Culture
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Tomaž Pandur
Theatre
Theatre of the Third Millennium
03.04.2009
Tomaž Pandur is one of the most admired directors in contemporary European theatre, especially in Spain where his plays are sold out weeks in advance. His theatre is a place where parallel worlds are made real, as can be experienced in his most recent production: Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The play is even more appealing, because the role of Hamlet is played by the well-known Spanish actress Blanca Portillo, one of Almodóvar’s muses.
Madrid has been applauding a new production of the legendary Shakespearean tragedy Hamlet, staged by one of the most highly-acclaimed directors in theatre today, Tomaž Pandur. From its premiere in February, this piece has left no one unmoved, starting with the fact that the main character, the tormented Prince of Denmark, is played by a woman. Spanish actress Blanca Portillo, the star of Los abrazos rotos (Broken Embraces), a new film directed by Pedro Almodóvar, has dared to take on one of the most difficult and daring roles in the history of theatre.
“I am so privileged and happy to be able to share this period of life and creation with such an exceptional artist and person as Blanca Portillo,” said Pandur at the premiere.
Portillo is a dream partner for any director, who is searching for the truth in the movies and in the theatre. “She simply IS the Hamlet of our times, the Hamlet of the third millennium,” Pandur explained, stating that with her incredible devotion, talent, professionalism and her personality, she is searching for the other side of the known and the familiar. “She searches for the meaning of unspoken lines, unwritten monologues, silenced dialogues. She doesn’t obsess over what the characters do or speak, she is interested in whom they are and everything they could be.”
In Hamlet, she is accompanied by a carefully-selected cast, including Spanish celebrities Asier Etxeandía, Hugo Silva and Susi Sánchez, among others. “We are staging the play to reveal the very myth of Hamlet, the contemporary ‘world-machine’, absorbing and crystallizing the time-space of the very moment.”
Pandur’s plays always have a deep and very personal interpretation; however, this production of Hamlet is true to Shakespeare and also entirely modern at the same time, as “theatre should always be mindful of the needs of its time,” as Pandur likes to add. There are politics opposed to morality, eschatological and metaphysical problems. It is the story of that what is hidden, trapped between a word and a silence. “A word is here a form and silence is the essence. Hamlet, who marks the space of mind and balances this derailed world, is re-inventing the Theatre itself.”
The very moment of theatrical time
For Pandur, the theatre is a place of the magical irrevocable moments in time, where parallel worlds are made real. “The theatre becomes reality. It is a pure emotional reality, where thousands of years of historical experience and all spaces of the Universe are processed into a single tear on the actor’s face.”
His distinctive artistic expression has left its mark on theatre in Europe and around the world with plays and productions, such as Barocco, Kaligula, Inferno, One Hundred Minutes, Dictionary of the Khazars, La Divina Commedia, Babylon, Russian Mission, Carmen, Hamlet, Faust and Scheherezade. Critics wrote of “images imbued with intense power of expression”, described the performances as “packed with subdued stylization and visionary strength” and hailed the group with superlatives, such as: “masters of theatrical representation”.
In his first years in theatre, Pandur ventured into the exploration and examination of theatrical substance. “Theatre was the magical irrevocable moment in time, which is already the future; a cosmic timelessness of theatre where time and space merge and function spontaneously on different planes.”
This is why one of his next projects will be Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, to be staged in Berlin.
“Hawking’s mind closes the 20th century in order to pave for the 21stcentury the path to the tasks of human spirit and mind that the past centuries could not even dream about. One of these tasks is also to solve the riddle ofthe miraculous secret of time”.
Pandur’s theatre is an experience and emotional extract of reality. “I would like to believe that now I am creating reality, which is theatre.”
Endless spiritual journey
This year Pandur has been nominated for the award Premio Max de las Artes Escénicas (Max Performing Arts Award ) with one of his most exceptional pieces, Barocco. For the audience, his theatre has always been an endless spiritual journey through pure emotional reality. It truly is a pure aesthetic pleasure, which charms and solicits admiration.
Pandur’s set designs and visual interpretations of the scene are like a mosaic of paintings and images, full of emotions. For Hamlet, the whole place, the old Madrid’s Slaughterhouse (Matadero), is magical and water helps to achieve even more dramatic and sumptuous effects on the stage.
“In water, one can see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour”. It is like an endless landscape of solitude, emotional memories and melancholy, sunk in water, where every image has its own reflection, its other side of the mirror. It is designed especially for the Matadero by the Numen architects, Pandur’s long time collaborators in theatre.
“We are developing the time-space of the performance in the direction of examining the visuality of the scene, stillness and mobility of the image, and then, finally, in the ratio of playable combinations between all this.”
Although he is creating in different parts of the Europe, he still keeps his team of people, who have been completely loyal to him for years. They also worked together in Hamlet, where the dramaturgical structure was done by his sister Livia Pandur and the original soundtrack by Slovenian duo Silence.
For Pandur, theatre is his home, his country, whether it is in Spain, Germany, Japan or Slovenia: “It isn’t just a state of discovery for me, but a state of creation and a sacred space. It is where I carve my verses into my own flesh every night.” And his audience can not be simply an observer, but has to be an active participant of the moment in the theatre.
Tomaž Pandur
His first love was painting, than literature, but at the age of sixteen he discovered that his personal artistic expression is the theatre of Antonin Artaud. In 1979, he founded his first theatre group Thespian Carriage-the New Slovenian Theatre. After he completed his studies at the Academy for Theatre, Radio, Film and Television in Ljubljana in 1988, he debuted at the Mladinsko Theatre in Ljubljana with the poetic drama Scheherezade. The performance, based on his cultural experience with the fascinating ritualistic Asian theatre, soon earned international acclaim. At the age of twenty-six, he took the position of artistic director of the Slovenian National Theatre-Drama in Maribor and transformed the city into a “theatre capital between Milan and Vienna”. When his mandate ended, he continued his creative work in New York, Hamburg, Beograd and Madrid and worked with outstanding artists, such as Rade Šerbedžija, Goran Bregović and Blanca Portillo. In 2002, he established his own independent and non-institutional theatre company, Pandur.Theaters, which collaborates with international theatre companies.