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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Alvis Hermanis: “To Be Everything and Nothing at All”

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This chapter is about the oeuvre of Alvis Hermanis, a Latvian stage and opera director and artistic leader of New Riga Theatre. It focuses on the road Hermanis took from the 1990s, as a young and rebellious postmodern director, into the second decade of the twenty-first century. In such productions as Long Life (2003), Inspector General (2006), The Sound of Silence (2007) and Brodsky/Barishnikov (2015), he approaches psychological theatre on a new, innovative level, exploring it as a kind of time machine in order to study people and history. In 2013, Hermanis entered the world of opera. In his productions including Alois Zimmerman’s Die Soldaten (2013), Leos Janacek’s Jenufa (2014) and so on, love and pain over the fading European civilisation reach an apocalyptic scale. Beauty is the key category of Hermanis’ direction and set design; however, it manifests itself in a vast variety of ways—provocative, tender, cautionary, nostalgic.