Translated material
"When my mom was pregnant with me"
The premiere of Alvis Hermanis’ new play “The Sound of Silence” took place in Riga.
This performance has an intriguing subtitle: “The 1968 Simon and Gorfunkel concert in Riga that never happened.” But there is no need to wait for the reconstruction of the mythical concert of American stars - this is a performance about Riga in the late 60s, about the time and young people in whose ears the sweet songs of Simon and Gorfunkel sounded, promising happiness. About the time in which Alvis Hermanis’s mother lived, when, as he wrote in the epigraph to the production, “she was still pregnant with me.” Almost all the participants in the play are under forty, which means that no matter how many real parental stories are included in the fabric of “The Sound of Silence,” this is not the real, archival 60s, but a legend - a wonderful fusion of other people’s nostalgic memories, old films, fashion magazines and those pictures that the music of Simon and Gorfunkel evokes.Talking about how this performance was made (now considered a collective work, like the last several productions of Hermanis), Alvis said that there were about three hundred sketches in the work, of which only 90 made it into the final version. The performance is structured like an alternation of sketches on the topic of youth and growing up in the 60s; there are no cross-cutting heroes here, but rather types, portrayed by the actors of the New Riga Theater balancing between tenderness and ridicule. A long-haired bearded hippie “Jesus”, a physicist with a skipper’s beard in a sweater, a young dude with sideburns, a tall funny guy with “Angela Davis” hair, a dashing blonde with a “Cherbourg Umbrellas” hairstyle, a clumsy fat woman, a timid beauty with a huge bun on top of her head, and so on. . We remember each of them, and each has long been part of a certain cultural code of the 60s, having counterparts in cinema, fine arts, and literature. But the main thing that makes this performance irresistibly affect any audience is that famous Hermanis precision in detail, which even for those who did not live at the turn of the 60s-70s evokes a wave of memories: “yes” Yes, I remember that!” Yes, I remember those bright oilskin raincoats, dark glasses, electric blue boots and psychedelic paisley dresses. I don’t remember myself, but I heard more than once how they made huge buns by twisting a chignon onto a glass jar, how they smoothed their hair with an iron so that it looked like Svetlichnaya’s in “The Diamond Arm”, but I remember such bouffants, tied with ribbons, eyes lined with bold arrows, blunt-toed shoes with thick heels. I remember unstable light furniture - the same thin-legged round chair, such an ottoman, a portable player in a suitcase, tape reels in which the film was torn and tangled, flexible records from the Krugozor magazine, a hefty radio on high legs (Riga, there was a factory VEF!), a chic polished bedside table with a radio, which my parents also gave as a wedding gift. I remember or can remember how a smarter friend taught me how to kiss before the first date: on the hand, on a glass jar (to make the technology clearer), and in the end she called a friend on the phone for training.
I look meticulously: “We didn’t have such underwear,” I say, “at the end of the 60s, where did such lace bras come from? There were no such colored tights!” “It was,” Alvis persists, “you don’t understand, this is Riga, even at that time we could correspond with foreign countries, relatives sent a lot.” “It was, it was,” sobs a Pole nearby, recognizing his youth in “The Sound of Silence.” The Italian gets excited: “And then everything we had was borrowed, everything was American... We all talk about communalism, not knowing what it is, but here it is...”
The play is performed in the same “apartment” where the old people from Hermanis’s world hit “Long Life” lived their lives, only freed from many years of rubbish - in an empty communal apartment with peeled wallpaper, where the walls between the rooms are marked with stacks of books. We can say that this is a prequel to "Long Life", but with different heroes - the youth from "The Sound of Silence" are more likely the children of those old people. Today they are 60. We see stories of growing up, although the characters themselves do not change and, of course, in reality no one still wore beards and a lush mustache a la Mulyavin from “Pesnyary” in those 12-15 years when he learned to kiss or played in a bottle. And even then, when a whole group of communes settled into an empty apartment and had their first sexual experience in front of everyone. When, to get high, I cooked some kind of rubbish in the kitchen, and everyone breathed it together or drank from a three-liter jar through a straw. Communal freedom-loving youth and fooling around gave way to weddings (here is the scene of trying on a wedding dress, from which, to the chagrin of the dressmaker, tier after tier is torn off to make it shorter), then pregnancy (former girls waddle like ducks, sticking out their bellies), and collective childbirth. And now the guys, who just recently dressed up as an elephant with the inscription “Make love” on the side and ran around the apartment with the girls squealing and laughing, timidly sort out their squeaking packages, and then, like exemplary city dwellers, push strollers with their wives and, touchingly lisping , look into them. Which one, I wonder, is baby Alvis lying in?
The corridor leading to the hall is hung with amateur photographs taken in Latvia by the same girl 40 years ago: short skirts, torn jeans, beards, wreaths on long hair, twenty-year-olds looking defiantly, acting independently and smoking, leaning against the wall with a chalk sign only love. Then the heroes of the play will show these photographs as a slide film on the wall of the apartment, and next to it will be an amateur film from 1971: a bearded hero with a girlfriend and a friend are having fun in bed naked. It looks completely innocent, but Riga residents from 1971 remember that 36 years ago it looked so cool, so dangerous: “It’s amazing how this film has survived.” The author and hero of this film - a long-haired and gray-haired man in a leather jacket - goes out with his wife, who is easy to recognize.
In “The Sound of Silence,” young people constantly live in a creative fever: they shoot feature films with a crackling hand-held camera, and endlessly take photographs. One scene, which fit like a glove in the play, turned out to be an exact quote from Anthony’s Blow up (remember when a photographer and two girls, instead of a photo shoot, have a fuss, undressing each other?). This is how in Hermanis’s previous play, “Latvian Love,” a video episode about a school ball organically arose, very accurately repeating the style and characters of Ettore Scola’s “The Ball.” The reality of Hermanis's productions, which seems so documentary, actually exists in the atmosphere of life, already reflected and refracted by art, among film quotes and literature.
Literature is both the medium and one of the main themes of the performance. Books are another way of life for young people who read endlessly. Mountains of books, Latvian and Russian, are scattered throughout the apartment; they recognize their own by the books; by looking into their eyes, they understand what book you need. “It was a time of poetry,” Alvis later says, “but there was no politics at all.” I believe in poetry, but not in politics. How could there not be politics in the minds of the Riga youth of 1968, when there was a student revolution in Europe, Soviet tanks in Czechoslovakia, and a trial of those who protested against the invasion in Moscow? If we add to this the constant dream of Latvian independence, which was realized 20 years later by those who were young in the late 60s, it is clear that it was impossible for there to be no politics at all. However, no matter what Alvis thinks, everyone reads their own from his performance; for us in “Sounds of Silence” all the games with a transistor that doesn’t catch the right wave in any way, requiring everyone to join hands and climb on each other’s shoulders, turning into a living antenna - this, of course, is a reminder of “enemy voices” ”, which at the same time we were listening through jammers. Although in the play it is only music. Simon and Gorfunkel.
Their songs sound all the time: The Sounds of Silence from every radio or tape recorder, Mrs Robertson bursts out of the cans when you open the lid a little, and falls silent as soon as you slam it shut. Music sounds if you put your ear to a book or to the bottom of a three-liter jar, the songs of Simon and Gorfunkel scatter like laughing gas and act like a drug, accompanying growing up. Someone asked later: “Three whole hours of wordless sketches about 1968—isn’t that too long?” But, in my opinion, you can watch this endlessly.