Song and Stage in the Backwoods of Latvia

Illustration by Michael Pape

It turns out that the cheapest way to get from Paris to Riga in July is to take a flight to Stockholm and then catch the rusty night-boat across the Baltic Sea. At that latitude the midsummer sun only sets for a few hours, as if being the only American on board an old Russian cruise-liner charged with drunken Balticans wasn't strange enough. The ship’s duty-free store sold cheap thirty-packs of beer and I saw more than a few sailor types lugging around their own boxes all night long and into the morning, their trophies piled up on the deck of the ship, all the way to Riga.

I sat at a table on deck during the six-hour sunset to work on the presentation I was preparing to give at my destination, an international theater festival outside Riga. The only information I had about the festival was what little I was able to glean from the Web site. I read and re-read the mission statement of the organizing body, the semantically bizarre "International University Global Theatre Experience":

Dubbed, "Theatre Methods '08 : Between Tradition and Contemporaneity," the festival aimed to explore the theories and practices that bridge the old and the new. A Google search of the two organizers' names only led back to their own website.

I looked over the personal statements of the other presenters. From the looks of it I would be the youngest and least experienced presenter at the festival, a fact that led me to be both extremely nervous and awesomely proud of my young gun status. With no idea what I was getting myself into, and no idea how I was going to fill my one-and-a-half hours of presentation time I did what any normal person confused about their momentary raison d'etre would do. I ordered a beer.

The seas were extremely calm and quite conducive to reflection. I traced in my mind the sequence of events that had led me onto the boat. One of my graduate professors forwarded to me a "call for papers" from an obscure theatre festival in Latvia. I submitted an essay about the history and function of dreams in dramatic literature and the piece was accepted. My university footed the bill and the festival fit nicely into my summer itinerary, roughly between my studies with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the U.K. and a long overdue visit to an old friend in Andalusia. One of the ship's whistles sounded as we passed a small island with a miniature lighthouse.

The first Latvian ale of my life was starting to disappear when a smiling elderly woman named Elizabete asked if she could sit with me at the table on the deck. A few minutes later her husband, Palvils, came strolling up with two fresh pints and joined us. We meandered into the typical introductory conversation and a mutual amiability was fostered as we began to expand our life stories. Palvils was exiled from Latvia by the Soviets for his role in smuggling documents out of the country to the West. He ended up in Germany where he landed a position creating programs for Radio Free Europe, those airwave rebels who were broadcasting the voice of freedom across the Iron Curtain. Over time he was put in charge of creating the religious programs, which led him into studying theology. Some years and hierarchies later Palvils ends up being a Bishop in the Lutheran church. When I playfully asked him if I could kiss his ruby studded Bishop's ring we all laughed but he didn't reply.

I told them where I was going: they laughed. Malpils, Latvia, the location of the theatre 'festival' apparently only had a population of about two-hundred. They were slightly bewildered and wondered if my information was correct.

***

Juan's Hostel in old town Riga wasn't too hard to find. It was a cozy place on a small street with a calm vibe unlike most of the raucous youth hostels in Europe. I met Ilona, a native Latvianne, at the hostel preparing for the opening night rehearsal at the National Song Festival. An annual event, the song festival goes all-out once every four years, and--lucky for me--this year happened to be that all-out year. The official festival events were already sold out but the public was invited to the rehearsal for the modest price of one Euro. Latvians hold the world record for the greatest number of people singing the same song at the same time--some eighty-thousand in unison--most of them dressed in traditional clothes with homemade crowns of daisies on their heads.

Image by Daukante Subaciute

The Latvian Song Festival is like the sweet little sister of Carnival. There's dancing, singing, and drinking, but instead of bare skin and sweaty samba beats, the Latvians sport traditional flowing robes and flowery crowns; instead of mojitos and Cachaça they drink pear cider and ale. There's an eerie purity and nationalistic quality to the festival, but it's a kind of hobbit nationalism, a sweet and sincere pride about Latvian culture that stems from centuries of tug-a-war between Russia and the West. After five hours and four pear ciders, the singing, dancing and fanfare came to end and I followed the masses toward the tram stop.

The following day two young German women, who were also en route to the theater festival, arrived at Juan's Hostel. Their confusion about the event comforted me and a quick friendship was born out of our mutual ignorance. As we rode on the bus together towards Malpils the next day we playfully imagined what this 'festival' might be.

As the hour and half long bus ride came to an end our host city appeared to be a deserted post-Soviet movie set. A few of the locals on the bus had family members waiting for them with cars but the bulk of the others just began walking off down one of the three muddy roads that disappeared into the rain.

As we descended from our coach we discovered that we had not been the only festival attendees on that bus from Riga. There had been a number of Ukrainian performers, a young Romanian actress, and an Italian Commedia dell'Arte maestro riding along with us. We assembled beneath the bus station awning as a heavy summer rain poured down. Our shelter was only about twelve square meters; despite numerous language barriers, we couldn't help but do a flash round of introductions. Sparks flew from the welding torch that a carpenter was using to fix the structural support of the very awning that protected us from the rain. We waited.

