This cannot be a review or review, this must be a diary. And not even for the festival diary, but for my personal. With and about my private thoughts, attitudes, experiences, about my world and my influence on this world, because that is what each of the festival events is about, only a few of which can be included in any of the criteria of theatrical analysis, and it is not necessary.
“Homo Novus” is not a theater for me, but an adventure festival, although I like the idea that we go to the theater not to learn, but to experience.
Becoming a queen is a matter of success
This is the first sentence in the description of the show that I wanted and should have read after the production directed by Iveta Poles. ”Bee Matter”. Six human beings with beautiful bodies, long, blonde hair made in princely curls, human beings who crave honey, one after another, peace, after the sun, after (perhaps) “themselves-don’t know”, surrender to each other, the viewer and the bee to the queen.
I don’t know if it was the director’s feminist cry, a shout right in the face of each of us running away in action, haste and arrogance, followed by sexual, material and / or other temporal pleasures, or a harsh cry for help for bees, whose importance in the planet’s ecosystem we have forgotten. . But it was loud and intense. And all of this I more or less got to think about during or after the show: Who am I following? What do I worship? What does my body mean to me, what did I do with it? Don’t my moments of pleasure cause someone else to suffer? Do I know little about bees, do I know them, and is it enough to know or know about them? What is my relationship with the hierarchy? Do I believe in hierarchy? What does it mean to be a (bee) queen? What does it mean to co-live in this world with other living beings? Is pleasure happiness?
Where is the happiness?
The “Feast”, organized by the Berlin association “Edible Alchemy”, Dita Lase and Riga youth, begins with a theatrical commentary on how we treat the food and resources we consume on a daily basis – to the other in the face and also in a container of water, from which they themselves drink a moment later. One of the actors comes out in front and starts beating the plates – thankfully! And sometimes rhetorically asks – where is my happiness?
Later, at another drinking “station”, an ome already clearly knows that her happiness is to rustle in her Sports Palace garden, almost in the very center of Riga. In the voice recording, the lady asks those who have come here for the first time (and I am here for the first time) if she wishes, and she does not have to think for a long time – to be happy! And happy is the whole team involved – warm, enthusiastic and simple in interaction with spectators, enjoyers, eaters, drinkers. And sometimes you don’t need anything more than a simple, pure passion.
It doesn’t even matter if a fact about tea mushrooms is said by real or fictional British scientists, because the main thing is that the event we are in is really, good with nature and with each other.
It’s just good to have nature, to have yeast and sugar, to have flowers, to eat them, to eat by hand from jars, in simplicity, with strangers.
Photo: drawing by Zane Kripe
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The whole event turns into a tour of a place hidden behind a cold, gray fence, but inside it hides an oasis (literally) – with palm-sized peppers, purple tomatoes and, as it turns out, full beds. eat-flower. Some drinkers manage to adopt tea mushrooms, others come to the “dealer” contacts, but I realize how stupid it is to always throw a bow at the gardens and not come to the spy earlier, and I learn that rice can be used to make a Bounty chocolate counterpart. In fact, I already learn a lot more and I also experience, taste, feel with all my senses and try to connect with everything that happens – consciously.
I am 27 years old, it is not much, but in “Feast” I somehow realize that I have already managed to miss this important thing in my life and I am glad that at least about ten young people who led us in this adventure have overtaken me (same I will think again a few days later when I come home from the show “Sex, Drugs and Violence”).
Sometimes we just have words
Sometimes we only have words – sometimes they are not enough, sometimes they are too much.
It’s very easy to misunderstand and very easy not to hear, sometimes because of the phone and the acoustics of the unloving handset, sometimes just because we don’t listen.
These are my most important thoughts after the first part of 600Highwaymen’s show A Thousand Ways, which is a phone call – a conversation moderated by an unfamiliar voice between two other unfamiliar people. The good news – I can be home when I experience it, the bad – I’ve never enjoyed calling and talking on the phone. It seems to me to be the most unloving form of communication, also the most understandable and disturbing. Although the anonymous voice repeatedly emphasizes that I will remember this experience later and find it funny, I cannot find joy in it. But this call reminded me of my childhood, when we used to call strangers with friends – first from the phone, then from landlines when the parents were not at home, and then from their own mobile phones, where, of course, the adrenaline level was much higher, because anonymity was quite conditional. The range of topics that were gutted in those conversations ranged from a cat lying still under a sofa for the second day to instructions for inserting a tampon into the vagina.
I wondered what it would be like to pick up the phone now, dial a number for good luck, and call an unfamiliar person to start a conversation – awkward but meaningful. Just to talk.
1:1
As much as I hate to call, I like to correspond. When someone I don’t know invites me to make friends on social networks, I often choose not to ignore, but try to start a conversation. I also like to meet in life, but only when I’m alone. One on one. And this is the setting for the second part of the show “A Thousand Ways”, which, in my opinion, is not a part, but one of a thousand ways to get to know a stranger. And being in person, I feel much more comfortable, despite the fact that I can almost say and do only what is written in the instructions to me, but the same is right for my seat opposite. Everything is fair.
We are in a dark room with two “instructions” written in front of us and we seem to be playing this show, but at the same time we live.
Everything is fine, it’s interesting. A lot of the time we spend together we just look us in the eyes and imagine something about each other, then we ask some unrelated questions that can only be answered with – yes or no. The current reference asks for a question to be asked to the opposite seat. And I can’t choose between several, but what interests me the most – what will happen next? Will we leave this room together and talk, go have a drink? Let’s say a polite thank you and “home”? And do I want to say anything more to her after all this? But this time the instruction, like the often different circumstances in life, puts things together, and I am left empty-handed.
“Homo Novus” performance “A Thousand Ways. Part Two: Meeting”
Photo: Publicity image
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Time to fly
This is the last phrase in the program of the show “Bee Matter”. Time to fly – with wings, planes, thoughts. Flight means giving up, saying goodbye, leaving something in order to move on, take risks and get to know, see, feel, be aware of what is out of the ordinary and comfortable.
Beck Bergere, festival director, in which said in an interviewthat theater is about stopping reality, another form of communication – it can happen while sitting in a traditional theater hall or for two, even at sunrise –
if it enlivens the imagination, creates curiosity or challenges, it is definitely theater.
My first days of the festival have been about conscious life and taking it in our hands, carrying it on our shoulders and taking responsibility – about the people we meet, about nature and our attitude towards it, also about the words we tell or choose to keep secret.
From September 8 to 18, the international festival of the new theater “Homo Novus” takes place, which offers 23 performances and events in person, remotely, by phone and in text. The program includes new works by Latvian artists, as well as performances created in close cooperation with artists from Norway, Canada, Italy, Germany, Australia, the USA and other countries.
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