The Ibsen Award, presented every two years in Norway, is considered the “Nobel Prize of theatre”. Now the director Lola Arias has been honored. She also associates the prize for her current piece about freedom with concrete hope.
Life is a construction site. This is especially true if you have just been released from prison and are counting forward again – the days in freedom, which in many cases mean the days until the next arrest. The six Argentinian protagonists in the play “The Days Out There” by Lola Arias aptly stand in a scaffolding setting, with a car in front of them as a symbol of freedom.
Everyone says how long they have been out: The audience in the National Theater in Oslo hears numbers between 870 and 1460. The four women and two trans men appear very authentic with their tattoos and their austere charm. No wonder, since six former convicts play themselves here – in a naturalistic show of fate from the Argentina of right-wing populist President Javier Milei.
The piece has been seen in France, Spain and Germany, including at Berlin’s Gorki Theater, where there will be two performances again on November 23, 2024. Arias has lived in the German capital for ten years and has been producing transatlantic for more than 15 years. Now “The Days Out There” stopped off in Oslo. The director, who developed the theme of her film “Reas” about female prisoners in prison with six actresses into a post-release revue – with music and dance – was awarded the International Ibsen Award for her work. The award, which is awarded every two years by the Norwegian state, is presented by a jury of experts and is endowed with 2.5 million crowns (currently around 220,000 Ero), is considered the “Nobel Prize of Theater”.
Everyday life as a re-enactment
The 48-year-old award winner follows Ibsen award winners such as Peter Brook, Christoph Marthaler and Jon Fosse. Arias has been working as an author, theater and film director, musician, installation artist and actress for 25 years and has developed her very own kind of theater. She succeeds in reconstructing the everyday lives of her protagonists from their stories and bringing them to the stage as a re-enactment, as a re-play – in a production with those affected that nevertheless follows and reflects the laws of fictional drama.
The fact that there is no need for an actor or a play by Shakespeare, for example, “in this sense I feel a strong connection with Peter Brook,” says Lola Arias in an interview with WELT, “because he was extremely experimental in both the theater and the film , in the direction his projects took, very open to inspiration from people, situations, places or groups.”
With Ibsen it’s a different story, after all she never staged dramas based on literary models, but always her own projects. But there is also closeness there: Ibsen’s plays sharpened and changed our perspective. Ingrid Lorentzen, National Ballet director in Oslo and jury chairwoman, sums it up like this: “Lola Aria’s plays don’t just tell stories, but, like Ibsen’s dramas, act as a means of unsettling.”
The audience often experiences this uncertainty years after the actors have met their fate. They are all survivors of smaller or larger disasters. In her evening “The Year I Was Born” in 2012, Arias worked with Chileans who re-enacted their parents’ youth during the Pinochet dictatorship. The work was based on the experiences of “My Life After” (2009), in which performers brought the experiences of their parents’ generation from the time of the Argentine military dictatorship (1976–1983) to the stage. Dressed in their parents’ clothes, playing with their memories, reading their letters, they brought the past to life.
Two evenings in the Bremen Theater, with homeless people and Bulgarian refugee children, were followed by the “Minefields” trilogy. Three British and three Argentine Falklands War veterans who had shot at each other in battle explored shared perspectives and irreconcilable differences on stage. “Mother Tongue” addressed perspectives on motherhood in 2022. A short excerpt from “Happy Nights” from Berlin, an intimate address to the audience on the topic of sex work by the performer River Roux, ensured undivided attention in the National Theater as the start of the Ibsen Award ceremony.
In “The Days Out There” she doesn’t talk about the violence in Argentine penitentiaries; she “didn’t want to follow the stigmatization of women, but wanted to show what hope and beauty there is in them,” says Arias. She achieved this touchingly with the help of the talented self-promoters Yoseli Arias, Delfino Natal Delfino, Estefanía Hardcastle, Noelia Perez, Paulita Asturayme and Carla Canteros. Her theater goes beyond documentary theater.
The director tells the story with a passionate tone that no one can find in the German theater. The ex-prisoners describe the stories leading up to their arrest and how they ended up in prison guilty or innocent, even being deceived by the lawyers who were supposed to defend them. Then it’s about prison experiences, the tattoos, the worship of the folk saint “Gauchito Gil”, a kind of underworld Jesus in prison, a spiritual savior.
Workshops in prison
There are songs and conversations about the taste of freedom and the obstacles it brings with it when it comes to housing, work or your own family. But it’s also about the opportunity that the job in the theater offers. After all, actors are real citizens, have ID cards and accounts, and health insurance. The tour with “The Days Out There”, which began at the Festival d’Avignon, was extended after the awards ceremony until April 2025 – where a guest performance at the Mousonturm in Frankfurt is scheduled.
Arias is aware of her responsibility. Doctors and lawyers work as a team to accompany the actors, some of whom are traumatized. The director prepared the production of the film and the play for years. “I gave the first workshops in prison in Argentina in 2019,” she says, “during the pandemic I wasn’t allowed to continue working inside, so I started working with those who had been released.” After shooting the film, she asked six of the 14 actresses , “those who were most committed” to whether they wanted to continue with the play.
The Ibsen Prize means a lot to her given the current production, which is by far her most complex. The news reached her when she thought it was hopeless, she says. The prize was not ego fodder, but rather encouraged her to “call artistic directors and festival directors to tell them that the next Ibsen Prize winner is on the line and that they should please co-finance the piece.” She had 22 co-producers Ending.
„The Days Out There”, Gorki Theater, Berlin, performances on November 23rd at 5 and 8 p.m
Participation in the trip was supported by the International Ibsen Award. Our standards of transparency and journalistic independence can be found at www.axelspringer.de/unabhaengigkeit.
