DIRECTOR.
MIHAELA PANAINTE
SET AND COSTUMES DESIGN:
DAN ISTRATE
CHOREOGRAPHER:
OANA SANDU
PRODUCED BY ALEXANDRI NATIONAL THEATRE OF IASI, 2019
WITH :
MĂLINA LAZĂR,
ȘTEFANIA SANDU,
HORIA VERIVEȘ,
IONUȚ CORNILĂ,
ANDREI GRIGORE SAVA,
RADU HOMICEANU,
SARA TAYARI,
ALEXANDRU GUȘĂ,
MARIAN CHICULIȚĂ,
BOGDAN GEORGE IONESCU
Lowlands (Niederungen)
Reading the volume of stories Niederungen (in Romanian Ținuturile joase) by Herta Müller was instrumental in reinforcing my belief that the first signs of our brutal detachment from childhood as a phase of blissful existence appear when we are struck by the cruelty of those around us.
The Village, standing in for the World itself, is seen through the eyes of a child and is engulfed by tension, sadness and death. This Narrator, still at the age of innocence, is plunged into this bastion of cruelty, alongside objects, thoughts, gestures, testimonies, disappearances, glances, and figments of the imagination, and in this way discovers the world of the adults pervaded with the shudder of death. Immersing into this universe constitutes an initiatory journey for the narrator, undertaken in the midst of dreams, expectations and fears, where the boundaries between the real and the imaginary are blurred. Being extremely sharp in perception, the narrator swiftly grasps that the inhabitants of these lowlands are dead souls, and consequently, realizes the necessity of seeking refuge in the realm of the imagination. This is her sole form of rebellion against the nightmare of the real, as well as her sole avenue for survival. The problem of memory, identity, absence, ephemerality, discontinuity, time, ambiguity and of the oneiric is an obsessive concern of mine in all my productions. These are also the very themes at the core of my production of Lowlands for the Vasile Alecsandri National Theatre of Iași, where I had the opportunity to work with an excellent cast and creative team.
Lowlands by Herta Müller, adapted for the stage by Mihaela Panainte (original title in German: Niederungen)
This innovative stage adaptation is based on a volume of short stories by Herta Müller written in German in 1982 and published in Romania in censored form; the full text appearing in Germany in 1984 and in Romania only after 1989. Lowlands focuses on the perspective of a child narrator, by way of a series of episodes that centre on mundane aspects of daily life in a remote village against the backdrop of the oppressive atmosphere of mid-twentieth century Romania. As a German-speaking author writing in eighties Romania, Müller conjures up the world of her childhood in the Swabian community of the Banat region, situated in the Western part of the country. This is a frank and penetrating view of an isolated population, on the verge of dissolution due to accelerated migration to Germany, perceived with reticence by some Banat-Swabians who found Müller’s portrayal unsympathetic. Indeed, Müller makes no attempt at idealizing this childhood, drawing instead on internal tensions and generational conflict in a close-knit and impoverished community. Her aim is a declared exercise of free speech that she also practiced on an overt political level as member of Aktionsgruppe Banat, a group of German-speaking writers in Romania who spoke up against censorship under Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorial regime. Müller has kept returning, time and time again, to this subject matter, most famously in the novel The Land of Green Plums, and received the 2009 Nobel Prize for depicting the ‘landscape of the dispossessed’ with ‘the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose’. Panainte’s stage adaptation, created for a studio production that explores corporality in a mesmerizing installation, is an excellent vehicle for testing the boundaries of autobiographical writing in and for performance. By turning to an initially censored piece of fiction that is rather economical with words, Panainte’s production celebrates the precision of carefully chosen words and theatrical images, and highlights the universality of the source material. This production has also successfully enticed new audiences to contemporary experimental theatre-making that intersects the tradition of text-based drama with visual arts and forms of movement-based performance.
Number of characters and gender split: flexible – Panainte’s production had 10 (3 female, 7 male)
Production history:
• Vasile Alecsandri National Theatre of Iaşi, Romania (directed by Mihaela Panainte) – Premiere: 13 October 2018. https://www.teatrulnationaliasi.ro/stagiunea/tinuturile-joase–179.html
• Rehearsed reading by Foreign Affairs, London, UK (directed by Trine Garret and Camila França): 25 November 2020.
Plays from Romania: Dramaturgies of Subversion (Bloomsbury, 2021). https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/plays-from-romania-dramaturgies-of-subversion-9781350214316/
ŢINUTURILE JOASE DE HERTA MÜLLER
REGIA: MIHAELA PANAINTE
COREGRAFIE: OANA SANDU
SCENOGRAFIE: DAN ISTRATE
CU: MĂLINA LAZĂR, ŞTEFANIA SANDU, HORIA VERIVEŞ, IONUȚ CORNILĂ, ANDREI GRIGORE SAVA, RADU HOMICEANU, ALEXANDRU GUŞĂ, SARA TAYARI, MARIAN ALEXANDRU CHICULULIŢĂ, BOGDAN GEORGE IONESCU (PERCUŢIE)
O PRODUCȚIE:
TEATRUL NAŢIONAL ‘’VASILE ALECSANDRI” DIN IAŞI, IASI 2019
