Alvis Hermanis

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Alvis Hermanis (2010)

Alvis Hermanis (born April 27, 1965 in Riga ) is a conservative Latvian actor , theater director , playwright and director of the New Riga Theater (Jaunais Rīgas teātris).

Life

Alvis Hermanis graduated from the Latvian State Conservatory in acting in 1988. In 1990 he joined the International Youth Theater Studio in Paris . Since 1997 he has been the artistic director of the New Riga Theater. He is currently one of the most creative Latvian theater directors and the best known internationally. Sometimes Hermanis acts as an actor in his performances. He has also celebrated success in the plays of other directors: In 2004 he was named Best Actor of the Year for his role as Jean in the play Miss Julie by August Strindberg ( Jūlijas jaunkundze , director Māra Ķimele ). He has also acted in several films.

Productions

Since 1993 he has staged performances at the New Theater in Riga. With projects such as Like a Calm and Peaceful River is the Home - Coming after Steven Soderberghs Sex, Lies and Videotape (1992), one of his first works at the New Theater in Riga, he has already received critical accolades for the “best production of the season” . This was followed by Marquise de Sade after Mishima Yukio (1993, best production of the year in Latvia). With this production he was invited to the Baltic House Festival in St. Petersburg in 1995 .

Further productions: The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1994), Fire and Night based on a play by Jānis Rainis and in the music by Jānis Mediņš at the Latvian National Opera , which won the Great Music Prize of Latvia (1996), Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (1998), Bungee Jumping by Jaan Tatte (2000), which was shown on tour in Canada and the USA. Die Stadt by Jewgenij Grischkowez (2001) and Der Auditor by Nikolai Gogol (2002; best production of the year in Latvia, Montblanc Young Directors Award 2003).

With his New Theater Riga he took part in festivals in Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Austria, the USA, Canada, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Italy as well Serbia / Montenegro participated. In addition to the regular guest performances of the Riga troupe, his works have been seen more and more frequently in German-speaking theaters and festivals in recent years. In 2005, Hermanis directed Das Eis. Collective reading of a book with the help of the imagination of Wladimir Sorokin in Frankfurt am Main and at the RuhrTriennale . In 2007 Hermanis staged The Sound of Silence for the Berliner Festspiele . Since 2007 he has directed Burning Darkness by Antonio Buero Vallejo (2006), Väter (2007) and Der Idiot at the Schauspielhaus Zürich . Beginning of Dostoevsky's novel (2008). On April 4, 2008, the Cologne affair celebrated its premiere at the Cologne Theater and there on April 27, The Secrets of Kabbalah according to Isaac B. Singer. In the 2009/10 season, Alvis Hermanis directed the Austrian premiere of Eine Familie by Tracy Letts at the Vienna Academy Theater . His production Fathers was taken over to the Akademietheater in the 2010/11 season.

On October 8, 2010 his version of Der Ruf der Wildnis nach Jack London premiered at the Münchner Kammerspiele, on May 5, 2011 his five-hour production of Chekhov's Platonov at the Burgtheater Vienna and also there on September 25, 2011 his version of Schnitzler's Das weite Country . The Chekhov production was invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen 2012 .

Il trovatore , Salzburg Festival 2014

Hermanis staged operas for the first time at the Salzburg Festival : in 2012 Bernd Alois Zimmermann's soldiers , in 2013 Harrison Birtwistles Gawein , both in the Felsenreitschule , both times with Ingo Metzmacher on the podium, in 2014 Il trovatore with Anna Netrebko and Plácido Domingo in the Großes Festspielhaus , in summer 2016 Die Love of Danae by Richard Strauss , also in the Großer Festspielhaus (with Franz Welser-Möst on the podium).

2013 he was selected by the schaubühne invited in Berlin, summer guests of Maxim Gorky to stage.

2015 he directed at the Burgtheater The Government Inspector by Nikolai Gogol . In 2016 he directed Madama Butterfly at La Scala in Milan , he was also responsible for the stage design.

In 2017 he made his debut at the Vienna State Opera with Richard Wagner's Parsifal .

Controversy

In November 2014, Hermanis accused the Russian President Putin of disrespectful behavior towards the late writer Vasily Makarowitsch Schukschin . After visiting the Moscow Hermanis production of "Schukschin's Tales", Putin took the podium to reinterpret the writer Schukschin as an ally of current Russian politics in a propaganda speech. The fact that Putin had also expressly praised the director Hermanis, even though he had been blacklisted for people with an entry ban a month earlier, characterized Hermanis as potentially dangerous because it was politically illogical.

