localized bias in language areas and cultural identities, often also amplified by their juxtaposition: Luxembourgish life stories, French life stories with the freedom to break the unity of time and space. There is also the mirror that both sides hold up to each other. Sometimes it is a distorted image, sometimes the other side recognizes itself in it, sometimes it can be misleading.
• Borders of various kinds as well as how they are crossed: political and material borders, personal borders relating to attitudes and experiences in life as well as gender and prejudices. The impossibility of jumping over one’s own shadow. The juxtaposition of different or matching characters.
• A polyphony of different voices and perspectives, the attempt to create a polyphonic multicultural microcosm.

44The theater text is radically multilingual, which is reflected in the title. Why did you choose it?

45Tell me, where do I belong? This central question runs like a common thread through the transnational and multi-local identity of “my” characters. Sometimes there is no clear answer, sometimes the answer is paid for with one’s own blood. Sometimes the answer is completely paradoxical or cannot be found. But this question forms a common level for the narrative.

46Luxembourgish, German and French are used equally in the play, and there are also participants who speak English. To what extent did the individual languages determine your choice of text?

47I tried to ensure that each language had an equal share in the piece. They determined the selection of texts to the extent that I couldn’t include all the interesting stories in each language but reduced them accordingly. The first version of the text had over 80 pages. The second was around 45 and I ended up with around 25 pages for the third. So, I reduced it draft by draft.

48Let’s move on to the staging part of your work. Your production not only features four actors, but also seven so-called “experts”. Going back to the theater collective Rimini Protokoll, which coined the term “expert”, meaning a person on the stage who is not a professional actor. These are everyday experts who talk about things they have experienced themselves, their lives in the border region, their experiences, their dreams - everything is vouched for, documented. This dual form of authentication creates a great sense of veracity or legitimacy. You once told me in conversation that not everyone who has an interesting story to tell can tell it in an interesting way. Was it one of the selection criteria for the experts, that they can do this? Do they have to have a natural presence?

49As the “experts of everyday life” have to remain authentic, I tried to find different personalities who complemented each other well. It was like a game of roulette because I didn’t know the people beforehand. The interviews both on paper and as recorded sound files were the only contact, I had with the people. There was no face-to-face interaction and no casting. Incredibly, however, I was very lucky that all the “experts of everyday life” invited were open-minded people and our collaboration, as well as that with the actors, was very harmonious and a lot of fun. We were also able to develop a personal level with people who only spoke French, and we communicated with the help of the assistant director, who translated during rehearsals. A good, interesting stage presence is definitely helpful.

50The actors also got involved with their colleagues who had no professional experience in the theater. We were a very harmonious troupe. It was also a nice human experience.

51Under which criteria did you choose them? How do you measure an individual’s talent for presenting a story in an interesting or compelling fashion?

52I think that openness and the willingness to honestly present one’s own point of view is one of the main criteria. Secondly, an ensemble built on contrasts.

53Would that also mean that some people and their stories would do better if they were fictionalized and portrayed by an actor on stage?

54You have to work with the experts as experts and actors as actors. In one case where we were initially talking to an expert, we actually decided that it would be better if her fate were portrayed by an actress, because she lacked the necessary emotional distance. Incidentally, this request came from the expert herself.

55You have to carefully weigh up which stories are more effective on stage if they are fictionalized, and which are more effective if they remain in their authentic context.

56What was it like working with professional actors as well as experts at the same time? Wasn’t that a big difference? How did you deal with the situation, how did the participants deal with it?

57Very enriching. The “experts” were very professional and always prepared themselves very diligently, developed texts and motivated each other. You sometimes wish for such professionalism and commitment from the actors. The interaction with each other was also very collegial, characterized by mutual respect and enjoyment of each other’s performance.

58The play was performed in a huge multi-purpose room at the University of Luxembourg, in which four different venues were built. The audience then visited all four over the course of the evening - in the style of a Stationendrama (“station drama” ). How did this stage concept come about? Why were these four locations needed for this production?

59An important aesthetic category of the production is the journey, the migration, the arrival, the crossing of borders - real, mental, social, intercultural, transnational - both for the performance and for the audience who had to find a new place in the auditorium four times. Yes, these different venues were very important in order to convey to the audience the aesthetic category of crossing borders and having to find one’s way around. I also believe that it worked. I received positive feedback from many audience members in this regard, even if many did not rationally analyse why it was important to them, but rather grasped it on an subconscious level.

60Was there anything that surprised you about the resulting production that you hadn’t expected?

61I think it was above all the commitment and the fantastic performance of the ladies from the French retirement home as well as their openness that absolutely exceeded my expectations. Even the fact that we do not share the same language, either as a mother tongue or a lingua franca, did not put a real barrier between us. I think the texts that we developed in a joint writing workshop were absolutely fantastic.

62You have a great deal of experience in the theater, and audience reactions can of course never be entirely predicted, but what was surprising for you about the audience response?

63I was quite surprised by the fact that a very lively discussion developed after each performance regarding a scene about Villerupt, a small town on the French side. This scene, which was conceived as a grotesque, was much more provocative than expected. Sometimes, unfortunately, the discussions went in a rather nationalistic, not to say racist, direction. There were many surprises: One evening, a lady even mistook the performing actress for the everyday expert presenting her true views and wanted to start a discussion with her in the middle of the performance by contradicting her several times and saying, “You shouldn’t say such things.” I wasn’t expecting such emotional reactions to this scene, but theater is a very lively and communicative medium and sometimes it can turn into an unintentional grotesque.

64I was also surprised by the great approval for the “wandering around” in the room that I mentioned earlier. I wouldn’t have thought that it would be so relevant for the viewers. They said it helped them to perceive and to identify with the different perspectives of the contrasting and sometimes opposed positions in the performance.