After about ten minutes of waiting amidst the smiles and blistering torch light, a luxury Toyota Four-Runner pulled up. The muddy streets, green forests, falling rain and tinted window S.U.V de luxe made the scene feel more like Colombia than Latvia. Sergey Ostrenko and Inga Ryazanoff, the mysterious organizers of the event, emerged from the vehicle, began hasty introductions and then quickly motioned for us to begin loading up in the car. Needless to say it took a couple of trips to get us out of there. We were all wet, foreign, and confused. It's one of those rare moments in life when it's actually convenient to be crammed into a tight space with thespians, when light heartedness and mime skills really come in handy.

The drive was only a three-minute trip, a couple of turns down the muddy roads and through a small forest grove to a vacant boys' school dormitory that would serve as our home for the next week. There were about twenty other people in the foyer with their suitcases and bags waiting to get their official festival packet of information and room keys. I began to realize that this was indeed an international affair, as I could hear Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and lots of foreign English accents bouncing around the room.

After everyone had checked into their rooms we began to walk through the adjacent forest to the "Malpils Cultural Centre." The Centre would serve as our dining area, meeting room and workshop and performance space. The Centre also included the town's only café, the town's only bar, and from what I could tell, the town's only store. It did not take one long to realize that points A (the dormitory complex) and B (the center) were the only real places of interest in the town, save a few charming trails woven throughout the forests.

We would all soon discover that this festival was not a festival, but rather a sort of conference. With the exception of a Chinese opera performance and Ritsuko Tsumaki's solo dance, the workshops and performances were closed to the public. Maybe organizers weren't prepared to bridge the cultural distance between this small, conservative Latvian town and the exotic performers. I sympathized, thinking about how some of these pieces would go over in my small Texas hometown.

The conference environment creates a very intimate ethos among participants, especially when it's a week long conference in the middle of nowhere. We all bonded fast and found solidarity in our collective confusion about the "festival." Everyone came for their own reasons: resume building, travel, a genuine learning experience, or simply to accompany friends who had decided to attend. Physical pain and cultural exchange became the common themes of each day. Throughout the various workshop settings and meals, everyone seemed slightly nervous about the looming dark eyes of Ostrenko, who moved throughout the festival but rarely spoke. His comrade Inga was more extroverted, but that was mainly due to her role as photographer and translator.

I came to the festival hoping to increase my theatrical worldview and to do a bit of networking with colleagues in the field. I had no idea I would meet people who would have an impact on my thoughts about theater, who would galvanize my own passion for the art. I was in the midst of writing a new play slated to be staged in the fall: a bilingual and multi-cultural dig into the collective identity of the people of Texas, a story shaped by interwoven histories of the First Nations Peoples, the Mexicans, and the Anglos. The significance of my own connection to my homeland and people grew as I observed and got to know some of my fellow festival goers.

Sahar Assaf had traveled to Latvia from Lebanon. Sahar helped found a peace organization called "Halas!" (Enough!) to help bring an end to the in-fighting of the Lebanese people. She came to the festival to see what methods were being used to bridge tradition and contemporaneity, hoping that it might be of some use at home. The fact that Sahar's life and art is defined by conflict made me grateful for my hometown’s relative tranquility and galvanized my gut feeling that artists today must help shed light onto the dark places in our world; in my own life, that place is the massive border wall being constructed along the Rio Grande.

Image by Daukante Subaciute

Fabrizio Paladin's Commedia dell'Arte workshop and solo performance revealed himself to be a true master of the genre. There are few indigenous Western art forms that have survived to this day; the Commedia dell'Arte is one of them. An extremely physical art with codified movements and gestures, Commedia dell'Arte provides the comedic foundation upon which most of our contemporary comedy has been constructed. Crude humor, physical violence, entangled love stories, witty repartees and exaggerated masks are all stock elements of the Commedia trade. Molière and Shakespeare pulled from the Commedia cannon at will. Paladin explained to me that like rappers, there are a lot of 'poseurs' in the theatre world claiming to know the art of Commedia dell'Arte. I myself had seen a handful of performances and even had been in two professional Commedia workshops and a college Commedia acting course, all of which had failed to meet my personal expectations about this illustrious art. Fabrizio set a new standard in my mind that all Commedia artists must now live up to. His passion for his art (and since he is Italian, it really felt like his art ) provided a positive counterpoint to the gravity of the world that Sahar brought to the festival.

The desire of each person there to share his or her own culture and to embrace the culture of others helped all of us get through the six days of life in the seemingly forgotten hamlet of Malpils. As the last session of our improvised summer camp came to a close on Sunday afternoon, a tempest blew in off the Baltic Sea and began lashing the forest and dumping waves of warm rain. We all congregated under the awning of the Cultural Center, some with pre-emptive evening ales in hand, and watched the water dance and swirl in the air. The firebrand Ukranian actress Anastasiya Kasilova suddenly ran out into the open courtyard, skipping and dancing, and was quickly followed by another half of our company. Within minutes we were all soaked from wet hugs and dripping dance partners. There are some moments in life where beauty slaps you in the face so hard all you can do is laugh and smile and say 'thank you.' The next day we all went our own ways home: to war zones, militarized borders, economic crises, and suffocating consumer climates.

Michael Pape is a playwright living in Wimberley, Texas.

Daukante Subaciute lives in Vilnus, Lithuania. Photography is a hobby, something she does when she feels happy. If she passes her exams, she would like to go on to study design at university.