What Is Theatre? Notes From A Lecture by Illia Razumeiko

The lecture took place on June 12, 2024, as part of a summer educational series. In his talk, Illia Razumeiko explores the concept of theatre, its interpretations across different eras.

Illia Razumeiko is a composer, co-founder of the contemporary opera laboratory Opera aperta in Ukraine, and a doctoral student in the Artistic Research Centre at the Vienna University for Music and Performing Arts.

The lecture “What Is Theatre?” begins with a work by the Finnish modernist Tove Jansson, Moominland. In the book Moominsummer Madness (1954), a sort of whimsical variation on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Moomins are rescued from a flood in a large floating house. Eventually, the characters realize that this house is, in fact, a theatre. At first, the Moomins explore the theatrical space, examining its separate elements. Then we observe the process of production unfolding: the character Emma, a former director and stage manager, appears in the story. She explains what theatre is, how it is created, how to write plays in hexameter, and how to stage them.

A key moment here is the dialogue between Moominpappa and Moominmamma. Moominmamma asks, “So what is theatre, then?” Moominpappa replies, “I don’t know,  but it’s something one absolutely has to find out about.” This stance of curiosity, of inquisitiveness, is essential when – or if – we engage in theatre-making: we do not know what theatre is, but we want to find out. Because when people already “know” what theatre is, know how to make it, as they were taught in an institute or in a state theatre – that is truly frightening. After several years in a theatre school or working in a traditional theatre, it often takes artists a great deal of time and effort to begin creating something new, or something entirely different.

A floating theatre like the one described by Tove Jansson was brought to life in 1980 for the Venice Biennale by the renowned Italian architect Aldo Rossi. His Teatro del Mondo featured a large, nine-meter stage mounted on a barge. It was inspired by similar Venetian theatres of the 18th century. Teatro del Mondo existed for two seasons. Performances were staged in Venice and later in Croatia. Our most recent opera with Roman Hryhoriv, GAIA-24, we named Opera del Mondo: it was literally born out of water, on the shores of the former Kakhovka Sea and on the island of Khortytsia. It, too, carries the idea of a theatre adrift in space: we don’t know what it is, but we want to find out.

GAIA-24. Opera del Mondo. Act II. Kyiv premier, 2024. Photo by Yulia Kochetova

On Definitions

When we ask what theatre is, we may hear many different answers. What matters most is that the concept is fluid: we can define it or revise it, or simply observe how it changes. We might call theatre a conditional form of art. It is also a profession, a community of people. There are many subcategories of theatre, like drawers with labels: spoken-word, psychological, literary, musical, puppet, dance, visual, physical, instrumental, multimedia, dramatic, opera, and so on. These types also depend on the media at play – whether the theatre engages with the word and literature, with the body and dance, or with space and music in a particular way.

In general, theatre can work with anything and call itself by many names. For example, the notion of “director’s theatre” only emerged relatively recently. The theatre of the artist arose after the Second World War and continues to evolve in various formats. There is immersive theatre, documentary theatre that works with real people and documents, and even incorporates performative concepts. In Europe, there are specific terms like “repertory theatre” – one that operates continuously with a set frequency in a dedicated building – and “festival theatre,” which traces its roots back to Ancient Greece and celebratory culture. In recent decades, the most important developments in European theatre have taken place specifically within the context of festivals.

There is classical theatre and exploratory theatre – broadly speaking, contemporary and experimental. In this context, the concepts of the “theatre of representation” and the “theatre of situation” are particularly interesting. In the theatre of representation, the central aim is to tell a story using the traditional tools of theatre. The theatre of situation, on the other hand, creates a new space, a new circumstance, inviting the audience to feel and experience it directly. This type of theatre can exist both on a grand stage and in a wide variety of alternative spaces.

In recent years, I’ve grown fond of speaking about theatre by returning to its most basic etymology. The Greek words theoria (theory) and theatron (theatre) share the same root and are both linked to the act or process of viewing. In some languages, the Greek term “theatre” and its derivatives are used directly, while others, like German, translate the concept more literally (e.g., Schaubühne or Schauspieler, meaning “theatre stage” or “actor”). The kinship between “theatre” and “theory” can help us see theatre in a broader light.

