Italian theatre makers ErosAntEros on their ambitious staging of Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards, featuring live music by cult band Laibach, and the challenges of international co-productions.
Saint Joan of the Stockyards, Brecht’s reworking of the Joan of Arc story in the stockyards of Chicago following the financial crash, is a challenging work to stage. Influenced by Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle and written between 1929- 1931, the play is a scathing critique of capitalism. The text as written requires multiple performers and musicians. Previous production have over 70 people on stage playing Brecht’s striking workers. It’s easy to see why it’s not often attempted.
Now, an ambitious new version by Italian company ErosAntEros and Slovenia’s Mladinsko Theatre has attempted to meet these challenges. The show, which will also feature live music composed by and performed live on stage by the cult Slovenian band Laibach, has been many years in the planning. ErosAntEros’ – co-founded by actress and dramaturg Agata Tomšič and director Davide Sacco – have been working on the production since 2017.
This is not the pair’s first attempt at Brecht. They previously created a piece called On the Difficulty of Telling the Truth, based on Brecht’s 1934 essay Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties, a text written after Hitler’s rise to power when Brecht was in exile. “He was directly addressing the intellectuals of his age,” says Tomšič, “to react to fascism and capitalism. He put them on the same level. He said that fascism is just the worst consequence of the capitalistic system.”
It is, they both agree, a very timely piece, one that relates directly to moment we are in now, which is why they intend to revisit this text and this performance in the near future. It has not ceased to be relevant, on the contrary. “In this text, Brecht is talking about telling the truth,” says Sacco. “In Italy now, it’s almost forbidden to talk about Palestine. If you do you will be censored.” By way of illustration, he describes the protests in Pisa earlier this year in which protesting school children were beaten by police in full riot gear, leading to several being hospitalised.
All of which is to say is that Brecht’s work and words have been very much at the forefront of their thinking for some time, when they started to explore the possibility of staging Saint Joan of the Stockyards. “We tried for many, many years to convince different theatres in Italy and Europe to find the concrete economic production possibilities to put this text on stage,” explains Tomšič. As conceived by Brecht, it’s a huge undertaking, with large numbers of actors and musicians on stage. “There are a lot of practical and economic barriers to staging something like this, especially for an independent company,” she says. “It is not affordable, from an independent perspective in Italy, and even from an established theatre, productions of this scale are not common.”
ErosAntEros – Saint Joan of the Stockyards. Photo: Daniela Neri
The solution? International co-production. This project sees them joining forces and resources with Slovenia’s Mladinsko Theatre, with Sacco directing and Tomšič acting as dramaturg and playing the main role, Joan Dark. This collaboration has not been without its challenges. For one thing, the Slovenian and Italian systems are quite different. “We don’t have a system like in Germany or Western European countries,” Sacco explains. “Our national theatres don’t have ensembles, for example.” While there was a rich and vibrant theatre scene in Italy in the 1980s and 90s, “our generation, the generation after theirs, really has less possibilities to have a place to work,” says Tomšič. While not impossible, she says, “It’s really difficult for independent artists to enter inside the institutional system.”
What they did have is a pre-existing connection with the band Laibach, having worked with them on 2016 production Alarms!, which also explored the threat of fascism, so they hit upon the idea of inviting them to perform in the production. Laibach’s work has always been deeply enmeshed in the political and they have recently been exploring more theatrical approaches, particularly with their recent performance and album titled Wir sind das Volk (Ein Musical aus Deutschland) based on the writings of German playwright Heiner Müller. In Brecht’s play the Black Straw Hats are a Salvation Army-like group whose music forms part of the perforrmance. Sacco thought this would be a perfect fit for Laibach. “It’s obvious that in 100 years ago, Brecht would not have been thinking of this kind of music, however we think they are a good match,” says Tomšič. “We have reconceived the dramaturgical structure of the performance so that Laibach become the band within our performance,” she says, though they have changed the name of the group to the Black Hats, as they could not picture Laibaich wearing straw hats.
Because they had been exploring the possibility of staging the text for so long, since back in 2017, they already had created many drafts of the scenes, designs of the costumes, even schemes of each chapter of Brecht’s text. The fact the Brecht’s Joan of Arc is called Joan Dark was a source of inspiration “The dark atmosphere is something that inspired us a lot,” she says.
