INTERVIEW WITH THE DIRECTOR
THOMAS YORK

— Thomas, can you illustrate the salient features of your theatre?

"One factor that certainly distinguishes my way of doing theatre is the use of predominantly poetic dramaturgy; I have never been a great fan of the so-called prose-theatre and, for obvious reasons, I have always favoured poetry”.

— The great theatre invariably used the language of poetry, from Aeschylus to Shakespeare.

“Yes. In my little way, I follow their example”.

— And from the point of view of strictly directorial choices, could you identify your predilections for us?

“First of all there is a basic resolution: that of total strangeness from the official theatre (be it bourgeois or otherwise) and from the lobbies of the show business; in parallel, I have always kept equidistant from professionalism and amateurism, since both appear to me to be convenient choices. Then there is certainly a strong propensity for the contamination of genres, which pushed me — as an actor — to relate with other types of performing arts, especially music and dance, collaborating profitably with musicians and dancers of the most varied extractions. Moreover, always from the strictly acting point of view, from the beginning of my theatrical journey I have tried to move in a integral direction, working on body expression in so as to try to express a global unity, in which the physicality of the actor can play a scenic role of primary importance”.

— In this choice there seems to be the hand of Grotowski, or am I wrong?

“For accuracy and correctness, I would say that the imprint comes from Zigmut Molik, who was the co-founder of the celebrated Teatr Laboratorium together with Jerzy Grotowski; although much less well known than the latter, it was Zigmunt who assumed the responsibility of training the actors of the now legendary company of Wroclav and, later, to train many other actors around the world, including myself; his guide was very precious to me, but there are other influences and, above all, the constant need to find my own personal style of being on stage and setting up shows”.

— In your theatre there is also a certain insistence on the feminine aspect of the divine, if one can say so. Can you say how it is born?

“It arises from an inner perception, essentially, while what I can say on a conceptual level is that European culture still suffers today from the Judeo-Christian conception of a God-Father unwilling to take care of things in this world. Not by chance, the hybris — that arrogance rightly condemned by the ancient Greeks — reaches its apogee right in the last two thousand years of human history, in which civilization was almost entirely governed by such a conception, where God is seen basically as an anthropomorphous being radically other than his own creation, not interested in intervening except to judge from his privileged cloud and to impart a post-mortem punishment, in the manner of a rigid and intransigent father. All this I find unacceptable. Obviously, mine is a generalization useful for understanding, therefore, what I have said must be understood in the right way. The fact is that, in contrast to this patriarchal conception (I would even say male chauvinist), the Divinity seen as a female entity significantly corrects the horrible dualistic and despotic conception that, in fact, tends towards an awkward gap between Earth and Heaven, between Matter and Spirit, between here and the beyond, between natural and supernatural”.

— The Goddess as a Mother tends instead to take care of her children in a more loving way, is not it?

“Exactly: this is the principle. The Great Goddess worshipped since the beginning (already in the Palaeolithic we find representations of her cult on the entire globe inhabited by man) is, among other manifestations, Mother Earth, Mother Nature, Mater Materia. Therefore, the vision of the world appears to be radically different from that conceived by an extra-cosmic Father who creates the world from nothing and which does not seem to care much about it. In the case of the Mother Goddess, the same earth on which we place our feet is a living form and, therefore, should be treated with the utmost respect possible. Man, in this perspective, appears as one of the many living beings, neither superior nor inferior to the other forms of life housed in the womb of Mother Earth”.

— Indeed, we are far from the biblical God who, in Genesis, gives the earth to man giving him the dominance over the birds of the sky, the fish of the sea and the beasts that walk on the earth!

"Absolutely. Seeing Mother Earth as a form of the Goddess spontaneously generates an attitude of respect towards all living forms, be they animal, plant or even mineral. And this is only the starting point — we come to see our Earth as a place of realization and progressive manifestation of the infinite powers of Divinity itself. All this results in open contrast with the world seen as a “valley of sorrow” or as a place of expiation or, even, as a planet to be looted and polluted without scruples. The attitude of anthropocentric domination proved to be devastating for this planet and for all its inhabitants, including men. It is time to radically change our way of relating to the world, changing our behavioral models radically. Humanly we have no alternative”.

— Can a reference to antispecism be found in your words?

“Oh yes. Today we rightly start to condemn, alongside racism and sexism, even speciesism, or the unfortunate human tendency to consider itself the chosen race, which can then afford any kind of abuse and violence against other living species. It is an absurdity that can no longer be tolerated”.

— All this, in the theatre, how do you express it?

“It is obvious that no concept appears explicitly in the course of the representation. Every consideration is left to the individual spectator, who is free to draw the consequences that he will want. Theatrical language can not be didactic, otherwise it would fall into the most boring rhetoric, which is the farthest from art. Theatrical language is an artistic language. I think that a theatre performance should be a bit like a fairy tale for adults: everyone can find what he wants or is able to receive — and any interpretation or reading that comes from it, remains valid for those who elaborate it”.