Alvis Hermanis canceled a production planned for April 2016 in Hamburg in protest at the Thalia Theater for refugees. He considers the humanitarian commitment to be wrong and does not want to be associated with it. According to the press release, Hermanis accused the theater of falsifying its statements from a private letter context. He posted a full statement on his part on the homepage of the New Riga Theater: As a father of seven children working in Paris, for private reasons he did not want to mourn the victims of the terrorist attacks on November 13, 2015 in Paris and at the same time work for a theater that was involved in Identify refugee reception centers. He ended the collaboration after it became clear to him in discussions that the theater management was not open to dissenting opinions.

Director style

All of Hermanis' productions differ to a great extent in terms of style and theme, but what they all have in common is the orientation of the performance towards the work of the actor, its intellectual nonconformity and the search for an autonomous, spiritually enriching language of art. So he has z. B. in the famous production The Long Life renounced language, as well as in The Sound of Silence . In his performances, Alvis Hermanis plays characteristically with different theater styles and aesthetics, with eastern and western cultural elements. Hermanis creates his own, original combinations using figures and symbols from individual periods of global culture and history. In particular, he draws on the historically determined connection between Latvia and Russia and emphasizes how much today's Latvia has been shaped by these conditions, which can be observed in the auditor or in long life .

The New Riga Theater, which he directs, can be seen as a starting point for new theater experiences and the search for the limits of reality. In addition to classical, psychological-style performances, such as Mein armer Marat ( Mans nabaga Marats ) by Arbusow 1997 or The Long Life ("Garā dzīve") 2003, he also uses the puppet theater ( A story about Kaspar Hauser 2003) or a mixture different media and perspectives in Nach Gorki ("Tālāk") 2004. Since 2005 he has been intensively concerned with the subject of Latvians and with stories that are based on real life. In the program of the Latvian Stories , Hermanis writes: "The life of a real person is worth more than all of Shakespeare's plays put together." In some cases, this type of work has already been done in the long life , with this multiple authorship reaching the climax in the productions Latvian Stories (2005) ( Latviešu stāsti ), Latvian Love (2006) ("Latviešu mīlestība") and Cologne Affair (2008). In these works, Alvis Hermanis and his actors prove to be precise observers of their environment.

In 2010 Hermani's play Marta vom Blaue Hügel (Latvian: Zilākalna Marta) was performed at the Wiesbaden Theater Biennale New Plays from Europe . At the Wiener Festwochen 2010 he performed his play Kapusvēkti - Friedhofsfest .

Awards

Alvis Hermanis with the Nestroy Theater Prize 2010 as best director

Hermanis has received numerous theater awards in Latvia, Poland and Croatia, as well as at the BITEF '93 festival . Furthermore:

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Alvis Hermanis: "I'm conservative and proud of it" Interview , Andrea Schurian, Der Standard July 26, 2016
  2. ↑ Karin Kathrein: Alvis Hermanis. The spiritual miracle happens or does not happen  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.festspielfreunde.at  
  3. ↑ http://www.delfi.lv/kultura/news/theatre/hermanis-pec-suksina-stastu-noskatisanas-putins-kapa-uz-skatuves-un-uzvedas-necienigi.d?id=45190692 message on delfi. lv (accessed December 9, 2015)
  4. ↑ http://www.deutschlandradiokultur.de/eklat-am-thalia-theater-ist-alvis-hermanis-noch-bei-trost.1013.de.html?dram:article_id=338878
  5. ↑ http://www.taz.de/Rassistischer-Regisseur-am-Thalia-Theater/!5258148/
  6. ↑ http://www.mopo.de/hamburg/ausiegen/buehne---show/nach-thalia-absage-kampnagel-boykottiert-regisseur-hermanis-23218836
  7. ↑ http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/alvis-hermanis-streit-mit-thalia-theater-auf-distanz-zu-fluechtlingen/12690994.html
  8. ↑ Is the theater director Alvis Hermanis a racist? In: sueddeutsche.de. December 6, 2015, accessed April 20, 2018 .
  9. ↑ http://www.delfi.lv/kultura/news/theatre/hermanis-thalia-theater-manipuleja-ar-maniem-izteikumiem.d?id=4680132  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Message on delfi.lv (accessed December 9, 2015)@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.delfi.lv  
personal data
SURNAME Hermanis, Alvis
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Latvian actor, theater director and director of the Riga New Theater
DATE OF BIRTH April 27, 1965
PLACE OF BIRTH Riga