Līga Ulberte, a theater scientist who worked at “Gammaņu nakts” 201 2020. and theater critic Zane Radzobe, who will judge this season ‘s productions. The new jury has already started its work.
Longer season
This year, due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the state of emergency declared in the country, the “Players’ Night” jury extended its work by three months – if the jury usually ends the season on June 10, this time it was September 10.
“Since we unfortunately had a number of shows that had premiered but the jury didn’t see them until mid-March, our main hope was that the theaters would be able to show what we didn’t see. Some did.” was so mechanical – from June 10 to September 10, “explains Līga Ulberte.
This year, the Latvian National Theater’s performance “Boy Who Saw in the Dark” received the most nominations, but Līga Ulberte emphasizes that the jury does not count the nominations when nominating candidates for prizes. “The jury nominates what it deems necessary to nominate, and then, as it matches, it matches,” says Ulberte.
Without revealing the names, theater critic Zane Radzobe admits that she had 2-3 favorite shows last season, which have also been nominated.
Describing the work of the jury, Līga Ulberte admits that there have been no major disputes between the juries, but there have been discussions. “But in general we really had a lot of discussions, and what is really atypical is that we had two very long nomination discussion sessions: one in June to understand the living process with which it has ended, and the other now in September,” says Līga Ulberte . “It seemed to us that we would just swell our tails in September, so to speak, but no, it turned out that what came in the summer had a lot of impact on the original list, and this one changed there. Because I would say we really “We talked a lot, a lot more, maybe more than in my experience in other years,” notes Ulberte.
New associations and new theater management
At the beginning of the year, several new theater associations and creative teams entered the Latvian theater space. How did the new words prove themselves this season? Zane Radzobe evaluates: “I would say that some of them have proven to be extremely viable in the new conditions – more mobile, more flexible, more interesting.
Because, of course, it is much more difficult for big theaters to respond to such challenges, it must also be understood. Small units are more interesting and more responsive. ”
Assessing how the challenges of this season have been coped with by the big theaters, where new directors have recently started working, Līga Ulberte notes: “About the National Theater – this season proved to me extremely clearly – not even what happened before March, but what happened after that – because we may or may not like digital forms of theater, but could not help noticing that the National Theater was the first to come and worked virtually all the time. We can discuss what the end result is, but the fact itself – the “White Cube”, the Oskars Pauliņš light show, and book readings, which were also the case for many others. It seemed to me that they feel very much at the National Theater – I don’t know, the new management, the director – but they are thinking about how to adapt at this time. ”
Zane Radzobe, on the other hand, believes that the New Riga Theater (JRT) and the Liepāja Theater were the first to respond to the pandemic conditions. Radzobe explains that the Liepāja Theater was the one who “immediately understood how to blame the existing production for the digital format, and it turned out very well. It was the right time. JRT, on the other hand, with their reading position is a very specific type of theater, but they reacted very quickly. ”
Commenting on the performance of the Daile Theater since the new management started working there, Radzobe says: “Starting from the first performances they started to release – maybe already from the“ Dreamers ”, but probably from those summer performances, Daile feels new breath at all.
Its artistic direction has obviously changed very rapidly. ”
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Digital projects and the challenge of a pandemic
Assessing the offer of theaters last season, adapting to the situation created by the Covid-19 pandemic, the jury also decided to create a new category “Event of the Year in the digital environment”. As Līga Ulberte emphasizes, this is a reaction to this year’s season, not a category that is planned to continue next year.
“I hope that it will not continue, because it is not really a new nomination, it is a reaction to this year’s special situation, in which this offer turned out to be bigger and more diverse than it seemed at first,” explains Līga Ulberte. “And here it deliberately left that rather vague wording – ‘event in the digital environment’.”
Ulberte notes that not all digital projects created during the pandemic can be called performances, and the new category was created to support theaters that are looking for and finding ways to continue to meet audiences in the new situation.
“Yes, it offers something of its own and sometimes, I would even say, a whole new thing,” says Ulberte about pandemic theater projects, noting: “I hope it will be just a one-off practice in this strange area.”
