International collaboration grounding classics in local contexts
ENWhatever location might summon me, curiosity to learn about people and culture, traditions and taboos, desires and traumas, is the driving force in my work. Engaging deeply and personally with a local team of actors, learning from and through them, shapes the concrete world of a new performance. But the strange feeling of always and forever being an outsider remains. A nostalgic longing for a permanent place of belonging is perhaps a feeling I cannot satisfy in such a professional landscape. The need to discover new places prevails, the terror of a new language, and the thrill at the same time. I’m often asked why I don’t bring a group of my favourite actors together from all over Europe and create a performance in English. But through all this extensive international work, and precisely because of working in local cultures and local languages, I don’t dare to take away the most essential tools from my collaborators— their own language, their own culture. Theatre can be universal only when it is first and foremost grounded in the local. Made for and by people for their local communities. Then the rest of us can translate, transform, learn and gain inspiration from the common themes and ideas in such artworks.
