The Holocaust Without Prêt-à-Porter

Mischa Twitchin is a master of small forms. Despite its brevity, the piece he brings today and tomorrow to Lisbon, 'The Children’s Emperor & The Pianist', is a profound reflection on the Holocaust, without the traps of historical reconstruction. Tiago Bartolomeu Costa

 

In the beginning the doubt: what are we watching? The images, projected on a glass surface, gradually reveal faces not as smiley as would be expected from a group photo. All of a sudden we see Hitler amongst children. In 'The Children’s Emperor & The Pianist' there isn't a narrative or a line we can chase. It’s all too brief. It's too disturbing. It is 15 minutes long, with sessions today and tomorrow at 9pm and 11:30 pm at the Centre for the Puppet Arts (Centro de Artes da Marioneta). It's a whole relation with another time and history that’s at stake.

 

Mischa Twitchin is an English playwright, director, theoretician and light designer. Master of small forms and co-founder of Shunt, an important and prizewinning London group, he is an essential figure in puppet theatre. What he brings to the Lisbon International Festival of Puppets and Animated Forms (Festival Internacional de Marionetas e Formas Animadas, FIMFA) is an extremely profound reflection on the power of images and the manipulation of references that takes a chance at approaching a subject as sensitive as the Holocaust.

 

It's not the first time that FIMFA brings us pieces that question, through puppetry, our relation to history. In 2008 the Dutch company Hotel Modern brought 'Kamp' to Belém's Cultural Centre, recreating a concentration camp with matches. A year ago the North American Roman Paska suggested a meeting between Hitler and Wittgenstein when children. Now, Mischa Twitchin brings a small show that works from familiar references: the books of Wladyslaw Szpilman, the pianist that Roman Polanski adapted to the screen, and Janusz Korczak, the paediatrician who ran an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto and died at Treblinka. But the way he does it extends the research that has allowed him to work not from dramatic texts but from philosophical references, not from illustrative soundtracks but from sound constructions, not from commanding visual structures but from the juxtaposition of elements, questioning our relation with memory and political culture. The material, he says, he found in record stores and in archive photos. These are quotations, references from other times and historical spaces that Twitchin summons expecting them to 'open up another kind of time and space for reflection'.

 

Against prêt-â-porter
Despite working with historical materials, Twitchin isn’t at all interested in a work of reconstruction of the past, something he considers a contradiction in terms. 'Cultural memory is eroding because memory no longer offers resistance to fantasy. It's fantasy that is reproduced, not memory. I feel strongly that it's not my responsibility to fiction that reality,' he tells us on the phone. 'I work with the facts, fragments of images and sounds. In a way I'm not inventing anything. I'm merely accepting the layering as a strategy. Of course, these elements didn’t coexist in a same historical time and space, but they coexist in my performance,' he explains. That's what distinguishes his work from a 'démarche' as Roman Polanski's 'The Pianist', produced from the same material. 'It's very gratifying for me to think that this show might cost £20 while Polanski's movie cost £20 million. Recreation bothers me. I don't even understand why someone would decide to reconstruct Warsaw in a studio.' Rather than the preservation of memory this is, he says, 'science fiction', a way of working imposed by the film industry, serving the production of clichés.

 

But the layering of references that don't coincide in time and space, and that Twitchin not only merges together but also re-inscribes in a contemporary frame, doesn't that itself create an artificial device? Twitchin is aware of this fragile border: 'That is the crucial question. There is an ethical border that I don't cross. I'm not naturalising anything, nor insinuating that we're there, which the film (Polanski’s) does: it creates a space that we see as if we weren't watching it, but living it. I think that's too problematic because it's an artificial production. Historical prêt-à-porter bothers me.'

Translation by Julio Rodrigues