Zane Radzobe agrees that “Event of the Year in the Digital Environment” is not a separate nomination, but believes that the question of whether projects that arose during an emergency is just a crisis phenomenon is “more complex and philosophical”.
“For example, when I look directly at the nominations ‘Event of the Year in the Digital Environment’, I undoubtedly see one show that was supposed to be at the big-format shows of the year,
which is one of the best productions last season, ”says Radzobe.
“And it seems to me the essential thing to think about and talk about in this whole process is this: namely, the theater has been able to swallow anything and reflect on what real life is like from the very beginning. And our real lives today are very much digital, “says Zane Radzobe.
She considers that what matters is not the medium in which the performance is created, but the artistic goals that are achieved and whether the work is simply an attempt to translate projects that were supposed to come alive into a new format, or the artist immediately thought of the digital environment. which these ideas are best implemented in the digital environment.
“From this point of view, I myself really like Roland’s song, precisely because Quadrifron understands very well how the media works and how they can interact with people,” says Radzobe.
And the “Iran Conference” is a play that is actually written for the digital environment.
Imagine what it looks like and what it really looks like in a live theater – it’s weaker because the digital environment itself is a great contribution. ”
However, digital projects require other evaluation criteria, emphasizes Līga Ulberte. She explains: “At first we thought it was hopeful that we would only evaluate projects that really took place online, that is, live – the actor is doing something, and we are following it at that moment. We realized that there are literally a couple of such projects. Most of them are treated one way or another. But now nominated for Quadrifron’s “24h” is once an online project. “
“Of course it’s a lot cool, but I don’t think some of these projects would have been if the theater had been under normal conditions,” Ulberte sums up the range of digital projects.
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Nominated for one show or work per season?
Commenting on the candidates nominated by the jury for the “Director of the Year” award, Līga Ulberte notes that the question of which performances the specific artists are nominated for is topical. The discussion about this after the announcement of the nominations has also emerged on social networks.
Ulberte explains: “And this is a valid question, it comes up every year. Do we nominate a person in any nomination for one of his best jobs, or for, say, a seasonal job and multiple jobs? That is the way it is now, and we did the same, that we acted differently.
We acted depending on the situation.
There are some artists, not only in the director’s nomination, but also elsewhere, to whom almost all the works are named, because they show the amplitude in which this artist is able to work in one season. And the intensity with which Valters Sīlis and Elmārs Senņovs work – you have to read all those names for five minutes. It also shows some quality. But I agree that this is the subject of discussion – is it necessary? ”
Large range of children’s and youth performances
Līga Ulberte mentions the offer of children’s and teenagers’ performances as one of the biggest joys of the season. She emphasizes: “The ‘school bag’ is doing an amazing job, and there has finally been a movement in this area that I do not think has been the case so far. This has to do with both the financial support of the School Bags and the political vision.
But it also has to do with a new generation of creative artists who feel very good in this genre, who work with fantasy, who have a completely different understanding of children’s theater than it seems in 90% of cases for our Puppet Theater as an institution.
There really is a living process going on.
True, this is not easy for the jury. It needs to be followed extremely carefully – this project theater life, because she is sometimes not, as they say, too coordinated, and sometimes they have to be found to find them. ”
Theater diversity – the strength of Latvia
Evaluating the offer of major project theater performances last season, Ulberte emphasized: “I would like to hope that in this list of nominations you can also feel that the jury has conceptually turned its face towards these project theaters. It is not too easy for such an administrative side. I would also like to invite the project theaters to work with the jury a little more, not to make us walk after them so that they can watch their performances. But in general, what they do is extremely good, and it must ultimately be judged together, not by some other principle of little weirdness.
It’s a contemporary, cool, modern, diverse theater. ”
Zane Radzobe, in her turn, emphasized that Latvia’s strength lies in the fact that we have a diverse theater. “In the end, what any jury should focus on is being able to understand what the evaluation criteria are for each type of theater, and in the end simply selecting the best that is happening. And it doesn’t just happen in certain homes or in certain formats. “
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