I discovered Irisz Kovacs as a teenager, during the pre-selection for the performative project “Microhistory. True stories told live”, organized in 2018 by the Romanian Association for the Promotion of Performing Arts – ARPAS. I remember that she was a student in her last year of high school and her personal story, told with aplomb and humor, expressed not only a free spirit, but also evidence of a performative potential, so I was not surprised to find her a theater director years later, an artist whose originality attracted the attention of critics from the very first performances.
A nomination for the UNITER award for debut in 2022 for the performance “8 fathers”, followed this year, just two years later, by the nomination for the UNITER award for best direction for the performance “Tschick. Why I stole the car ” establish her as a very young (only 24 years old) artist with an aesthetic that integrates the values of her generation on stage, overflowing with freshness, and where the visual and playful are enhanced by an acute critical spirit.
In the present interview, we revisit some formative moments and the birth process of several shows that are all performed in our country. It’s an invitation not to miss any of them if you happen to be in Constanța, Cluj, Sfântu Gheorghe, Timișoara or Bucharest. Or in Sibiu, at FITS 2024, where she participates with “Tschick. Why I stole the car.”
Oana Cristea Grigorescu: The performance that “launched” you is Tschick. Why I stole the car by the German State Theater of Timișoara, followed in the last two years by other invitations to state theaters. Tschick addresses the themes of adolescence, (the formative journey), in the continuation of the issue presented in 8 fathers, a bachelor degree show staged in Constanța in 2021, and draws attention to an aesthetic connected to the landmarks and the imagination of today’s youth. How do you choose your texts, what is the range of topics you feel interested in?
Irisz Kovacs: I was very lucky that the texts were the ones that actually found me – 8 fathers was one of the reading suggestions of my teacher, Leta Popescu, and Tschick was the proposal of the German Theatre. Director Lucian Vărsăndan had seen my performance in Constanța as part of the Theater Networking Talents festival, and I think he felt the same association between the two coming-of-age stories that I do: the playful spirit, the strong writing and above all the freedom (generosity!) of the text that allows it to fold into many different shapes of theatricality.
Themes… that’s hard to say. Alice Rohrwacher, a director I greatly admire, often talks about the importance of the position of the “foreigner” in art. Nico, Maik and Tschick are strangers in their own lives, and this is an important driving force in their stories. If the protagonist feels excluded or alienated from the world they live in, it offers one a gateway to explore that universe, its cracks and texture. It automatically raises the question: what could the world be like?
In the choice of texts, I think that intuition weighs the most, the first images it invokes. You read, and things appear out of the mist, the outstretched hand of the author booping your nose. Humor, symmetry, soap opera touches and visual potential are welcome additions. If the performance that arises in my mind when I read is interesting or emotional, I believe and hope that it will be the same for the audience.
Tschick’s story offers a topsy-turvy perspective on the world of adults, deciphered by the two teenage friends through the aesthetic filter of cartoons. This deliberately schematic play of the adult characters gives the show the freshness and unintentional humor with which teenagers discover life. How did you come up with this solution?
Irisz Kovacs: Wolfgang Herrndorf wrote Tschick as a novel, and his friend Robert Koall adapted it for the stage. Later, when Herrndorf was diagnosed with a brain tumor, he returned to the text, beginning to rewrite it from the perspective of the character Isa, a draft that remained unfinished and was published posthumously.
For me, the author’s return to the novel in the little time he knew he had left to live is meaningful. The fact that he returned to this text, these characters and this story, establishes for me the perspective it represents – that of very young people. Of kids who feel both tenderness and revolt towards the world they live in and who perceive it through the lens of freshness. Their outlook changes the perception of the major elements of any life but also of its end. What I wanted to emphasize is precisely the perspective, the POV, putting the viewer back in the position of a teenager who gets to know the world for the first time.
All the adults are played, then, as Maik and Tschick see them – in a schematic, sometimes grotesque, “cartoonish” manner. I think it helped that I still feel like a kid and this style of play is closer to my perception of life, where significant details are exaggerated and blown out of proportion. The actors made a very important contribution in highlighting the characters through improvisations and proposals: not only did they understand the key to the game, but they elevated it and enriched it beyond words.