Even though they clearly know the text inside out, the creative process has not been without issues. The work that Mladinsko produces is often vigorously physical and quite distinct from the more stylised, highly visual style of ErosAntEros.
International co-production can bring net benefits. It is a way of pooling economic and creative resources but it can also highlight how even neighbouring countries can have markedly different understandings of working practices, rehearsal processes, and creative hierarchies, not to mention linguistic differences – Tomšič speaks Slovenian and Sacco does not. It’s therefore not surprising that the process has not been frictionless. “We love our actors, but they come from different worlds and have different ways of working. We are trying to understand one another,” Tomšič tells me, when we speak during the rehearsal process of the production which opened in Bologna on 18th April.
Neither Sacco nor Tomšič have formal theatre training though Tomšič recently completed a Master’s in singing and contemporary music theatre at the State Conservatory in Ravenna. Before forming ErosAntEros, Sacco worked as a music designer and performer and completed his own independent education with other groups on the Italian contemporary scene, including Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Teatro Valdoca, and Motus, before making the transition to directing.
ErosAntEros -Saint Joan of the Stockyards. Photo: Ivian Kan Mujezinović
He and Tomšič founded ErosAntEros in 2010. Reflecting their backgrounds, their work is often cross-disciplinary, with video and music playing large roles in their aesthetic. Their past show, Libya, which was based on the graphic novel by artist Gianluca Costantini and war journalist Francesca Mannocchi, is a good example of this. Exploring how the collapse of the Gadaffi regime has left the country in a state of economic and social volatility, the performance mixed live music with animation, part-gig, part-recital. For their 2023 Gaia, in which they worked with non-professionals, activists and young actors from the area, sound and visuals also played key roles.
In 2018, they founded the POLIS Teatro Festival, an international festival in Ravenna, the town in which they’re based. Everything they do as a company is “motivated by our social and political role inside society,” says Tomšič. They set out, she says, to “try to bring this international theatre that has been nourishing us so much as creators for many years to our town and share it with our audience.”
Each year they focus on a different country or region. Last year there was a Balkan focus, with a programme including Ziga Divjak’s Game and Jeton Neziraj’s Sworn Virgin. This year there is a focus on German-speaking countries, with the line-up including She She Pop and Rimini Protokoll, the latter with their audio work The Walks. The focus is not just limited to theatre groups or productions coming from German-speaking countries, it’s wider than that encompassing artists or groups within Italy or elsewhere in Europe, who are in some way connected with the German-speaking region.
The audience has always played an active role in POLIS. The festival is a partner of two national networks. One of these networks, called Italy of Visionaries, which consists of a dozen festivals across the countries. A national call is put out for productions and then in each participating city, a group of “visionaries”, audience members of different ages and backgrounds, are recruited to view all the shows that result from the national call and help decide, in the case of POLIS, which two productions 0will be scheduled in the next edition of the festival. It is “a wonderful exercise in democracy, community-building, and bringing people closer to the theatre,” says Tomšič.
Many of their audience have not encountered this kind of international work so it is their first exposure to it. They are also working hard to make the festival accessible to people who “usually never go to the theatre because of social or economic reasons,” says Tomšič. The work is all subtitled in both Italian and English to make it accessible, she says, to “all those communities who are not Italian, it’s something that helps them to be included.”
While they’re relatively limited in the work they can bring to Ravenna, they have resisted going down a more commercial route, preferring to focus on the artists and companies they find stimulating and exciting. “We prefer to focus on the quality than the quantity,” Tomšič says.
POLIS festival runs from 7th -12th May at venues around Ravenna.
For more information, visit ErosAntEros.org and PolisTeatroFestival,org
Further reading: Laibach: “We don’t belong to one state only – we belong to all of them”
Natasha Tripney is a writer, editor and critic based in London and Belgrade. She is the international editor for The Stage, the newspaper of the UK theatre industry. In 2011, she co-founded Exeunt, an online theatre magazine, which she edited until 2016. She is a contributor to the Guardian, Evening Standard, the BBC, Tortoise and Kosovo 2.0
