Johanna

About this Play

Witch or saint, such are the irreconcilable judgements of Joan of Arc lore. At the age of only 17, Joan, who later went down in the history books as Joan of Arc or Johanna von Orleans, sets out to set right a world that was deemed lost. Her journey ends at the stake. Hundreds of years later, she is canonised. Since then, her myth has been politically charged: as an icon of courageous idealism, as an example of fatal fanaticism or as a heroine who brings salvation. Johanna is many things. Again and again, she serves as an image for all those young women who seem to single-handedly challenge the status quo, be it that of patriarchy, exploitative labour conditions or climate policy. In Friedrich Schiller’s “romantic tragedy”, Johanna leads the French army against England through her firm faith – and by force – ultimately to victory. While in Schiller Johanna legitimises her actions with God, director Leonie Böhm sees Johanna as a human being behind the myth: between powerlessness and omnipotence, doubt and wonder, one’s own visions and foreign projections, constantly transforming, always searching for attitude and defying an ambivalent present.

Interview

Dramaturg Helena Eckert in conversation with director Leonie Böhm

HELENA ECKERT In your productions, you repeatedly enter into the complex narratives of theatre classics and examine them for the thoughts and feelings that dwell within them. In the process, a lot of text is cut; you do this with plays that have already been performed countless times. In Zurich, for example, you worked on Leonce and Lena, Medea and Three Sisters. What makes these texts interesting to you? And does this approach always need a reference to the "classical canon"?

LEONIE BÖHM With my productions I try to trigger conversations, feelings and thoughts that encourage us to think about and also experience communities on stage that function together without violence and justly. In order to talk about these issues through theatre, the canonical theatre plays are particularly suitable for exploring, as they are well-known and, furthermore, carry a lot of reception history with them. In all the times in which they have been performed, they have reflected and perhaps also shaped social developments and changes through their stagings. If the audience has already had an experience with the text, the myth or the character, then this knowledge and also the expectation that arises from it helps our intention: to draw the text into the present, to let it emerge on stage in the here and now, and to scrap complex narratives in favour of an immediate encounter for the time being.

HE Are you intrigued by contemporary texts that already entail all of this?

LB Contemporary plays have often already taken this step, yes, but for me and for our process together, the knowledge of the reception history of the material, and the search for the underlying patterns and emotions of the characters behind the actions is an important step to transfer it to the present. This examination is essential for the whole team and cannot be skipped. Of course, this approach also requires the greatest possible freedom in dealing with a text. In the end, there are always only a few pages of original text that remain, which we then reassemble together with Maja Beckmann, Josefine Israel and Wiebke Mollenhauer. Combined with space for improvisation by the performers, they then form the text of the play. The autonomy of the text in the knowledge and minds of the audience, the theatre company or society as a whole is important to me and is more likely to be the case with classical texts. But if a contemporary text already incorporates the emancipatory power that I'm looking for with theatre, so that it wouldn't have to be about telling the story or doing justice to the narrative, for example, but about being able to use it as an encouraging language, I would also find that very exciting; when the text already achieves that on its own or even accomplishes more than the classics, or than what I try to do with the classics, namely, to extract the emotionally transformative potential from them.

HE In February you will premiere Blutstück, based on the novel Blutbuch by Kim de L'Horizon, in Zurich.

LB In Blutbuch, Kim de L'Horizon succeeds in creating a taboo-free, open dialogue of a self whose inner world addresses us so personally that I am forced to confront my own boundaries of shame and fears. Moreover, the collaboration with Kim allows a similarly free approach to the text as with the classics.

HE In the case of the historical Joan of Arc, or Johanna, as we call her, the political events of her time are an important driving force. She is trying to win a war that even the holder of power, the future king, no longer believes will ever end. Today, too, there is an acute awareness of catastrophe. There are numerous protests against the multiple crises of our time, all of which are interrelated, with the climate crisis at the top of the list. Nevertheless, more and more doubt that the tides can be turned.

LB I am fascinated by Johanna's determination and the consistency with which she tries to realise the wish of the others to win the war against England. For me, the question arose: What hopes have we already given up? What, then, can Johanna fight for with us? We have grown up knowing that the path of violence is no way to solve the problems of the present in a sustainable way. And the concept of justice has also changed a lot. Johanna grew up believing in a French monarchy, it is clear to her who the enemy is and who needs to be protected. Accordingly, France must win the war against England. The dilemma of our present, on the other hand, is that we are aware: We are partly responsible for the threats in which we live. This creates a much greater urgency to the question of how can we make ourselves capable of action in the first place, in order to be able to believe our actions and that our actions can create a world that is a safe place for ourselves and everyone else. How do we solve these dilemmas? How can we return to action without our actions constantly generating new violence?