For young artists at their debut, Fresh Start by the Cluj Creation and Experiment Reactor is an important professional experience. What did that moment represent for you, how did you develop afterwards?
Irisz Kovacs: Haha, it’s funny that you ask me this precisely today, when Facebook is telling me that it’s been exactly three years since I found out I got residency. For me it was a transformative experience and served as a benchmark for the atmosphere of all the rehearsals I have conducted since then – the hot, inspired summer days when everything had so much meaning, the pasta eaten in a hurry and the magnesium ritualistically passed around by actress Oana Jipa (to conserve our energy until the evening). Team spirit! Effervescence! I was working at the theater and then I was working another shift at the beer hall, talking non-stop about how it could be, how it would be, what our show could mean. For an entire summer I was surrounded only by dear faces.
The residency format means you don’t get to pick your team, and the fact that we all got along so well felt like a miracle. A miracle powered by highly gifted selectors? Afterwards, I met up again at work with three of my Fresh Start colleagues, our show was called A Child on a Liter of Petrol and it was a Lynch-ABBA-Rompetrol mash-up that I’m not sure we understood either. I would love to get to work with everyone again.
Where do you place the collaboration with playwright Doru Vatavului? You already have three shows together in three theaters (Sakura Sandwich at the Andrei Mureșanu Theater in Sfântu Gheorghe and in Bucharest familienormală.jpeg at Apollo111, Disco regret at the Metropolis Theater) and a work-in-progress, the sky (map to home), at Teatrelli. You seem to be connected by a common sensitivity for observing and commenting on the reality perceived by the millennial generation of life as mediated by devices, but also for recovering those values that cannot be experienced through delegation: love, identity, the discovery of the meaning of existence. How was your collaboration born, what connects you?
Irisz Kovacs: Turns out that Doru was a resident at Drama5, also at Reactor, and I went to the performance-reading of the text he wrote there, Disco Regret. I cried because I could relate so much to what he had written. I basically harassed him to work together, I also read his short prose, I proposed that he dramatize it and develop it into another play.
Our projects then existed only in our heads and we sent them to each other by email with notes and observations like oracles, from him to me to him to me. Without any real prospect of materializing them. We pitched the plays to theaters, entered them in contests, and after a string of rejections followed a more shocking string of serial positive answers.
I was talking earlier about how I choose a performance. Doru and I are very good friends, we talk about everything that catches our attention in pop culture, literature, music or cinema, and many of our projects are strongly rooted in our common interest in the contradictions of contemporary life. So often enough, if something nags at me or obsesses me, I’ll find that thing in the text Doru is working on.
He was recently telling me how he writes certain passages to amuse me, and I do the same, I build some passages knowing that he will come and see them and he will like them. We think of ourselves as unique viewers, and that ties our shows together in a funny way, it coagulates them stylistically. He writes generous scores for actors, but especially actresses, and the texts bear the imprint of his values, without being patronizing. We have the same sense of humor and honestly the songs he writes are fabulous. That’s all there is to it.
Erasing the firm boundaries between the arts is a reality of the artistic environment of the last decades. Your interest in photography seems natural, but would you care to comment on how you came to this type of artistic expression, what place does it occupy among your concerns?
Irisz Kovacs: Photography is an older passion of mine than theater, for the first time some of my photos were published when I was 16, in SUB25 magazine. A lot of things in my life now are due to the then teenage photographer who took pictures of her friends. For the adults around me it was an open door to a kind of childish exuberance they no longer had access to, and several magazines invited me to photograph for their articles.
My pictures appeared in Scena9, Decât o Revistă, Gen Revistă, Libertatea, I was able to travel and meet people from all over the country and enter their homes, their lives. I’m a very sociable person, I like to be around people, not to stay in one place for long, so this is often a much more cathartic experience than working on a show. But many of my best photos are intimate shots of people I know well. Maybe this is a lesson, and I’m trying to get back into my habit: to take my camera with me wherever I go, to try to see my life through the eyes of a stranger.
And it helps a lot on stage. For me, the visual, compositional dimension of the movement of bodies on stage is one of the most important elements. The proximity, the distance, the mathematics of their floating. If you imagine them as a series of still-frames, you can watch them over and over again without getting bored.
Cover photo: Ovidiu Zimcea
