Theater Performance: Drei Schwestern

This Report is trying to shortly describe my own EVS here in Germany. The main reason was create meaningful theater project, which became part of Theater GegenStand repertoire, Theater company, which invited me for EVS.

The first big challenge was to chose the right play. Dramaturgy is not in theater very known proffesion, but it is very important indeed. As a new citizen of Germany was very hard at start to choose the play, which is not exciting just for me, but also interesting and bit provocative for the audience here.  At first I took this position "to be a stranger" here as advantage to see German culture behaving from outside. In comparing czech and german culture was interesting to see differences and actual, problematic topics. Through new people and new friends I discovered the fact, how important is (in generaly) German relationship to work. The problem to be pushed to work, which I even do not like, come home exhausted and just sit on sofa and turn on TV and thinking about how one day I will change my life and do something what I really like. And this storyline copies quite exactly Russian theater play Three Sisters by A. P. Chekhov. Although is this play more than 100 year old, it is very actual, with the critic of seeing attitude of people to their life, even the time and space context is different.

Chekhov became in his Theater work almost genius author. Because the play doesn´t seem dramatic at first view at all. There is no over-reacts emotions, loves, murders or monolouge about being and not-being as in Shakespeares work for example. But the Figures which do nothing and just sigh about their destiny the end of the play, which has to be inevitable tragic. Than the Figures look back and see, they didn´t do anything important for world or for their own happiness. And in very similar princip work our lifes aswell. There are nothing no over-played situations, but in our decisions say how we solve our lifes, how quality will be.

The second challenge was for me, how will I figure out the directing of the theater play which is in different language and which also seems at first view as a boring piece. It is very hard to ignore the words, sentences what Chekhov wrote, because all of them has deep meaning. But the most important things are not directly said in the play. It is written between the lines. So I used my not-perfect knowledge of the language again as advantage and tried to concentrate on visual element of the play. To show the audience the topics what should be obvious in the play. So sometimes in Rehearsals we had moments, when I did not fully concentrated on the text but I still told the actors, that I did not understand them. It was important not just what they are saying, but also if I / audience can see their characters, motivations, relationships etc.

And finally the result worked well! Even Chekhov sometimes promise a boredom on the Stage, with theater group we created visual interesting show, which emphasize the main topics of the play. The audience proved to see this responsibility of the characters for their own destiny and similarity of today problems.