The Boundaries of Theatre

Theatre is far more than what takes place on a dramatic stage, where a script, a text, an opera score, or similar elements are required. In 1968, theatre director Peter Brook wrote The Empty Space, a foundational book for a new scenographic and theatrical theory. According to Brook, any empty space can be turned into a stage. A person who steps into that space — and someone else who watches them — is already enough for a theatrical act. This definition includes no text, no script, no special venue, no drama, no music. Contemporary theatre and modern choreography can exist without a person, without the human body in the frame. In this context, I believe the term “site-specific performance” has lost its meaning and may already be obsolete, since there are no longer performances, shows, or events that are not “site-specific.”

Peter Brook, the author of The Empty Space book. Photo by Thomas Rome, 2013

Ancient Greek theatre is an interesting point to return to. In seeking the essence of classical Greek theatre, we have texts, dramas, and the high art of tragedy. Our theoretical understanding of this theatre comes from Aristotle, writing a generation after the playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. In the time of those authors, the word “theatre” didn’t even exist; it took someone like Aristotle – who first called it theatre and gave it an aesthetic analysis – to define it. Through copying, reinterpreting (sometimes misinterpreting), and rereading Aristotle, key ideas of Greek tragedy would later be reborn in Renaissance theatre, from which Shakespeare and opera emerged. That too is both “theatre” and “theory.”

According to Aristotle, tragedy and comedy both originated from improvisation. Tragedy arose from the leaders of dithyrambs, while comedy came from those who led phallic songs. Comedy is still often associated with the Dionysian festivals, which took place once or several times a year. Tragedy, on the other hand, expanded and gradually revealed its defining features, evolving through many changes until it ultimately reached a form that fully matched its nature. When we speak of the origins of ancient Greek theatre, we are speaking of ritual and folklore: elements that are deeply connected to our contemporary understanding of performance. Returning to Greek theatre always brings us back to performance, to ritual, to play, and to festivals.

Contemporary Ancient Greek Theatre

This was theatre before it became a codified, dramatic, bourgeois, political art form. Concrete reinterpretations and explorations of ancient Greek theatre began more than a hundred years after Aristotle. The first stagings of these “legendary parameters” start to appear. Then come the Hellenistic and Roman theatre. During the Roman Empire, theatres were built across the entire territory – from Africa to Chersonesus – much like Soviet-era palaces of culture. A bourgeois art form emerged, which replicated itself heavily. The Renaissance, the operas of Wagner, and so on, marked important milestones. At the same time, Greek drama continues to influence various forms, including documentary theatre and theatre of the oppressed.

After World War II, Antigone became a highly sought-after text, inspiring various adaptations and reinterpretations. One of the most high-profile recent examples is Antigone in the Amazon (2023), directed by Milo Rau with the Brazilian theatre. In this version, Antigone is portrayed by a member of an Indigenous community living in the Amazon rainforest, defending her land from deforestation and fighting against the enormous oligarchic power of Brazilian corporations. The New York-based avant-garde troupe Living Theater also staged Antigone using Brecht’s texts in the form of Italian opera. Their two-hour production relied heavily on simple performative tools.

Theatrical centre “Gardzienice” (Poland) is one place where artists attempt to rediscover ancient Greek theatre in the most literal sense. They conduct experiments and search for the “authentic” form of ancient Greek theatre through work with masks and attempts to reconstruct the music. Their approach is highly literal: they might take a single mask or a single figure from an amphora and try to apply it to a fragment of a Sophocles tragedy. At times this can feel artificial, but the centre is deeply engaged in this work, involving actors, physics, and folklore. Every year, they organize international conferences dedicated to ancient Greek theatre.

Among Ukrainian artists, Dmytro Kostiumynskyi has explored ancient Greek theatre through his own interpretations. He began his career as a designer at the “Dakh” theatre and, since 2015, has been creating his own productions. He’s engaged in a compelling and systematic exploration of Greek drama and diverse approaches to theatre. He staged Iphigenia, and in Odesa, directed a four-hour version of The Bacchae. Seventy percent of that production was a rave, with the audience actively involved. Spectators enter the space as if stepping into a nightclub, and the performance unfolds from there. This, too, is a different way of engaging with ancient Greek theatre: one rooted in the idea of theatre as a festival of wine, the body, dance, and sensuality.

