Body politic: The duets of Bert and Nasi
On a pair of contemporary theatre artists making stripped-back work about complex topics.
Welcome to Café Europa, a weekly newsletter dedicated to European theatre.
This week I’m back in Belgrade, playing host to friends from the UK and enjoying the opportunity to show people the city. I also wrote a short piece about different cultural understandings of acting for The Stage (an arguably too-large topic to try and squash into a 500 word column) and spoke to contemporary performance-makers Bert and Nasi about their experience of working both in the UK and Europe, more of which below.
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In April 2021, when the UK was still in the grip of a months-long lockdown, I wrote an article for The Stage about double-acts, about pairs of artists who work closely with one another and how being apart was affecting both their creative practice and their personal relationship. Two of the people I spoke to for the piece were Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas. Performing together as Bert and Nasi, their work is relatively minimal – often just the pair of them on stage – but via their physical interplay, whether clambering on one another’s backs or squaring up to one another, embracing tenderly or bounding around the stage like kids at play, they probe the political and philosophical. Small gestures take on bigger significance. Complex topics are unpacked by two sweaty men in T-shirts grappling with a ladder.
Bert and Nasi met at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2015, while working on two different shows as part of two different companies. When they both found themselves with some time on their hands, they decided to get together and start making their own show.
The result of this initial collaboration was EUROHOUSE, an exploration of the relationship between different EU member countries, with a focus on Greece conveyed via a mixture of vignettes, movement and clowning. Things got messier and pettier as the show went on. Hierarchies emerged. Debts mounted up. Bert offered Nasi some M&Ms and then demanded them back after he’d eaten them. When Nasi pointed out the flaw in this request, Bert suggested he vomit them up.
“There was no real money attached to the project,” says Bert, “because no one really knew about us or what we were going to do. So this first project was done on a bit of a shoestring. And that's what led us to do other projects in similar, minimalist ways.”
With their second show Palmyra they once again they found a theatrical analogy for geopolitical complexity. Taking its name from the devastated Syrian city, it was a piece about destruction in which things got smashed and the stage ended up covered in shards of shattered crockery. Bert swung a hammer around like a weapon until eventually it was given to an audience member to keep safe. This resulted in a stand-off situation in which the audience had to get involved. Critic Andrew Haydon called it “a strong contender for “Best Piece of ‘Political Theatre,’ Edinburgh 2017.”
“Palmyra’s a nasty show, and when we perform it for long stints at a time, it takes its toll on us,” they said at the time, in this interview for Exeunt. “We really liked that show, but it was intense,” recalls Nasi. “Only after finishing touring that show quite intensively, did we realise that going to that place of intensity all the time took its toll on us.”
Conflict featured even more prominently in One, the third show in what had become a trilogy. “One explores the interaction between men who are, ostensibly, close friends. Nasi and Bert inhabit a dynamic of casual violence; as men, they are coded through their physical strength and their mutual ability to injure each other, if they really wanted to,” wrote critic James Varney in his review for Exeunt.
They didn’t set out to make work that explored friendship and their own interpersonal dynamics, it just happened organically, a consequence of working closely together. As it became apparent to them that they were going to continue working with one another – “Are we a company now?” they asked one another - they started exploring this dynamic more. “It became a thread in the rest of our work.”
Their next show The End took the form of a two-man dance to the end of time, full of their customary physicality, an abundance of high-fives and chest bumps. It was a piece about friendship but also about inevitable endings, not just of relationships, but societal collapse and climate catastrophe - the end of the world. As they lolloped around the stage, a series of projections asks what things will be like in five years, 100 years, 20,000 years, five million years, 10 billion years. Time became an unimaginable series of zeroes as the pair ended up racing around in an eternal circle, as the sound of their bare feet slapping on the floor echoed around the room.
They collaborated with Catalan company ATRESBANDES for their next show It Don’t Worry Me, a piece that sent up and played with the format of the post-show Q&A to explore questions of cultural permissibility and political correctness. The show played some dates in Spain early 2020, but the pandemic disrupted the planned tour.
In that article on double-acts for The Stage, we discussed how Bert and Nasi’s usual way of working - throwing around ideas in a room and trying things out on one another - was much harder to achieve remotely. Even so, they managed to create a show during this period called Hello, which consisted of a series of phone conversations combined with images and music. It ended up being a very personal piece, they told me. The distance between them somehow amplified their intimacy. (All three double-acts I spoke to said that enforced separation made them appreciate their relationship more).
