Ole Frahm is a member of LIGNA, the collective he formed together with Michael Hüners and Torsten Michaelsen. LIGNA is among the notable theatre groups in European performance and media art, known for its work with group audio situations and its exploration of social and political processes. In 2017, the group received the George Tabori Prize for independent performing arts in Germany. Anita Angelova interviewed Ole Frahm about ‘Rapture and Rage. Studies on Authoritarian Characters’, presented as part of the festival’s Showcase Programme.

How did the idea for Rapture and Rage emerge, and how did the collaboration with Bulgarian artists begin?

I first came to Sofia in 2011, when we presented our piece The New Man, which dealt with the aesthetics of the 1920s – Brecht, Chaplin, Meyerhold, Laban. At that time, we met Stefan Shtereff, who is part of Antistatic International Festival for Contemporary Dance and Performance, and we began thinking about a possible collaboration. Our first joint work was Secret Radio, which premiered, I think, in 2013 or 2014. It took some time, but for us it was a very important step forward. Afterwards, in Germany, we produced a piece about the First World War called The Great Refusal. Stefan was still thinking that we should continue collaborating, and we were very happy about that. He proposed doing something about the Georgi Dimitrov (Bulgarian communist notorious for participating in the group that set fire to the Reichstag in 1933). I remember we were in Genoa, showing The Great Refusal, and we thought: Dimitrov is a very specific story. At that time, we were working a lot with collective bodies, and with the question of how one can tell a biography today. Now I might think differently, but at that moment it seemed difficult. Then we discussed Dimitrov a little, and of course his famous thesis on fascism. This was in 2015. In Germany, Alternative für Deutschland was already quite strong. In Bulgaria, there was also a strong right-wing party at that time, which later disappeared, but then it was present again. And Trumpism had already started. So, we said: perhaps we cannot make something specifically about Dimitrov, but we can think about fascism. We proposed this to Stefan, and he said yes, it was a good idea. We applied for funding, and in December 2016 we had a kick-off meeting in Budapest, because of Orbán. We interviewed many people there, and that became the starting point. For us, it was very interesting because LIGNA comes more from working in public space. We have also done a lot of theatre work, but our development started in the city, in public spaces. Stefan, and the composer Emilian Gatsov, come much more from theatre. So, it was very nice for us to work with people who have a different approach to theatre. It created an interesting tension.

Rapture and Rage explores the appeal of authoritarianism and radical communities. What originally motivated LIGNA to investigate this subject?

The challenge for us was that most of the people who come to our performances are, in one way or another, already anti-fascist. So, we thought it would be boring simply to tell them something about fascism. What interested us was something else – the ambivalence. The authoritarian character is not only a right-wing phenomenon. It does not belong only to the far right. We had worked before on another piece about Oedipus, subjectivity, and the question of what kinds of machines produce our subjectivity, and how this can be reproduced through performance. That was the starting point: how can we create a situation in which the audience feels awkward. Because of course they know they are not fascists. But what happens when the body begins to follow certain instructions. When a voice tells you what to do. When is there a desire to be told how to act. At the beginning, our work in public space was very much against control. It was about subverting spaces. There was a safe position there: you identify yourself as deviant, you act collectively, you empower yourself. That was important and strong. But many people would ask us: yes, but we are doing what the voice on the radio, or the voice in the headphones, tells us to do. And that is true. There is tension. Of course, the voices that control public space – video surveillance, security, institutions – are much stronger. The radio has a weak voice because it has no eyes. It does not really survey you. We cannot control whether someone listens to our piece or whether they do what we say. In theatre, however, it is different, because people watch each other. If I do not follow the rules, others may wonder why I am not doing it. But in Rapture and Rage, different groups are always doing different things, and you are never completely sure what instructions the others have received. That also creates a particular feeling. For us, it was important that the performance remained playful, that it remained theatre. There are two roles: one is active, and the other is more relaxed, more observing, without the need to do anything. So, there are two different ways of being in space.

The performance turns the audience into active participants rather than passive observers. Why was it important for you to make the audience experience the mechanisms of suggestion, obedience and collective behaviour, instead of simply watching them represented on stage?

We have never really made theatre in the traditional way, so for us this was natural. Theatre itself is a kind of authoritarian structure. There is the stage, and the audience sits. Today, you are forced to sit. This is something that began with bourgeois culture. Before that, the audience would stand, smoke, drink, and move around. Theatre was a much louder, more social, even more dubious place. With modern theatre, with the role of listening and the voice of the author, a very sophisticated form of attention appeared. But bodily, the spectator remains in a forced situation. This represses the bodily experience and turns theatre into something mainly visual and intellectual. And when you deal with something like fascism, it cannot be only an intellectual question. Even if you put it on stage, the division between stage and audience remains. 

We try to work differently. We do not want simply to represent something that is different from the spectator and with which the spectator can identify intellectually. We want it to be played through the body. In a Brechtian sense – through action, through gestures, through discovering what those gestures do to you. One of the influences on the performance was an early work by Anselm Kiefer called Occupations, in which he took photographs of himself giving the Hitler salute. Interestingly, he did this in countries that had not been occupied. Kiefer explained that he was looking for the fascist within himself and trying to understand what that gesture was doing to him.

For us, this was a very important moment. Most people would say: no, I am not a fascist. But especially in Germany, many people have parents or grandparents who gave that salute. And that salute did something to them. There is an inheritance of the gesture. The question is how you touch that inheritance. That is why we were interested in making the spectator leave the comfort zone saying: I know where I stand, I am safe, I am not endangered by this. Because in our society it is very possible to be attracted by fascist thoughts, moments, motives or forms of behavior – even if one does not admit it to oneself.

The piece asks why authoritarian ideas can become attractive in times of crisis. In your view, what emotional needs or desires make people receptive to these forms of politics today?

I think it is very important that people get to know their own desires – that they understand why something attracts them, what the moment of attraction is. This is a difficult question, because it is individual, subjective. But at the same time there are also collective desires. For example, the desire for something else to act instead of you. The desire to be able to relax, to have a good private life, and for someone else to take responsibility. I think this is very understandable. But we would also like to produce another desire – the desire for collective action in which something can happen between people. A different social space can open. The problem is that the social space of authoritarianism is not very interesting. It is extremely simple: leader and followers. And it only functions if others are excluded, humiliated, harassed or destroyed. That is the structure. And it is very depressing. The question is how to organise it. But to do that, we also have to see that we live in a society which often depends on looking down on others, on excluding others, on maintaining hierarchies. So, the question is not only how to fight openly authoritarian structures, but also how to think about the authoritarian structures of society itself.

“Rupture and Rage” on 10 June, 5PM and 7:30PM, Drama Theatre – Second Stage.