Göteborg Dance & Theatre Festival: Sweden, 2004

I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I had e-mailed a woman in Scandinavia a few times and the next thing I knew, I was on a plane to Göteborg, Sweden.

The impetus for my sojourn was the International Association of Theatre Critics’ Young Critics Seminar, arranged in conjunction with the Göteborg Dance and theater Festival. So, I left Newark airport, which operates next to a gargantuan IKEA store, for Stockholm, the IKEA world headquarters. How different could it be? For starters, unlike the rough-edged cities and fashions Americans live in, everything about Sweden was streamlined: from sleek the airplane flatware to the tidy film “Anja efter Viktor.” (Even if it is a Danish movie—you get the idea). I love to travel and have had the good fortune to do so with motley groups in the U.S., Mexico and Scotland, among others. But this experience in Göteborg (a.k.a. Gothenburg) made the deepest impact on my career as a critic, theatre artist and American journalist.

My 11 colleagues came to this remarkable Nordic city from South Korea, Portugal, Romania, France, Canada, Moldavia, Russia, Denmark and, of course, Sweden. Each morning in the stylized café of our humble Hotel Flora, complete with black wallpaper patterned with giant daisy photos, we would grab some breakfast of salami, sliced red peppers, pate, thick yogurt and a cup of coffee or tea before walking up the main avenue to Artisten, Gothenburg’s art school. We held our morning seminars, usually lasting 2-3 hours, in English, although I was the only native English speaker in the group. For the first few days, the seminar’s director, Margareta Sörenson, and the two monitors, Wibeke Waern from Copenhagen and Lis Hellström Svenningson from Gothenburg corralled our confused dozen, of whom only three understood Swedish. As each day passed, our befuddlement dissolved into sizzling intellectual conversation, European history lessons, awkward, on-the-spot translations and heartfelt companionship. We discussed the pandemic of shrinking real estate for theatre reviews in papers, as well as the lure and danger of freelance life. But we were there for the theater, right?

Living in New York, I left in the midst of the International Fringe Festival, whose roster only included a paltry six companies from outside of the United States. (Worse still, the festival hosted more that 200 companies in all.) The much smaller Göteborg Dance and Theatre Festival offered only 18 companies from which to choose, but only two were Swedish-based. My mind was virtually shattered the first night out during “Foi” by the Belgian company Les Ballets C de la B; I was filled with pride for the solo performer, Nana Janelidze, and her Georgian story of war-torn Eastern Europe; and I was shocked by Lina Saneh’s “Biokraphia” from Lebanon.

As the only American, it was quite a precarious time to represent the nation in the international community, and the trip certainly re-awakened me to the insularity of America and the need for a east- (and south- and west- and north-) looking vantage away from our own borders. Not only in the political arena do we need to fling wide our arms, but in our own art: in traditional theatre form and interpretation. Most of the performances at the Goteborg festival were not text- or reality-based. The heavy London/New York premium on 19th century, Western models of theatre seemed passé at best. The art form has long outgrown slice-of-life naturalism, yet our American universities teach Meisner like he’s Moses on the Mount and our award systems hold up “Proof” and “Take Me Out” as theatrically paradigm. Ah, but that’s the old “chicken-or-the-egg.” Which came first? The gesture or the word? In any event, this Scandinavian theatre festival reminded me that I much prefer the Artaudian to the Ibsenian view of what is stageworthy.

As we all—from lumbering nations to nimble individuals—try to discover meanings or lack thereof, theatre offers a solitary and unique form of artistic expression.

Just in case you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.