HE Although Joan of Arc leads a whole army, in the end she finds herself practically alone. In this production, the actresses Josefine Israel, Maja Beckmann and Wiebke Mollenhauer are three Johannas on stage.

LB I find Schiller's Johanna incredibly contemporary. Even today, I constantly encounter people, especially women, who try almost single-handedly to develop superhuman strength. Sometimes, however, they spend themselves trying to sort out the problems of a patriarchal system in which they themselves are neither understood nor safe. Nevertheless, they unreservedly invest all their energy and strength in conditions that actually destroy them. They have surrendered their energy to a social concern that does not include them in its considerations. And I asked myself whether you should show this mechanism through theatre; meaning, how you make yourself a tool for a system that destroys you and leaves you behind on your own. I feel this contradiction to be fundamentally understandable and realistic, and I know it from myself too. At the same time, however, I am looking for a utopia in my theatre work – and I find it in togetherness, no matter how small the interpersonal gestures are. Then the system for which one is spending oneself moves into the background. It is much more a question of how much of this programme one has possibly internalised. And, in a second step, how one can, perhaps anti-intuitively, act to overcome the system or to check and transform one's own belief system. The more complex the problems are, the less a single person will be able to solve them.

HE Can you elaborate a little on the anti-intuitive action?

LB I'm interested in how you can always get out of a moment of paralysis, disorientation or destruction and back into action. For me, anti-intuitive action is doing something that you have to bring yourself to do in the first place. Like, for example, exposing yourself in moments when you might not even know yourself anymore, doing things that you are embarrassed about, that you are afraid of. To expand your own radius of action. Learning something new about yourself is an intimate moment, I find it extremely exciting and it can also be very funny. It creates transformation or at least movement in hardenings, in behaviour as well as in feeling and thinking. Unlike in the original, where Johanna steps up to maintain a threatened order, we explore the possibility of change. In Schiller, the system and Johanna's power are perhaps more separate. In our production, Johanna has internalised the dilemma described. She herself is part of her image of the enemy, which is no longer clearly identifiable as "the others". She is part of the environment against which she wants to emancipate and empower herself. We can examine the question of how this turns out, whether she wins or loses against herself, so to speak, the multiperspectivity that arises from this question with the three performers, who each develop their own idea of themselves as one of Johanna's characters. What is interesting about Johanna is that she is both a historical person and a fictional character in Schiller's play. Josefine, Maja and Wiebke try to approach this construct, this icon, this character, this person from different perspectives and thus discover something about her complexity. All three of them have developed Johannas that react in very different ways to threats and uncertainties: With an urge to act, a search for security in the community or a retreat because one no longer wants to rely on anything. These three reaction patterns have to come into visibility in the first place.

HE For some performances in Zurich, Vincent Basse will now play the Johanna which Josefine Israel developed.

LB During the rehearsals for the Zurich premiere we tried to develop an adaptation that, based on Josefine's Israel's "Johanna" and the thoughts we worked out together in the rehearsals, merges with Vincent's ideas. And Vincent, through his ideas and thoughts about this position, his potential and all that he brings to the group, has also helped to develop the show to a certain extent in a short time.

HE And the stage has also changed a lot. The play was performed in the Malersaal at the Schauspielhaus Hamburg, comparable to the Box here in Zurich. What does the move to the Pfauen, to a classic picture-frame stage, mean?

LB By moving to the picture-frame stage, a shift in meaning takes place within the play. Aspects are highlighted that had a different emphasis in the Malersaal. The theatre portal underlines the question: What does it mean to play Johanna, to become Johanna on this stage? To develop the potency and the power, the skills of Johanna, as maybe others have tried in different ways on this stage? It is not so much a performative interaction with the audience, but a reinforcement of the separation between stage and audience. As a result, the step onto the stage in front of the audience, the step of becoming Johanna, is marked. It's like climbing onto a pedestal and examining what it's like to stand there. Always in comparison with the images we have of the icon.

HE Despite wanting to understand who Johanna might have been as a person, what is the "miracle" in Johanna for you?

LB For me, the miracle is the moment of departure, that Johanna sets off. I myself am looking for a communal departure with the performers. Can we, inspired by Johanna's strength, become Johanna ourselves, take responsibility, believe in big goals? Use all our strength for something that actually seems impossible? We all have extreme powers if we want to. And we are all willing to put them to the service of a great whole again and again; while being aware that it is only temporary and that we all do it and take turns at it. That is a "Johanna inspiration" that I would like to take with me from the play for my life.

Imprint

All text contributions are original. They were written in December 2022 for the Hamburg premiere of Johannaand updated for this programme booklet.

Editor: Helena Eckert

Season 2023/24
Artistic Directors: Benjamin von Blomberg / Nicolas Stemann