Power play
In 2020, Bert and Nasi won the Forced Entertainment Award for a “company who is reinventing theatre and performance in new ways and for new audiences.” As a result, they spent the pandemic period discussing potential work with the company. For last year’s Avignon Festival, they collaborated with Tim Etchells on L’Addition, a piece designed to be itinerant, which they performed in the villages surrounding Avignon. The piece, which consists of a simple scene - a waiter pouring a glass of wine and spilling it, which they then repeat, and repeat – is a study of power dynamics. “Tim was interested in working with us in our dynamic and letting us improvise a lot,” says Bert.
They enjoyed the experience of performing in villages. “Our work can survive quite well in smaller-scale setups,” says Nasi. They performed the show in French, so it was accessible to a wider audience, beyond the usual Avignon crowd. It helps, says Nasi, that the show is funny. “Even though our work is quite contemporary, it has a lot of humour, which is a really good way of bringing people in.”
“The work can rub some people the wrong way,” says Nasi, “because we’re repeating the scene again and again.” But the kids in the audience usually loved it, he says. There was often a lot of laughter. “They are not interested in the philosophical side of things, they’re just seeing it for what it is, which is two guys stuck in a scene. We love that.”
They recently performed an English-language version of L’Addition at HAU (Hebbel am Ufer) in Berlin, which they will bring to Edinburgh later this year as part of the Here and Now Showcase (the full programme of which will be launched on 8th May) and then Battersea Arts Centre in London in November, but first a German version – Die Rechnung – will play Vienna as part of the Wiener Festwochen. The piece will be performed in all 23 districts of Vienna in a variety of venues including community centres and football clubs. The show is part of Volksstück initiative to make theatre accessible. The German-language version will be performed by two local actors, meaning that they will get to watch their own show. They joke about becoming a franchise. “We just stay at home and other people play us,” laughs Nasi.
The start of something
Now, they’re following The End, naturally, with The Beginning, a piece which sees them working in collaboration with older people and members of the local communities in which they are performing, creating an aural tapestry of voices recorded during the creative process. (You can watch the trailer for The Beginning here). The idea of working with older people in this way came to them relatively late. They were initially finding it difficult to unlock the topic, to find the right way in, but when they began hosting workshops with older people and recording their voices, “the piece very much came alive,” says Bert, “because they have a lot more experience about what beginnings are, and a lot more to say about beginnings than we do.”
At each place they perform they put out a call-out for people over 60 who want to participate. The Beginning doesn't ask too much of its older performers, says Nasi. They perform a dance with them and read a text, but it’s more about their presence. “They are the guardian angels of the piece.”
It may not have escaped your attention that Bert and Nasi made their own beginning as a duo at a pivotal moment in the UK’s relationship with Europe, making EUROHOUSE in 2016, the year of the Brexit referendum. As a French-British artistic partnership who work both in the UK as well as extensively in Europe, they have both an inside and outside view of the impact the last few years have had on artists. The writing was on the wall from the beginning, says Nasi. While they have made a point of trying to be as integrated as possible in the UK circuit, he says, “it became quite clear quite early on that the only way that we could survive was to sell the work elsewhere.”
It is a question of both longevity, he says, and sustainability. “A lot of people can't sustain themselves. A lot of people will just leave the profession because of that.” If they’d worked predominantly in the UK, he says, “we probably wouldn't be working as much.”
“It's getting harder and harder to develop this sort of work in the UK,” he continues. Even in the stripped-back way in which they work, it’s getting harder. The UK doesn’t have the infrastructure to develop work suitable for international touring. “I think it's asking an impossible task of UK artists to try and deliver internationally when you don't give them the means to do so,” says Nasi
Instead, they’ve looked to companies liked Forced Entertainment as an example of how it is possible to have a career that straddles the UK and international touring scene. They’ve also been helped, points out Bert, by institutions who understand the struggle of being an independent artist and offer them support. He cites the Fast Forward festival in Dresden and Staatstheater Mainz as two organisations who provide thus kind of support. “It takes the courage of a few people in those institutions to say I want to show these artists in our spaces. We wouldn't be able to work in institutions like those without those people.”
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days.
All Greeks - NT Gent presents an ambitious festival of Greek theatre, featuring reworkings of all 32 Greek tragedies performed in numerous ways, from small scale installations to major performances by acclaimed directors and companies. All the performances will take place in public space around Ghent, often at dawn, and the whole programme will be free. The festival kicks off on 1st May and runs until 23rd June.
Theatertreffen – For this year’s festival of German-language theatre, Nora Hertlein-Hull in her first year as director, has whittled down 690 productions to just ten, including productions by Yael Ronen and Falk Richter, and a music-infused staging of Lord of the Rings. The festival runs from 2nd – 20th May in venues around Berlin.
GIFT - Gateshead international Festival of Theatre features an eclectic programme of local and international artists. This year’s festival runs from 3rd-5th May and the line-up includes Greg Wohead, Action Hero, and Bert and Nasi with The Beginning at Gateshead Library on 5th May.
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