Theatre and Performance

Italian theatre director Romeo Castellucci is an artist and the founder of his own theatre. Since the 1990s, he has worked extensively with his ensemble, engaging deeply with theatre, opera, and large-scale forms. For many decades, one of his most explosive performance-art productions has been St Matthew Passion, where he employs a wide range of performative strategies, concepts, and techniques on a grand theatrical stage. St Matthew Passion is part of the Catholic mass that evolved within the Lutheran tradition and is performed on Good Friday. In Castellucci’s production, these are complex three-hour musical works: a solemn mass, a form of sacred theatre telling the story of Christ. These three-hour Passions recount the last three days of Jesus’s life — his arrest, trial, and everything that precedes the Resurrection. The final number in Passions is a tragic one. In a way, the mass becomes a merging of strategies from ancient Greek theatre and contemporary performance. Castellucci’s theatre, in the classical sense, is a grand festival — a production that serves as an encyclopedia of diverse performative concepts.

P.S.

In Summer 2024, two opera productions took place almost simultaneously and became a fascinating subject for comparative analysis. A stage event that might be described as “an opera about nuns” was performed both in Lviv and, simultaneously, in Vienna (two cities that, as we know, are 790 km apart by road, yet share 100 years of shared artistic and historical development).

In Lviv, this marked the first performance in Ukraine of Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, directed by the theatre’s director Vasyl Vovkun – a historic moment for Ukrainian opera. Meanwhile in Vienna, Hindemith’s opera SANCTA was staged in a contemporary production by Florentina Holzinger, widely regarded in European and global media as one of the most anticipated theatrical events of the season.

The Lviv production was nearly a reconstruction of how Poulenc originally staged it, perhaps even more archaic, with classical music performance, traditional costumes, and scenography. In Vienna, it was a full-blown deconstruction of both score and stage: several punk bands were involved, there were bell-installations played using the bodies of feminist nuns, a skate ramp, the symbolic destruction of the Sistine Chapel, and much more.

In the overall visual concept, what first catches the eye is the stark contrast between the classically draped nuns of Lviv and the bare-skinned feminist figures of Vienna, but this contrast, in truth, is rather superficial. For over a thousand years, the image of a women’s monastery in the Western European imagination has been imbued with eroticism, and the unveiling of the naked body – along with its eventual gender revolution and arrival on the grand stage – was only a matter of time.

Opera Dialogues of Carmelits presented in Lviv, Ukraine. Photo by Lviv National Opera House, 2024

What proves far more compelling than the nuns themselves is the representation of Christ in both productions. In Lviv, Christ appears as a massive, lifeless gypsum crucifix: a sculptural installation that would no doubt have made Yevhen Lysyk or Danylo Lider proud. It is the dead Christ of a society where the biblical texts have ceased to be part of living culture (and with Christ, the body disappears as well, in all its meanings: the human body, the body of language, the body of the Aral Sea, and so on).

In Florentina Holzinger’s production, Christ is a living woman with an electric guitar: an emancipated feminist performer. Christ is alive. It’s a rather banal idea (and Holzinger’s opera at times does resemble a string of banalities placed on a grand stage – especially given that it was presented in the city of Viennese Actionism, opera, and Catholicism, all pillars of the cultural identity of the former Austro-Hungarian capital). Yet for the past hundred years, Jesus Christ in European society has been steadily becoming a woman. To the extent that feminist theory and practice have fought for a woman’s fundamental right to be recognized as human, God – who takes on “human form” and “dies for humanity’s sins” – now chooses to incarnate in a female body: whether in the “theatricalized” version by Marina Abramović, who composed her performative Gospel-Autobiography, or in “real life,” as in the case of Pippa Bacca, who was murdered near Istanbul on March 31, 2008, during her performance Bride Tour.

The translation of this material was made possible through the Per Forma grant program, implemented by the Kyiv Contemporary Music Days platform with the support of the Performing Arts Fund NL and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science of the Netherlands, aimed at developing the performing arts sector in Ukraine.

Text based on a workshop audio recording by Illia Razumeiko and Oleksii Havryliuk
Translation by Yurii Popovych